Rights Management Cannot be Solved by Software Alone

Parks Associates released a report with Philo showing that the average U.S. household now subscribes to 5.3 streaming services. More than 300 streaming services are competing for that wallet share in the U.S. alone. And 33% of pay-TV subscribers say they stay with their provider specifically because they can find more of the content they want in one place. That last number is the one networks are paying close attention to.

Fragmentation fatigue is real. Consumers are tired of hunting across several apps to find one thing to watch. Aggregation is becoming a competitive advantage, and content is increasingly appearing on more than one platform at a time, sometimes several. Companies are competing on discovery, on curation, on depth of catalog. That pressure has driven a wave of catalog acquisitions as streamers race to own more content and put it in front of more people, faster.

The strategy is sound. The execution is where it falls apart. Major catalog acquisitions include acquisitions of content metadata, and content metadata is largely non-standard across the industry. This includes rights data, which can create an enormous amount of avoidable operational drag when it is not handled mindfully.

The Rights Data Does Not Translate

Here is what is actually happening inside a lot of streaming companies right now: They have catalogs. Big ones. Sometimes acquired from other companies, sometimes licensed libraries, sometimes legacy content sitting in a system for years under contract terms that have not been fully translated into today's rights management systems. And when they go to launch a FAST channel, expand into a new territory, or add a content package to an OTT offering, they hit a wall.

Many networks cannot figure out where they are allowed to show large swaths of their content.

From my experience, this is largely a tier one, tier two streamer problem. It exists inside companies with massive infrastructure, headcount, and revenue. Although operational complexity looks different from company to company, the symptoms feel consistent. Contracts were interpreted one way in one system but differently in another. Rights data was interpreted a certain way for one catalog but not that way for another. Does "United States" include the territories, or just the states? Does it include Guam? ISO-3166 codes were used across all of the libraries, but it turns out the acquisitions SVP at the old company used them with rather loose vernacular definitions.

Compliance has to be tuned tightly to the appetite for risk of the organization. If you don't want to get sued and you don't want bad publicity, the data needs to be accurate. And even if you are comfortable taking the legal risk, you don't necessarily want to risk a relationship with a content partner that might have great content down the road that you are going to want.

The business wants to move fast, and many rights operations cannot keep up right now, which is a very expensive latency because content has already been acquired cannot be monetized. There are larger tier two companies today that are unable to launch the number of channels they want, and therefore unable to generate the ad inventory and revenue they need, because the people managing their supply chain are having a very difficult and very slow time figuring out what can actually get distributed where.

The Vendor Instinct (Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself)

When companies feel this pain, the instinct is to buy software to fix it. What tends to happen is companies get overwhelmed by how complicated this data problem is and start classifying it as just a data problem, or just a technical problem. It is an operations problem.

There are real players in this space: Rightsline, FilmTrack, FADEL, MetaComet. These are legitimate, capable tools. The market is competitive enough that each has developed its own approach, its own data model, and its own workflow logic. Some of them are genuinely excellent.

But they are tools. They know how their own software works. They do not know how your company works. They do not know who depends on your rights data, in what format, or at what point in your supply chain. They do not know your programming strategy, how your distribution team makes its decisions, or how compliance is handled inside your organization. They will not learn it as well as you know it. This is not a criticism of these vendors. It is simply true, and it is not fair to expect otherwise.

Companies are treating rights management platforms as if they are rights management strategies. They are different things. Keep your strategy in-house. You can outsource implementation. But the strategy has to be yours. When you rely on a rights platform vendor to solve your whole rights operation, that vendor will be cornered into retrofitting your company into their model, and they’re often not even aware of it.

When you put a vendor on top of an undefined rights operation, here is what happens. You had a spreadsheet problem. Instead of organizing the spreadsheet, instead of defining your terms, instead of connecting the data to what your company is actually trying to accomplish, you bought software. Now you have a spreadsheet problem and an implementation problem, and the vendor is charging you for both. The underlying mess has not been cleaned up. It has been digitized. And the tool will faithfully automate whatever chaos it finds. This is a great example of avoidable operational complexity, where you’re moving fast, but you’re realizing less revenue, and more of the revenue you’re realizing is leaking out before it hits the profit line.

It is a lonely problem to have inside your company, but if you feel this pain, you are not alone. A company acquires a catalog. The acquisition comes with rights data maintained in a system built for a completely different operating model. The new owner plugs it into their rights platform and proceeds. Six months later, the team is manually overriding the system on a Google doc because the logic no longer holds and there isn't roadmap or budget space to call the vendor back in so soon. The rights platform is doing exactly what it was configured to do, but there are too many caveats that it cannot hold.

The configuration was actually wrong from day one, because nobody defined what the rights operation should look like end-to-end before the implementation began. And this goes well beyond deciding whether to use ISO-3166. Legal compliance needs to match your contracts, which need to match your supply chain, all the way through.

What You Need to Define Before You Evaluate Vendors

A rights strategy is not a rights management platform. It is the layer underneath the platform, and it has to exist before you bring in the technology, because it is the business requirements for your RFP and your vendor.

Before you start evaluating vendors, your organization needs answers to a set of foundational questions.

What is your company trying to achieve with its content? Not in abstract brand terms. In distribution terms. Which platforms, which territories, which windows, which revenue models? What does a tight rights clearance workflow look like for your organization right now? What about marketing materials? Who is accountable for all of this?

How do you actually use the data? Who touches it? Who depends on it to make choices that move the company forward? At what point in the supply chain and in what format? Is your programming team making scheduling decisions based on ratings, or based on content strategy and then requesting the rights? Is your metadata team flagging territorial restrictions at ingest? What are the business rules that surround that? Is your distribution team running clearance checks before delivery? How does that work? If those teams are working off different versions of the same information, you have a structural problem that will only get worse the more horsepower you put behind it through vendor automation or AI. Software does not fix structural problems. It inherits them and makes them bigger.

What does compliance look like in your operation? This question reveals more than any other. Companies that have not defined their compliance framework end up with rights platforms that are technically sophisticated and operationally useless, because nobody can agree on what a compliant distribution decision looks like.

Once you have answered those questions, you have a rights strategy. Now you can evaluate vendors. The question is which of these tools fits closest to the data model you need to support and the strategy you are trying to execute. Do not use who is familiar to you. Use who works best with your company.

Rights and Attributes: What Are They, Who Needs Them, and How Are They Used?

There is another layer that companies need to define before they bring in any technology: the distinction between rights and attributes. In the data hierarchy, rights are the parent. Attributes are the child. Rights define what you are allowed to do with a piece of content. Attributes define the conditions under which that content gets delivered to a specific user on a specific device. Both are essential these days. We used to operate primarily on rights alone, but attributes have become much more central over the last three or four years as streaming audiences have exploded across devices and started consuming content in different ways.

Rights data at a company generally means the business level. Territory. Channel inclusion and exclusion. Windowing. Frequency caps on FAST channels. Time-based restrictions. These govern when and where your content can appear.

Attributes are more specific and operate further downstream, at the device and user level. What devices can a title stream to? Can you go anywhere except Samsung? How many concurrent plays are allowed in the same household? How many total plays per month can an OTT title have per user? This layer governs how content gets consumed once it has been cleared for distribution.

Every company I have worked with defines the line between these two things a little differently depending on content type, content partners, and distribution strategy. Because rights and attributes are often handled by different systems at different points in the supply chain, the question of where this data lives matters enormously. At some companies, the business-level rights data lives in Rightsline or FilmTrack, and the attribute data is handled further downstream by the product team.

I do not recommend that separation. All of this data should be easy to access during reporting, and ideally manageable from the beginning of the supply chain. This is something I have seen mostly at tier one companies where the product team handles attributes without direct access to the larger rights data. There are booby traps in that arrangement.

A holistic view should be available to business teams, operations teams, and product teams. When people making decisions about partner-facing, compliance-critical data do not have a complete picture of how rights and attributes connect, you are setting yourself up for very big, very urgent problems.

Define what rights are. Define what attributes are. Figure out who benefits most from seeing all of it. Consider putting it all in your rights management system from the beginning. Measure twice, cut once.

This Work Should Come Before Catalog Ingest

Catalog acquisitions are happening at scale, while programming decisions are happening with white gloves. Companies are acquiring content libraries to compete on depth, fill out FAST channel grids, and anchor subscription value propositions.

Every catalog acquisition brings rights data maintained under somebody else's operating model. The contracts exist. The underlying data is probably there. But it should be checked for completeness, accuracy, and how it differs from the acquiring company's approach to rights and attributes. That often does not happen. People rush to get the catalog into their systems thinking they will figure it out later. Now they have a gigantic data mess.

That data was interpreted in another company's system, with their definitions, their values, their appetite for risk, under their own compliance logic, to serve a different distribution strategy. That interpretation does not automatically port over.

When you have not defined your own rights operation before catalog ingestion, you are adding an enormously complex data set on top of an undefined system. You are also leaving revenue on the table, because that content is going to sit in the library while people untangle the data.

You cannot implement your way out of a strategy gap.

Ideally, the work looks like this: establish how your company interprets and stores rights data, define your compliance requirements, map the downstream dependencies, choose and implement the vendor that fits. Then when the catalog arrives, you have a system that knows how to receive it.

I also want to be realistic. The idea that you will have a perfectly defined rights strategy and a vendor implementation complete before the catalog shows up is not usually how it works. Acquisitions move on their own timelines. But here is what you can do: resist the urge to converge everything at once.

Think of it as three separate tracks. Your existing catalog and rights data. Your new rights management system. The newly acquired catalog. Do not combine those tracks until each one is clean, defined, and ready to fit together. It should look like a Tetris board, not spaghetti. The urge to combine everything at once usually comes from a sense of urgency to go to market as fast as possible. That urge is what slows you down, because converging three messy tracks into one big messy track does not get you to market faster. It gets you to a standstill.

Conclusion

Rights management platforms will continue to improve. Competition in that space is good for everyone. But the platform is the last piece, not the first. The first piece is understanding what your company is actually trying to do with its content, how the data needs to flow to support that, and who needs to see what along the way.

If you are reading this and recognizing your own operation, you are not behind. This is where most of the industry is right now, from my experience. The companies that pull ahead will be the ones that take the time to define their rights strategy before they let the technology define it for them. That work is not glamorous and it does not move fast. But it is the work that makes everything else move faster once it is done.