HITS

It’s no secret that the media industry is in a period of major flux. Over the past two years — and continuing today — the big players have been making dramatic moves.

The reunion of Viacom and CBS, Amazon’s announced acquisition of MGM, the AT&T spinoff of Warner Media. The list goes on — and few can predict exactly how the changes happening today will alter the landscape over the long term.

Throughout all of this change, the oldest adage in the media industry remains true: content is still king.

The question is: what does it mean to create and manage content profitably in an industry moving at light speed into the future?

Agility needed

The media landscape is extremely complex. Markets are proliferating, distribution channels are everywhere, and streaming platforms are pushing the envelope in the competition to attract customers. What’s needed to quickly and consistently create, manage, and deliver great content today is business agility. And getting agile requires a move to the cloud.

True, when it comes to serving customers, media companies have been pioneers in the cloud. In the content production process, many of the postproduction and localization processes have also moved to the cloud.

But, as Richard Whittington points out in the first blog in this series, when it comes to flexible back-office business processes, media companies often lag behind.

To move forward, media companies would do themselves a favor by focusing on the following three key areas.

Content financials in the cloud

Media is a finance-driven business. By putting your content financials in the cloud, you can increase your business agility significantly. The goal is to centralize visibility into content ideas, proposals, and projects — all the way through production spending, asset capitalization, and into amortization.

Now, as you’re charging forward to deliver what audiences demand, you can better understand the impact on your bottom line. With ideas all in one place, you can speed up the turnaround time for your content investment. You can also create and manage more contracts faster, accelerate project timelines, and control costs throughout the project with greater precision.

Having your content financials in the cloud also helps when it comes to managing your content rights, availability, and value — whether you’ve produced the content or acquired it.

Centralized visibility into your library of content makes for easier accounting. Everybody works from a single version of the truth, which speeds the decision-making process for what to buy, lease, or sell. The result is the ability to yield greater value from your intellectual assets.

Content planning in the cloud

Content planning is notoriously time-consuming — but it’s also a must if you seek to maximize ROI from your content. When managed in the cloud, content planning is no longer hostage to individual spreadsheets telling different stories. Now the entire organization is on the same page, which speeds planning and budgeting cycles and helps you capitalize on new trends faster.

With real-time reporting based on trusted data, you can increase forecast accuracy. Executives can track operational details, financial standing, and deal particulars through dashboards that are up to date by the minute. You can also run profitability analyses on a continuous basis to better understand your most profitable customers, products, and channels. Based on this information, you can then quickly alter content plans to make the content moves that keep your customers coming back.

Content rights and royalties in the cloud

If there’s one aspect of the media industry ripe for cloud transformation, it’s rights and royalties management. Whether you produce your own content or acquire it, there’s no escaping the complexity of tracking the myriad details of who gets what under which circumstances per the relevant contracts.

This includes writers, directors, actors, production crews, and more. Seasons, episodes, and distribution details that vary across geographies and platforms. The details are dizzying. And then there’s music (synchronization) rights and royalties, adding yet another layer of complexity.

By moving to the cloud, you can provide full visibility of the rights to your content catalog, simplify the management of rights and royalties, and increase sales of your content to generate more revenue. Now you can automate processes associated with intellectual property acquisition and settlement.

And with full visibility into intellectual property rights, you can more effectively monetize your content.

Learn more

By increasing visibility and orienting the entire enterprise to the same reality, the cloud helps increase your business agility at a time when managing change is a primary challenge facing the media industry. Want to learn more? Take a deeper dive and view https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/3251660/01C1C79AB5714D371F73D91E6678C086?partnerref=MESA our webcast “Successfully Moving Media Companies to the Cloud.”

** By Julie Stoughton, Global Head, Media Industry Marketing, SAP

This is the second in a series of industry insight articles by SAP. The first can be read here.