RightsIn, the global content marketplace and licensing platform, is teaming up with Unna, the rights-management offshoot of Icelandic Records, to present its new model for labels, musicians, and other rights holders hoping to maximize their sync and other licensing opportunities.

RightsIn is unlike any other digital marketplace for music. The company focuses on relationship building in markets that have been left out of the content equation, connecting buyers and sellers in deals that go beyond one-off licenses. “We focus on building sales teams on the ground, in markets like China and Indonesia,” explains founder and CEO Ray Young. “We work closely with local partners who know the market inside and out, to close strong deals for revenue shares with content creators and distributors. These are deals that could not happen any other way,” like providing music and film for on-demand mobile services in Vietnam or Mongolia.

When Iceland’s Unna Music was looking for a partner in the licensing space, they turned to RightsIn. “Unna was born because the royalty and collection systems are extremely complex for artists and songwriters to understand and administer,” explains Soffia Kristin Jonsdottir of Unna. “There is no easy way for content creators and owners to know what they should be getting paid. We built the digital rights management platform to better help navigate catalog assets.”

RightsIn provided the tools to make Unna run effectively, a white-label and turn-key solution to catalog management, pricing, and deal making worldwide.

 “We simplify and centralize and monetize revenue collection, demanding a standard of transparency between stakeholders. From contract management, pricing, promotion, distribution, royalties collection, to invoicing, we oversee the entirety of the lifecycle of music to ensure creators are being compensated to the extent of their work,” says Jonsdottir. “Unna was built to be a platform to enable artists and management, PRO’s and labels, to directly stream, broadcast and sell via a wholesale model. Initially, we will utilize RightsIn marketplace for licensing music to all media types.”

About RightsIn

RightsIn is a comprehensive, international IP marketplace specializing in video, film, and music content. It connects buyers worldwide with rightsholders to facilitate mutually beneficial deals using a variety of technologically innovative pricing, sales, and analytical tools. www.rightsin.com

About Unna

Unna means love... and it's also the name of our unique technology platform that makes it easy to upload and manage your entire music catalog all in one place, manage creators' rights to your music to ensure that all creators involved get credit & paid for their work, and monetize your music by enabling upload of your catalog to the world's largest music marketplace...then track your catalog performance in realtime. www.unnamusic.com

Vietnam has undergone a quiet but potent transformation in the last decade, opening up and shifting economically and culturally. RightsIn, the global marketplace for film, music, and other IP, has recognized this, setting up a new partnership with local content experts Sunrise Seagull.

“Vietnam is experiencing an exciting, creative explosion of content producing. Just ten years ago, only a handful of films were being produced out of Vietnam. Now, looking at 2016 alone, 50 or so films came out of the country,” explains Sunrise Seagull’s Thien Pham. “That doesn’t even account for the films being produced outside of Vietnam by Vietnamese filmmakers. The quality of films that are being produced despite limited production budgets, is really mind-blowing.”

Pham and his team wanted to blow minds outside of their region, however, something they felt as a “no-brainer.” Pham was working on a project that would connect Vietnamese content to more purchasers in North America, when he met Ray Young, the driving force behind RightsIn.

“We quickly realized we had similar visions of disrupting the distribution market to level the playing field for independent producers and filmmakers, and have kept in touch ever since,” Pham notes. “So when RightsIn went to market, we both immediately knew a partnership between RightsIn and Sunrise Seagull Productions was a natural fit.”

RightsIn has a knack for finding markets with promise--and then crafting win-win deals with local rights holders and international content owners and distributors. “We work with independent film distributors like ITN in the US, finding new markets for their deep catalog and their latest releases,” Young says. “We don’t just sell a couple licenses here and there; we create real value with rev-share deals and ongoing relationships.”

Having close ties to partners on the ground, who know the market inside and out, is key. Without a sales team with deep local expertise, it’s impossible to know what will work locally, and what local content may connect with potential fans abroad.

“With the continued modernization of the country and increase in living standards, there is an increased appetite for entertainment media consumption of not only locally produced content, but internationally produced content, as well. Vietnam has more than 90 million people and over 50 cinema chains, so the growth potential is there. The conversation on both the selling and buying side shouldn't be, ‘Is this a market we should look at?’, but ‘How can we get into this market?’”

RightsIn is helping international players do just that, while helping local producers, filmmakers, and creatives find new audiences worldwide, deal by deal.

About RightsIn

RightsIn is a comprehensive, international IP marketplace specializing in video, film, and music content. It connects buyers worldwide with rightsholders to facilitate mutually beneficial deals using a variety of technologically innovative pricing, sales, and analytical tools.

When catalog holders and content creators think of new markets, they may not think of Mongolia. The landlocked democratic country of just over 3 million people is better known for its nomadic steppe traditions than its contemporary life. Yet it is an increasingly urbanized and connected society, with mobile phones and city amenities. And Mongols are hungry for films, music, and other content.

RightsIn, the international marketplace for film, music, and other intellectual property, is showing just how important small but growing markets like Mongolia can be to rights holders. CEO Ray Young has been working in the country, along with several other promising Asian markets such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, to create on-the-ground sales teams, ready to promote international content from indie distributors like ITN Films. RightsIn is also helping these local creators get their content to bigger potential audiences.

“I had some professional contacts in Mongolia already, but I knew if we wanted to have deals be successful, we needed to do more than throw a marketplace online and hope for the best,” says Young. “I knew we needed to go in person and work directly with interested partners.” RightsIn is doing more than just making deals; it’s also training local representatives to broker future partnerships in the market.

The company’s Mongolia deals are diverse and promise to bring in far more potential revenue than a one-off license. In several recent trips, Young worked with a variety of partners to find good homes for independently distributed films and other content on RightsIn. The company is working directly with the local distributors of contents to consumers instead of sub-licensees to put more money into the content owners.

Some of these deals involve getting Mongolian content onto the international marketplace. Ulaanbaatar-based production house Mongol Nomad Films, for example, will place its catalog on RightsIn. “There’s interest around the world in Mongolian movies and shorts,” Young notes, “as several recent documentaries that got international notice have shown.”

In Mongolia itself, Young worked with the biggest cinema chain in the country, Urgoo Cinemas, to create a special catalog for VIP clients. Moviegoers can choose from a menu of American and other films distributed by ITN and licensed by RightsIn and arrange private viewings for friends or business associates. “This is a new concept for Mongolia,” notes Young. “We’re doing a revenue share deal, which will likely mean more income for rightsholders.”

One of the larger mobile carriers in Mongolia, Skymedia, also inked a deal with RightsIn that involves revenue shares. “Twenty films from ITN will be available to Skymedia subscribers a month, as pay per view and as video on demand,” Young explains. “RightsIn and its content partners will receive a share of the revenue when these videos are viewed.”

Mongolia is part of a broader, Asia-based strategy to expand markets for catalog and rights holders in the US. “We’re building teams in Malaysia, China, and Vietnam,” says Young. The mix of tech savvy and human expertise promises to create a truly global market for content.

About RightsIn

RightsIn is a comprehensive, international IP marketplace specializing in video, film, and music content. It connects buyers worldwide with rightsholders to facilitate mutually beneficial deals using a variety of technologically innovative pricing, sales, and analytical tools.

Along with their hot new releases, independent distributors have deep catalog, films that may not see constant or intense demand but that truly fit the bill for certain broadcasters and other media companies around the world. Exploiting those rich but complex resources, making those numerous deals, however, can prove extremely challenging.

ITN, a distributor releasing at least 4 films a month that’s been in the business around 20 years, faced these challenges. They had limited sales resources, with teams that couldn’t cover all the world’s potential markets. They had a huge catalog that was unwieldy, and generating the availability and cost to license a particular film in a specific market could take hours, even days.

“We release dozens of films a year,” explains ITN president Stuart Alson. “We were looking for a new rights management partner.”

That’s when Alson crossed paths with Ray Young, the technologist and mastermind behind the IP marketplace RightsIn. After meeting at a dinner party, Alson and Young discussed potential collaborations. Young met with ITN staff, who managed the catalog and sales queries. He saw an opportunity to showcase RightsIn’s patent-pending rights exploitation technology to exponentially increase ITN’s sales universe.

“In ITN’s rights management system, for someone to find all the movies available for free broadcast TV in Mongolia, say, he’d have to work for days,” says Young. “In our system it takes a matter of seconds.”

However, RightsIn does more than park a distributors’ catalog on an online marketplace, and make search and licensing fast and simple. Young has also cultivated boots on the ground in markets where American distributors and studios still have limited reach, from Mongolia to Malaysia to Indonesia. “We chose RightsIn as a partner for the real-time avails and the international reach, among other reasons,” notes Alson. “Now we can get our catalog to more places, extremely easily.”

And there are serious financial payoffs for the right kind of deals. Young and RightsIn have trained sales teams to work directly with potential media partners to create longer-term relationships and bigger bundles of content deals for companies like ITN. “Instead of buyers coming to a company and saying, ‘I want rights to this movie,’ we meet with regional TV stations and ask if they are looking for movies to air,” Young notes. “The answer is often yes, and at rates more lucrative than a one-off license for a single film.”

These new opportunities often involve emerging mobile and other pay-per-view formats. Audiences that rarely had access to media before the advent of feature and smartphones can now reliably and affordably view feature-length films. “Cellphone carriers are now delivering pay-per-view and on demand on mobile devices,” says Young. “We’re negotiating those deals for ITN in those markets.”

New formats have multiple technical requirements, something RightsIn has also addressed for partners like ITN, so that they don’t have to service each individual partner overseas. “ITN has a tech staff, and we work with them,” Young explains. “They don’t have to support every customer. We give them the spec, they put it on a FTP site, and we get it to the right partners.”

About RightsIn

RightsIn is a comprehensive, internationally savvy IP marketplace specializing in video, film, and music content. It connects buyers worldwide with rightsholders to facilitate mutually beneficial deals using a variety of technologically innovative pricing, sales, and analytical tools.

About ITN Films

ITN Distribution, Inc. is a leading independent film distribution company that specializes in high quality, genre and star driven independent films for the domestic and international TV, VOD, DVD and theatrical markets. ITN releases 24 films per year with ITN's connection to all major retailers and rentals in North America, such as Redbox, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, Amazon and Video-On-Demand (VOD) outlets. ITN produces, distributes and acquires films worldwide.

ITN attends the following 12 markets each year:  Cannes Film Festival, American Film Market, Berlin Film Festival-European Film Market, Hong Kong FILMART, MIP TV, MIPCOM, NATPE Eastern Europe, NATPE Miami, Toronto, Prague-World Content, Ventana Sur-Argentina  and  Busan, Korea The AsianFilm Market

RightsIn, the IP marketplace tackling global content issues, has just launched its newest marketplace platform: RightsIn Music.

RightsIn has already made steady inroads into the global film and video markets, creating new opportunities for indie distributors, bringing foreign broadcasters and content users out of the shadows and into licensed usage, and streamlining rights management. “While it used to take an entire working day to determine availability, it now takes a matter of seconds,” states Ray Young, CEO and founder of RightsIn. “We can crunch the data and let both sides know what deals are possible.”

The marketplace charges an artist-friendly 10% on done deals, while offering a robust rights management dashboard that can ingest metadata quickly from sources like IMDB and Spotify, set up exclusivity and usage parameters, bundle content into discounted packages, and divvy up markets. With the global market in mind, RightsIn inked a partnership with Chinese third-party payment platform Dinpay, to enable seamless and simple international payment transactions.

“Now, we’re excited to apply these same tools, including real-time analytics, to the music market,” Young says.

Young and his development team love building tech tools that solve the problems plaguing the creative industries in the digital era. Young got his start in entertainment-related tech by creating software that managed the incredibly complex physical distribution of entertainment products. The software got DVD titles to big-box retailers just in time, in just the right amounts, keeping tabs on everything from shelf space to sales.

It was a hit. Young’s product dramatically increased efficiency. After fifteen years, however, “it became really clear that physical was no longer the future,” he remarks. “So we decided to focus on digital.”

He had strong relationships at studios, ties that helped him see the next problem that needed solving. Studios and large distribution companies had thousands of films, thousands of hours of deep catalog content that owners struggled to exploit effectively. This content was in demand around the world, in markets huge and small. Yet bringing owners together with potential purchasers proved next to impossible.

“It would take the studio department responsible for rights management a week, just to field a query,” explains Young. “Simply to see if the material was available, and under what conditions at what cost. There was no way to exploit the catalog in real time, or to seal deals and complete payments internationally with any speed.” Distributors told Young of preparing for conferences by spending weeks preparing and printing out spreadsheets of what films were available where and for how much. “And if they didn’t happen to have your country, if they didn’t have a sheet for, say, Turkey, you couldn’t do the deal.”

Young and his team decided to fix this. Young turned to independent distributors and dug deep into their needs. “I said, let’s launch a marketplace,” recalls Young. “We’re going to help the small guys with IP and distribution, the 150-200 smaller distributors on the market. If we solve the problem for the industry, we solve it for everyone, in any market. What used to take an entire working day now takes a matter of minutes.”

What resulted was a platform built to nurture new markets, for content of all types. “Studios can’t exploit their content globally. They’d have to have a sales team all over the world,” Young notes. “In places like Bangladesh, it just doesn’t make sense, as the market is too small. So they don’t sell to those markets. What we’re trying to do is tell the studios that we are incremental to opening up new markets, places you’re not reaching today.”

These markets, once operating in the shadows, want to operate above the board. RightsIn is helping them do so, as the television station in Ulaanbaatar can now buy well-priced rights to broadcast A Fish Called Wanda. New markets are also opening up for independent content creators, be they dedicated filmmakers or passionate amateurs with some great GoPro footage.

Now RightsIn has opened its doors to musicians and independent labels, part of a multi-stage strategy that includes books and patents. “Any IP can be traded using our marketplace. Music is so interesting to us because musicians at all levels are looking for ways to expand their income, and one crucial way to do that is to make the most of what they already have, their rights,” says Young. “We want to help people monetize their rights, about 50 types of rights globally, directly. We ultimately are striving to solve the problem of sustainability, for the people who make and love culture, art, and entertainment.”