Feasibility Study of a Digital Platform for the delivery of UK ... - BFI

UK FILM COUNCIL
existing broadcasters, such as the BBC and Channel 4, who are not only the independent sector’s best customers, but in some cases
financiers in their own right.
Fundamentally, we believe that there is an overall lack of clarity not only as to what rights are available for both Internet and VoD
exploitation, but also as to who owns the rights (if anyone). It increasingly appears to be the case that contracts silent on Internet and
VoD rights are interpreted to not include such rights within them, thereby creating a convoluted scenario whereby an operator will have
to deal with an exponentially larger number of rights holders on each and every title (rendering the whole process an expensive and
time-consuming exercise).
There are also fundamental questions surrounding rights granted by platform or window, mainly because of a lack of clarity (and arguably
understanding of all the technologies) within many contracts. For example, do ‘on-demand rights’ include rights for on-demand
exploitation across all possible platforms: walled garden TV, open gateway Internet and possibly mobile? Likewise, do cable rights include
exploitation across all technologies that cable operators may choose to exploit that may include, for example, IPTV. The current
approach, where contracts are differ greatly and separate rights in an arbitrary fashion, leaves much to be desired – only compounding
the already prevalent chaos.
Questions such as these, as well as the overall silence on VoD and Internet rights in older contracts, have led to the confused situation in
which companies and rights holders are now operating. It is also one of the reasons why larger players are seeking more extensive rights
in a bid to remove ambiguity. In a sense, independent rights holders and distributors can be doubly disadvantaged. They do not have the
same resources as larger companies to sort out murky rights issues – plus they are under increasing economic pressure from platform
owners and broadcasters to give up VoD/Internet rights along with the sale of linear rights.
We believe that any action taken to resolve these issues will facilitate the wider distribution of specialised film in the on-demand space
and discuss below a number of options as to how this might be undertaken.
Development of a ‘rights portal’
One relatively simple step that could be undertaken by the UK Film Council to ease the confusion surrounding rights would be to establish
a ‘rights portal’ – an online business-to-business (B2B) database of rights information. A number of off the shelf applications already exist
for managing rights inventories. The portal could work on both a ‘push’ and a ‘pull’ basis. That is, rights holders would have the
opportunity to populate the database with their own information in order to make distributors and platforms aware of the availability of
their content (‘push’). On the ‘pull’ side, the UKFC could facilitate the undertaking of an industry rights audit (possibly as the first step in
setting up this initiative and then on a regular basis) – see below. Such a step can be recommended on several grounds:
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