Managing Production House Content Licensing & Distribution Rights via Odoo

Today, I’ll walk you through one of our client meetings where we first met the legal, content licensing & distribution head of a media production house. They had just finished their first original web series and we were expecting a discussion about platform integrations and delivery workflows.

So, she was like, what! and then she sighed. After that she said, we are producing content and that’s not a problem. For us but keeping track of who owns what, where, and until when is what we are looking to resolve.

The problem was clear for us; Managing production house licensing rights across multiple regions and platforms.

Check the video on how you can streamline digital media content, revenue, and audience.

Missing Deadlines & Spreadsheets

The production house had sold out the rights for their web series to multiple distributors. One was in United states, one in Middle East, and another in Southeast Asia. So, each agreement came in with different start dates, end dates, and territory clauses.

So, you might be thinking of how they were managing and tracking the same. Well they were –

• Using Excel sheets with color coded cells
• Manual calendar reminders and
• Emails that were going across their legal, sales, and content delivery teams

This type of content licensing management was creating a lot of problems on ground, like –

• The U.S rights got expired and were not noticed and the platform kept on streaming the content
• Marketing team accidentally promoted shows in the regions where the rights had not yet started which created legal issues.
• Apart from that, the legal team was spending more time juggling between the issues than strategizing.

This was the type of chaos that was going behind the scene for a smooth appearing production schedule.

Internal Team – Licensing Workflow Challenges

The production house had a nice creative and efficient team who excelled in production. One thing was missing out and that was they were not able to handle the high volume, complex licensing workflows. On ground they faced a lot of problems, like –

• For each of the licenses were having unique terms as per duration, platform, and territory.
• They were having multiple content windows to showcase their web series like – digital, satellite, and theatrical releases
• Unfortunately there was no unified system that could help them in managing active, upcoming, or expired rights.
• Their manual tracking was leading to situations where they were loosing their revenue.

Content Licensing & Distribution Rights Workflow in Odoo

We made them understand that using spreadsheets and emails was not going to help. As a suggestion, we provide solution Odoo ERP for production houses which mirrors their real world operations.

First of all, we set out to observe the content licensing process end-to-end, for example –

• How a contract was moving from negotiation to signing
• After that, how they were delivering content per region
• How their marketing campaigns were aligned with their active licenses

So, we built our solution around their real content flow that also included overlapping territories or staggered start dates.

Building Real-World Licensing Workflows

let me walk you through the key changes we implemented for the production house for content licensing:-

Production House’s First Automated Renewal

The first auto alert sent to their distributors was a real game changer. One of their European distributor’s license was about to expire and now the legal and sales teams were having a 30 day warning along with renewal drafts ready to send.

The complete process automated without missing a single step in their workflow and their COO remarked, “This is for the first time we are actually in control of our IP”.

Impact on Business of Content Licensing

After the implementation went as planned, there was a –

• Complete visibility into all of the active, expired, and upcoming licenses.
• None of the renewals were missed in the following six months.
• Having the license status at hand the marketing team launched campaigns confidently.
• Now their manual tracking time has dropped by over 70%

This was something beyond digitization, it was de-risking the IP pipeline.

Production houses have to manage multiple title across the global markets and just manual hard work on spreadsheets alone will no longer help. You should understand that managing licensing is more than paper work, it’s a revenue security. A system like Odoo helps in ensuring that –

• You get a single source of truth for all of your rights and territories
• The compliance and renewal timelines are never missed by your teams
• Teams will be able to quickly work on new deals without any confusions

By aligning the system with the actual operational workflows of the production houses they will be able to achieve content management efficiency with confidence.

If you are producing content that would be release in multiple regions, managing licensing manually would be a risky job. Odoo can help you automate and streamline your workflows. Apart from that, it will also ensure to protect your IP and your deals are execute flawlessly.

To know more, how to streamline your production house workflows drop us a line at sales@apagen.com or call us on +91 9971800665.