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Rights & Personalised Content
StumbleUponOn-demand models of content delivery require rights models that fit the new context. So what rights models look workable for the era of personalised media, asks Michael Nutley...
By Michael Nutley
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article below...]
“It’s all going to
come down to who owns the rights”.
That was the view expressed to me six months ago over lunch by NMA columnist and digital marketing specialist Tim Hayward. Since then hardly an issue of the magazine has gone by without that view being borne out.
And it’s happening because we’re moving to an on-demand culture. Interactive media always held the possibility of mass-personalisation of content; the mass uptake of broadband is making it a reality, to the extent that people have started talking about the coming post-TV era.
On-demand content faces rights obstacle-course
The BBC, for example, sees itself moving from being a producer of content to a gate-keeper. Through initiatives such as the Radio Player, the Internet Media Player, Podcasting and the Creative Archive, it is committed to giving people much greater access to content. The main stumbling block is ownership of the rights. New contracts are being drawn up to reflect the appearance of new channels, but archive material is another story. Tracing the people who own the rights to all the various elements of a programme is turning out to be a massive undertaking.
Over in the world of commercial television, the situation is different, but no less serious. ITV has already redrawn its contracts to give it online rights, but further ahead, programme-makers are looking at a future of dwindling ad revenues due to increased channel numbers and the decreasing effectiveness of interruptive advertising.
The question here is how will programmes be funded. One of the answers is through distribution across multiple platforms, allowing the same basic property to be sold multiple times. Hence the increase in the number of production companies starting to experiment with mobile video versions of programmes, or mobisodes. Once again, the crucial issues are who owns the rights, and how can their value be maximised.
Powershift from broadcasters to producers
As a result, power is moving to the production companies. When terrestrial TV was the only game in town, the broadcasters had the power. They controlled what would appear on the nation’s screens. Now, as rights ownership becomes crucial, that balance has shifted.
Increasingly though, the people are starting to question the way rights are organised. Traditionally, rights have been assigned by delivery mechanism, so the TV rights would be sold separately to the radio rights, and might have ended up being held by different organisations. But when you can watch the same piece of content via TV and broadband, this model starts to break down. One alternative, being proposed by Nigel Walley, MD of the consultancy Decipher, is a model based on time windows. He thinks that having one set of rights for live transmission, by whatever means, then another set for use up to a week after transmission, then another set for the next month, and so on, might suit developing patterns of consumption better.
In some areas, this is already happening. Rights to show football highlights are already staggered by time as well as platform, in order to avoid jeopardising the investment made by the company that bought the live rights. And such a model would suit the next phase of TV, the hybrid model of video-on-demand and live broadcast that is already on the horizon.
Rights models to reap the long tails’ benefits
But the benefit to broadcasters of this model is what is known as the “long tail” effect. Retailers are finding that, once freed by digital storage from the physical limitations of stock holding, they can make more money from the aggregated sales of content outside the best-seller lists than they can from the best-sellers.
So changing the rights structure only solves part of the problem. For broadcasters to successfully move to offering content on demand, there has to be a significant archive of content to offer, otherwise the long tail benefits don’t kick in. And in order to be able to offer that content, they have to go back to the original rights holders and renegotiate.
Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.
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