Data critical to all aspects of Making Media Pay

In Making Media Pay, the DPP and its members have explored how media companies optimise revenue from their content assets. How do content companies manage their content rights, monetise their content, and then protect it from content theft?

The project investigates anti-piracy practices and techniques, the opportunities in the complex and constantly evolving rights landscape, and the latest technology innovations in AdTech helping media companies work with suppliers and partners to make money from video content.

Good data practices and management play a crucial role in all three strands of the work, weaving a thread through rights, monetisation strategies, and content protection.

Rights Management

In Rights Management, expert contributors from across the media industry agreed that systems and processes need to be flexible in order to work with the growing complexity of video and distribution rights.

Report author, DPP CTO Rowan de Pomerai, advised that strong data governance and flexible rights systems enable the data to evolve as business needs change, reducing the need to revert to exceptions and manual processes. This is because the value is contained in the data and new tools, and not in 10-year-old Excel spreadsheets.

And ultimately, integration is key. Many companies still rely on rekeying data and other human intervention to provide rights information to different teams, assure sales, and trigger payments. Modern data integration architectures provide better visibility and enable process automation, and the report explores approaches organisations are taking.

Content Protection

Expert contributors to our Content Protection report discussed best practices in the battle against piracy including tools like watermarking, while making sure security teams correctly implement DRM (digital rights management) to create the most secure possible environments.

And some expressed that better data visibility and analytics will provide a significant return on investment when dealing with content theft and illegal streaming. A more advanced data capability can help better understand user behaviour and build improved models for detection and identification of suspicious behaviour.

Indeed, analytics and data monitoring was cited as an important tool in tackling some of the biggest content protection challenges; the DRM vulnerabilities which can allow unverified users to access content, and CDN leeching where hackers can steal video content straight from the CDN before restreaming it.

For one contributor data represents the best defence.

"One of the issues we see is the lack of analytics; the lack of data so you can correlate what is happening on your DRM, your CMS, on your CDN to detect issues. We see this far too often. The first thing you should do is put analytics in place in your streaming architecture, to make sure you detect fraudulent usage, and to make sure you can act."

Maximising monetisation

Data was also cited as the key link between content protection and Content Monetisation. First, piracy data helps media companies understand how they can better monetise their assets. The more media organisations know about how and why their content is stolen, the better they are able to monetise it as well as protect it. Piracy is a proxy for consumer demand, and companies can learn about the levers and price points which will make an engaged audience pay.

Secondly, many innovations in AdTech and monetisation strategy are fuelled by data. To successfully implement trends in programmatic buying, dynamic, interactive and virtual advertising, personalisation, and ‘Shoppable TV’, media companies will need quality first-party data to develop multi channel monetisation strategies.

And of course content providers know data is key to fully exploiting the rights available to them. Because getting rights management, monetisation channels, and content protection strategies in unison is ultimately how content providers will have success Making Media Pay.

DPP members can explore the Making Media Pay series here. Making Media Pay is enabled by Expert Sponsors Ateme, Fincons Group, Friend MTS, Rightsline, Veset and Vimond, and Contributing Sponsors Backlight, Deluxe, Extreme Reach and Knox Media Hub.