The move towards a global broadcast market is well on its way. No longer interested in selling their content to local broadcast companies, today’s companies with tomorrow’s world-famous brands are now offering an entire broadcast channel. Country by country, they stretch their reach around the globe.
Working on a global or at least multicountry scale seems a logical choice, given the fact that already today the same content is broadcast in nearly every country. All over the world the same episodes get ingested, quality controlled, described and promoted for what must be a staggering number of times.
But world domination is harder than portrayed on the big screen, even for a broadcaster. Evidently, you must have the technical infrastructure to get your signal or stream to each country and, obviously, you should be able to generate sales or subscription revenue in every country. But even when you have all that in place, many challenges remain.
All of a sudden it dawns on you how diverse a place the world still is today. Different languages require multiple audio and subtitle versions, translated titles, categories and press descriptions. Different cultures and local laws spawn specific age restrictions and compliance rules. Different parts of the world have different frame rates, which requires two versions of the same material. And, unlike in an online environment, frame rates can never be mixed in a broadcast environment.
And then there’s rights management. Managing rights for multiple territories can become very complex. Defining the rights for every different device, service or business model requires a very flexible and efficient rights management system. It demands an even smarter rights verification tool that checks the legal use of content on each channel, device or service in each country.
Your system must handle the relation between regions, as to release dates or cost distribution for instance, and monitor the actual use of assets for all of these outlets. Stock management per territory must make sure that the assets in your inventory are exploited in the most efficient way.
Operating a multicountry broadcast company is so complex that very few have tried and even fewer have succeeded. The fact remains that companies want to extend their reach over the borders with their content without multiplying their staff and operational costs. So only by investing in the right systems and joining the right partners can they attain the efficiency that makes this move towards globalisation feasible.
The shift from single-country to multicountry broadcast operations reminds us of the move from single to multichannel stations, which seems obvious now but was a big deal at the time. The complexity now is tenfold. A go at world presence should therefore not be attempted without a proper broadcast management system and a system provider that can partner with you on this awesome journey.
