This week, AI entered the world of rights management with the release of AI-Powered rights management from Molten Cloud. Designed to address long-standing data challenges faced by media distributors, this tool transforms long-form contracts into an intelligent rights database within minutes.
This innovation comes at a critical time for the media industry. The shift from Pay TV to streaming, driven by evolving consumer preferences, has forced media organizations to adapt their business models to remain profitable. Dade Hayes, Deadline Business Editor, observes in Deadline's coverage of this development,
"As all networks look to eliminate waste and optimize their full portfolios, the urgency around rights management has increased."
Notably, Q2 2024 marks the first time in U.S. history that SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) revenue has surpassed Pay TV, underscoring the immediacy of this trend.1
Traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) workflows for rights data have struggled to keep pace with the increased volume, complexity, and global reach that streaming demands. Many companies rely on internally maintained spreadsheets or databases of duplicated rights data, which become increasingly complex and difficult to manage over time. These methods are not only time-consuming but also prone to inaccuracies, exposing companies to potential liabilities.
Molten Cloud’s AI Rights Management tool revolutionizes this process by introducing a hybrid model of ETL+H, where AI handles the bulk of ETL tasks, and human intervention is primarily required for the final stage, H, for human review. The superior pattern recognition capabilities of AI make mapping and data extraction significantly more efficient. However, for AI-powered mapping to be effective, it needs a robust infrastructure to map the extracted data to. This is where Molten Cloud comes in. Molten Cloud’s platform for rights, content, and royalties management provides the essential infrastructure required for this automation, creating a uniquely powerful combination.
This technology is being successfully utilized by The CW Network, where Molten Cloud’s AI technology can read and extract critical data from contracts in various formats, including MS Word, PDF, TXT, and even scanned images. For example, it parses incoming documents, extracts detailed rights, metadata, and financial data, digitizing paper contracts within minutes, creates structured data models, runs error and collision checks, ingests the data into the software system, and finally highlights select data that require human verification. Following human review, this data integrates seamlessly into the rights management application, where it can be easily accessed, filtered, and shared. On an ongoing basis, the AI system constantly verifies data integrity and accuracy, and prevents or reports anomalies to ensure that the data in Molten Cloud remains trustworthy.
The tool is already making a significant impact. Jack Paschal, VP of Business Affairs at The CW, notes,
“Their attention to streamlining media operations in the cloud and using AI to simplify data ingestion is exciting and is already saving us time and resources during onboarding.”
According to Molten Cloud the ability to glean rights directly from the source of truth will be far reaching. Molten Cloud CEO, Arjun Mendhi, states:
"Our tool’s job is to empower The CW Network to know its own rights, so that the business can do what it does even better -- confidently create, distribute and monetize intellectual property! I believe this is an ideal use case for generative-AI in the media and entertainment industry, and sets a very promising precedent of what we can do when we use technology the right way."
See AI -Powered Rights Management in action.
