On the Rights Track

26 November 2008

From his background in international TV distribution, Ross Bentley could feel the pain of media execs trying to keep track of rights availability and licensing opportunities. Together with co-founder and CTO Richard Warr, he decided to do something about it, and Rights Tracker was born, initially piloting a small-scale rights management system with a handful of customers before rolling out a full-blown web-based system. Having bootstrapped the company to profitability, when they reached a comfortable level of turnover, both Bentley and Warr felt the company could go further. The market agreed, and after attracting well-respected IPTV pioneer Iolo Jones as chairman, the g2i graduate company secured funding from the the Capital Fund, Creative Capital Fund and angel investors

You started your career managing royalty reporting for the programmes distributed by Granada International, before moving into a more strategic forecasting role. Was that when you realised there was a problem with rights management?

As well as producing revenue forecasts, I was working with the sales teams, seeing where there were windows where you could license programming – which countries, territories, and broadcast platforms were available. It sounds quite simple but even in those days, it was reasonably complex just because of the matrix of territories, episodes, rights, languages, and all the things that had to be taken into account.

We had some big systems to manage it but they were slow, cumbersome and very off-putting for the user and people didn’t really like them. So what tended to happen was the sales, finance and legal teams all had their own Excel workbooks and there was no holistic view. So when you’re actually going out to sell something, you’re not sure what rights are available – or if you’re selling a pan-European licence, you’re not sure which countries have already been sold.

One example was when we had a deal for the Discovery Animal Planet channel to distribute the Survival catalogue, which was about 400 hours of programming. It was a big distribution deal for the end of the ‘90s, about $30-40m. But we just couldn’t work out what rights we had available. It almost got to the point where we couldn’t do the deal. This was where I met my business partner:  we got a programmer in to write a rudimentary rights database to do the deal, and we had the answer in a couple of days. Before, we’d had a team of accountants working flat out and they were unable to tell us. That sowed the seeds for me.

Later when I left Granada I was asked to look at all the systems that were on the market and I talked to all the usual suspects - BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 - and pretty much universally they all had the same problems.

How has the advent of digital media platforms affected the picture?

In the past there might have been 20 different definitions of rights you could sell, in the form of terrestrial TV, cable and satellite and maybe video or DVD rights. Now there are hundreds of rights definitions - and if you throw in the merchandising and licensing, you can easily get to thousands in your rights database. So it’s exploded and it’s a lot more difficult to keep track of.

You’re not from a technical background, so how well does the collaboration with your co-founder Richard Warr work?

It works to our strength. I come at this from the user’s perspective, so for me it’s got to be a simple user interface, and the techy stuff is just in the background. Over a period of a few years I’d worked with Richard solving some of the problems with rights systems, so when we started the company it wasn’t like getting a technical team in and starting from scratch – there was already the knowledge there with our CTO. For example, something key like availability reporting – what have I got available to sell and when? – is actually a really complicated set of algorithms to work out efficiently because you’re dealing with a lot of data.

You’ve built the system in a modular way. Was that deliberate so you could add to it and improve it as you go along?

We’ve seen a couple of rights management companies that have come and gone that went into large companies and promised they could build the system from scratch. But these are very complex systems and if you start from scratch trying to build a really big project, you can very quickly run into trouble. It’s the whole business process of rights exploitation that has to be developed and it’s not something to enter into lightly.

We deliberately started working with small companies, 10-15 users, and we did it in Microsoft Access at first – so we could just prove everything in a simple database structure then port it onto a web-based SQL database platform later. Our first half dozen clients were close partners with us, they gave us a lot of feedback on how the user interface should look, they helped us develop it and they really bought into it. It wasn’t like doing a deal with one of the media giants, where they just want something delivered.

How did you fund that development, and when did you get to the point that you needed to look for outside funding?

We had a bit of voluntary redundancy money and savings that we put into the company and in year one we paid ourselves a little bit. But as development has got more intense, we’ve had to bring in developers and pay them rather than us. Richard and I have had a lot of foregone salary. Friends asked me how we could carry on like that, but I think it’s just having confidence in your product. Yes, we were foregoing 12 or 18 months’ salary at the time, but we believed it was ultimately going to be worth it.

Then we got to a point on the ladder where we had a product we could sell to small and medium-sized customers in the broadcast production and distribution area. But we knew that was just the tip of the iceberg for us. However, to get on that next rung and make that next leap required investment.

How tough was it to raise investment and how did the g2i programme help?

Funnily enough, it was quite straightforward but it just took a long time. I worked out it was 357 days from when we first met The Capital Fund to when we got the money. There were no commercial problems or disputes – it just took a lot of time.

The g2i programme was fantastic for us. It might have been something to do with where we were as a company and what we were doing with the product, but it just fitted in with what we wanted. The problem when you’re a company producing software is that you’re so fixated with the product, you lose sight of what the company’s doing and the bigger picture. It made us think about the market and challenge what we were doing, which was really important.

Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

I would have loved to have had our chairman, Iolo Jones, on board a couple of years ago. His drive, enthusiasm and vision is really moving us forward. But you can’t turn back time!

Ross Bentley was talking to David Longworth of Webster Buchanan Research