By Chris Saito, Chief Commercial Officer, Vubiquity
Media companies are under enormous pressure to keep audiences engaged and revenue growing. But creating new content is expensive. Every new release represents a significant investment, and there’s tremendous pressure for that investment to perform.
Even the largest studios can only produce so much new content in a year. That means every asset needs to work harder, with revenue potential that extends well beyond its initial release.
A title might move from a traditional release to streaming, become part of a FAST channel, find a new international audience, land in a library licensing deal or be rediscovered years later by an entirely new generation of viewers. The goal is to create opportunities for content to earn across platforms, territories, languages and business models.
Seems straightforward. So what’s the catch?
The gravitational pull of the revenue spotlight is almost always on what’s next: the next film, series, franchise or hit. Meanwhile, most content owners have vastly more existing assets than new releases. Decades of films, television series, specials, documentaries and other programming may be sitting dormant.
Many of these are real gems with new commercial potential. The challenge is finding them.
So, What’s in Your Library?
Ask a media company what content it owns and there will almost certainly be a system, spreadsheet, or database somewhere with an answer.
But is it 100% accurate?
Media libraries grow over decades. Companies acquire catalogs, merge with other businesses and inherit content. Assets move between storage systems and vendors. Rights are bought, sold and renegotiated. Employees leave, taking years of institutional knowledge with them.
Over time, the gap between what a company theoretically owns and what it can confidently identify, access and monetize can become significant.
A title might appear in a database, but where is the best source? Is it digitized? Is the metadata accurate? What languages exist? What rights do you hold, and in which territories? Is the asset technically ready for a platform that might want it?
You may own the content and have the rights to monetize it. But if you can’t confidently answer what you have and what you can do with it, that potential value can remain locked away.
Start Small
When people hear “library project,” they often picture thousands of old titles sitting in the proverbial garage that nobody wants to go through.
We get it.
If you own tens of thousands of assets, assessing and cleaning up the entire library sounds like an enormous transformation project and potentially an expensive one.
So don’t start with the whole library. Start with the commercial opportunity.
Maybe a group of films could anchor a FAST channel. Maybe a series has potential in a new international market. Maybe a distributor needs a particular genre and you already have the inventory. Or perhaps a new series, remake, actor or cultural moment suddenly creates demand for an older title.
I was talking to a colleague recently who had just discovered Homeland and was completely hooked. The series premiered in 2011, but to her, it was new content. Great content can find new audiences years after its original release.
Now, not every asset will be worth pursuing. Rights may be too restrictive. Source material may need too much work. Restoration or localization could cost more than the opportunity is worth.
You don’t need every asset to generate revenue. You need to identify the ones that can.
Let Vubiquity Do the Heavy Lifting.
Vubiquity has spent decades inside the content supply chain. Through both our content licensing and media services businesses, we understand what audiences and platforms are looking for and the work required to turn an existing asset into a commercial opportunity.
We can help assess your content and rights, identify assets with potential, and determine whether there’s money to be made before you commit to a massive library initiative.
When the opportunity makes sense, we can handle the work required to get that content back into the market from identifying and validating source assets and cleaning up metadata to rights validation, digitization, localization, technical preparation, and distribution.
Your team doesn’t have to stop managing today’s releases to dig through yesterday’s catalog. You don’t have to add permanent headcount or tackle tens of thousands of assets at once.
Let us do the heavy lift.
We understand the economics and know how to activate the right content cost efficiently. So let us help you get more profit from your existing content while you focus on creating the next big hit.