B2B Content sales solution―from content license rights management via ingest and aggregation of video, metadata, picture, audio, subtitle to a presentation, purchasing and delivery

We are often approached to help in selling content from a historical archive or ongoing productions of movies, series, magazines, or event reports. So, a technical problem about preparing content to be offered on a B2B sales portal was discovered. But isn't that simplifying the all-over business process a bit too much?

Today's business models in monetizing content are much more versatile than they were before the Internet. Nowadays, content producers and owners have many distribution channels available to be leveraged in parallel, to earn back costs to produce and to make profit. So, from a business perspective, the business process starts with spending money to produce or acquire content and ends with the sale of every single piece of content. Due to revenue share based business models, this means that every Video On Demand view by an end-customer is such a revenue contribution.

The B2B content sales transaction is part of a business process that starts much earlier and is tightly connected to the downstream B2C content sales business. Such B2C transactions might be a third party's business or can be an additional business for the content owner. Please have a look at our VOD Content Aggregation and Publishing Solution.

Our B2B content sales solution is composed on the very top layer of a content rights management system. It manages all business-relevant contractual data, content metadata, and aggregates the end-customer's usage data. This way, it provides you with a cockpit to actively drive your content B2B sales as well as B2C sales via campaign management.

The actual content management takes place within our Production Asset Management system. Content essences can be received via internet uploads, local ingests, or from an existing archive. Please have a look at our All Ingest Solution. The asset packages for B2B sales are aggregated from a video, audio, subtitle, picture essences, descriptive, and technical metadata as well as pricing information. This is achieved via internal processing engines (e.g. transcoding, audio/video/picture processing, quality control) and by leveraging services from external providers. Once approved, assets are presented within the B2B sales portal.

The B2B sales portal is similar to a B2C VOD library. It presents the content stock just how an end-customer would like to browse it, but it also shows additional business-relevant metadata. Assets can be added to a shopping cart and at check-out, no credit card number is requested, but instead communication with the sales department is initiated. That said, the solution fully supports the negotiation process via integrated sales and communication tools.

Once a "sale" is closed, the assets are processed (e.g. transcoding incl. version rendering and watermarking, picture rendering), packaged as requested (e.g. languages, subtitles, artwork, metadata), delivered fully automatically, and then finally the customer is notified. What happens next fully depends on your business model or the agreement with your customer. Either all data gets prepared to issue a one-off invoice or end-customer usage gets collected for a monthly revenue share invoice. Various other business models between such extrema are supported.

The Production Management System (PMS) is the heart of our Content Sales Solution. It acts as a Media Asset Management System, Workflow System and Traffic System. The product for the PMS we've selected is Flow Work's Flow Center. For customers with distributed organizations, the PMS can be deployed at every facility and connected to act as one global system via the flow-to-flow module.

Ingest can happen in different ways. If it is performed manually, then we would select IN2IT Access from Woody Technologies as the tool of choice. Alternatively, the PMS can expose a feature rich upload portal or upload micro-page on an invitation. Both tools will allow supplying essence files and  metadata manually. For bulk asset package transfers, we prefer Media Shuttle or Managers+Agents from Signiant.

The Transcoder and Processors are engines that help to fully automate the end2end business process. The PMS allows integration with any other already existing or future software solution. For our transcoder, we've selected Cambria FTC from Capella Systems. Sound and video processing can happen as part of the transcoding process or in certain cases via specialized software services. Picture rendering and metadata processing are implemented based on components of the PMS. Subtitle generation and audio dubbing might be outsourced to external suppliers. For automatic transcription and translation, we've selected MediaWen and Aiconix. We can integrate with those companies via interaction user interfaces. For automatic quality control, we utilise Pulsar from our partner Venera Technologies, and for manual quality control, we offer review user interfaces.

The inbound or outbound File Transfer can happen via traditional FTP transfers. For obvious reasons, we prefer secured and accelerated file transport. As a file transfer tool, we've selected Media Shuttle or Managers+Agents from Signiant.