The business side of the entertainment industry is still operated completely offline. It is relationship-driven, and licensing deals are created and closed offline, where the owner manually uploads each deal in their “wholly back-office maintained” rights management systems. A frivolous detail as it may seem, Ray Young begs to differ. “Before RightsLedger, there was no technology that could process exclusive license availability by territory, media, duration, and language,” says Ray Young, the founder and CEO of RightsLedger. “With our technology, we have, for the first time, introduced the possibility of the entire entertainment business world to be operated digitally.” Similarly, the volume of media content generated on the Internet today is incredibly valuable, but it’s mainly just the platforms that realize it. Even if content creators are not planning to make money, they should at least claim ownership of their content and establish terms of use so that when people reuse or distribute it, there will be some recognition and transparency of authorized use.

"We allow content creators to have a fingerprint of their content, so that they can pronounce its originality"

Around 300 hours of video are added every minute on YouTube, and each day, users watch a billion hours of those videos. Whereas, every day, Facebook and Instagram users watch 650 million and 200 million hours of videos, respectively. Coming to the far-reaching effects of this viewership, these social media distribution channels gross revenues of billions of dollars for content they don’t own, thanks to the original content creators! On the one hand, there are content creators whose efforts go unappreciated and unrewarded; on the other hand, there are distributors who are willing to pay a fortune for these lucrative original ideas, provided, the creator can validate the authenticity and originality of the content. A gap that has been prevailing in the entertainment industry for decades is now finally beginning to see daylight, or as the RightsLedger team would want to say it, “the spotlight.” RightsLedger is a blockchain technology company that wants to give content creators the due credit they deserve, by providing them the means to a transparent digital media supply chain, where they can claim ownership, track ownership changes and monitor the usage of their content on any digital platform, and monetize.

Holy Grail for Independent Filmmakers

Major entertainment studios have a lot of resources—from human to technology—for rights management processes, and they know how to make money out of their content.

Whereas, independent and social media content creators neither have the capital nor the right avenue to channelize their creativity. One of the biggest pain points for them here is protecting their creation so that they can make money while keeping the content pirates at bay. In the pedantic sense, they need to validate their proprietorship, ensure anti-piracy, and create ownership rights so that they can guarantee the distribution platform that they own it, and draw rules around how people can use that content. Both rights management and usage rights, ideally cost a lot of money and nobody is willing to go down that rabbit hole. Independent creators don’t have the money, and more often than ever, are clueless about how much money they can earn. After all, who are these independent creators? Anyone with a GoPro, or even a smartphone can get the cameras rolling and create movies. “This is where an affordable tokenized ecosystem of applications comes to their aid,” says Young. “We have a blockchain-backed platform that can create immutable ownership records and authenticate them on a universal ledger.

We allow content creators to have a fingerprint of their content so that they can assert its originality. In fact, we’re working on a module, where even in the event of somebody copying or manipulating content, we’d be able to tell what percentage of it is stolen and what is modified.”

On the monetizing front, RightsLedger is planning to partner with distribution platforms, where they offer APIs that can help these platforms do the validation tasks for them. Once the source is authenticated, the content creator gets compensated.

How it Works

The distributed application from RightsLedger has a simple mobile-type user interface that makes it easy for movie makers to select the desired product they created and on the click of a button, the platform picks it up, authenticates it, and creates a unique fingerprint for it. Their ecosystem of applications lets creators select the territory, preferred distribution platform, the tenure of the license, and creates the rights record for them. “We have made the entire media supply chain simple, where we give content creators the delivery methods, along with the right audience to publish their creation,” explains Young. “It’s not just social media; we can also get media content video-on-demand-ready, so that creators can distribute their movies to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu viewers.” Understanding that every Video on Demand provider has set specification requirements for media files, RightsLedger can also help its users with video encoding. For instance, if a particular distribution channel requires the media file to have a resolution of 4k or 1080p, RightsLedger can help with that as well. For that, they have introduced a tokenization process.

They have a reward program, where when a customer registers their content on the distributed blockchain platform, they are offered tokens that can be utilized for premium features like fingerprinting and encoding. “Our economy will be completely tokenized and affordable to even the smallest creators,” Young adds.

The quintessential factor of blockchain networks is the security it institutionalizes. The RightsLedger platform is no different; any record of content ownership or even proof of sale will stack up as a smart contract on the ledger. No hacker can modify a record, as the information is not stored on any central server or location, but on millions of computers across the globe. Even the payment is made directly to the content owner, and no middleman is involved. At the end of the day, it all boils down to building trust among the various stakeholders in the media and entertainment supply chain. “Today, the entertainment world has become orderless and chaotic, and we are here to solve just that,” quips Young. Coming from someone who has weathered the distinct eras of transformation in the industry, these words hold to be true indeed.

Where it all Began

When Young entered the entertainment business over 20 years ago managing DVD and BluRay inventories, the industry standard was traditional Digital Asset Management systems for media storage and distribution, which entailed enormous costs for movie makers and production studios. Then came the paradigm shift to “everything digital.” Today, with RightsLedger, he has taken digital rights management to a whole new level of innovation. His close-knit team of developers spread across California and Indonesia take the company’s vision very seriously. This is the reason that the company has earned the trust of many independent content creators and streaming platforms alike.

ITN Distribution, a leading Hollywood independent filmmaker, has recently started working with RightsLedger to validate the content that they produced and distribute globally. Similarly, in the recent Cannes Film Festival, Young was on a panel discussing about what blockchain could mean to the entertainment world. “Few days after the session, we signed a letter of intent with Cinezen, a blockchain-based streaming platform from Sweden,” he states. Amid the mounting response that blockchain is getting across the globe, the fact that RightsLedger has both teams and customers all over the world, is an evidence of their commitment to their value proposition. On top of that, their user-driven enhancement strategy, where real-life users dictate their product roadmap is gaining a grand reception.

RightsLedger is all set to get its initial coin offering (ICO) started. In the future, Young envisions a world where content creators can record something on their smartphones, claim ownership on the go, protect it, and monetize instantly. “We are capturing an opportunity to ignite a revolution starting with independent/amateur creators,” Young says.