The online marketplace aims to maximize salable windows for every media and market in the world, making life for buyers and seller easier.
For those looking to buy and sell intellectual property rights at the Berlin Film Festival, RightsIn, a new digital marketplace, aims to make life easy.
Los Angeles-based Rights2 is showcasing the IP market platform at the Berlinale so indie distributors with a deep film catalog can reach TV networks and other key film buyers faster and more efficiently. Stuart Alson, president of Las Vegas-based ITN Films, which releases around four movies a month, says RightsIn brings the time needed to license a film in a specific market from days down to minutes.
"We were looking for a new rights management partner," Alson recalled, before partnering with Ray Young, CEO of Los Angeles-based Rights2 and the mastermind of RightsIn as an global IP marketplace.
Young brought Rights2's rights exploitation technology to ITN to help grow its content sales internationally. "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. In our system it takes a matter of seconds," Young says.
RightsIn gives sellers and the buyer instant access to the most current rights and sales information related to a film's availability, and even includes trailers. Another benefit is global reach. "The big game changer for both the buyers and the sellers of the indie films is they can now manage rights and calculate availability for every media and market on the fly wherever they are," Young explains.
And paperwork becomes a thing of the past. "RightsIn deal sheets are generated as soon as the deals are entered, so no more carrying all the deal sheets and filling them out manually for every deal," he adds.
As entertainment players reposition themselves in a global digital marketplace affected by new streaming players like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, the evolving RightsIn market intends to see broadcasters, distributors and resellers license select content rights in their own territory faster and easier.
"The best thing about RightsIn is that it’s free to use and we charge a minimal fee to sellers when they make a sale," Young says. That's a bonus for indie players with far smaller sales network or systems than the major studios.
RightsIn covers emerging mobile and other pay-per-view formats. "Cell phone carriers are now delivering pay-per-view and on demand on mobile devices," Young says.
"We’re negotiating those deals for ITN in those markets," he adds. New formats have multiple technical requirements, so RightsIn can work with a distributor's tech staff to service clients. "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," Young insists.