Molten Cloud has helped Rushlake scale up from a boutique film agency, dealing with 1-2 titles a month, to a library in the hundreds, working within the vast landscape of African streaming platforms. Partnering with Molten Cloud has helped Rushlake reduce the complexity of their operations, and move strategically, allowing them to uncover much more revenue.
Before partnering with Molten Cloud, a lot of time and energy went into operations workflows. When Rushlake was a boutique film company, taking in just one or two titles per month, manual processes on tools like excel were manageable. However, with the volume of content that Rushlake manages today, managing their operations simply would not have been possible without a proper system in place.
As their library grew over time, their operations became more complex, and more laborious. Workflows around avails and distribution were divided between excel sheets, and word docs. Multiple team members sharing an excel sheet may result in incongruent versions of the same file, and a lot of time would be spent double checking for inaccuracies, or copy & pasting data into an avails sheet and separately tracking down corresponding screener links. For a delivery, Sales Manager, Vito Marchiano might need to enlist the help of a colleague, or work with a lab.
“The issue is that with two people working contemporarily, the data gets overwritten… we had a procedure of double checking the list… another person just had to double check so we didn’t send out any wrong information.” - Vito
When Rushlake began looking for a new system, they had two goals in mind: to cut down on the time it took to put together avails, and to eliminate the chaos of their operations end to end.
Before Molten Cloud, the most exhausting piece of the sales workflow was the avails process. Distributing to the African market, which is saturated with streaming platforms, manual avails generation could take hours. Screeners in particular might be a huge time cost, that might even require another colleague to generate and collect screener links for Vito to individually copy/paste into an avails sheet. The amount of time spent on manual tasks like avails was a huge bottleneck for Rushlake’s operations.
Overwhelmed by manual processes, it was difficult for Vito to work proactively rather than reactively. For Rushlake, cutting down on chaos would mean gaining insight into their business, and allowing them to move forward strategically.
Using Molten Cloud, Vito doesn’t need to be an IT expert to execute end-to-end operations. With the click of a button Vito can send a link to a producer for 3rd party upload directly into Molten Cloud or generate a screener link. In a matter of minutes Vito can run complex searches of his avails and send them directly to a streaming platform in a template that meets their specific requirements and includes watermarked screeners. An avails process that once took hours, and might have included the help of colleagues, can now be done by Vito in just a few minutes.
In the ever-churning landscape of the African streaming market, risk analysis is key. Because Molten Cloud records distribution data automatically, Vito has insight into which platform relationships make the most sense, and can strategize which titles are worth selling non-exclusively.
In fact, Molten Cloud’s business intelligence is so crucial to Rushlake, that if a new title has not yet been ingested into Molten Cloud, they wouldn’t bother presenting it to their clients. According to Vito, Molten Cloud has become a centerpiece of Rushlake's operations.
“I consider myself not a particularly technically skilled person. Molten Cloud is so user-friendly that even I can manage to set up screeners and deliver content directly to clients without the need to disturb my colleagues to ask for help every time.” - Vito
Molten Cloud has allowed Rushlake to scale by an order of magnitude, while navigating a fast moving, high-churn VOD market. In Vito’s words, the greatest impact of Molten Cloud has been Rushlake’s ability to scale and uncover “much, much more revenue”. Once moving just a few titles in a month, today Rushlake Media uses Molten Cloud to avail an average of 100+ titles per client, and sells, on average, 30+ titles per deal.
In order to build a sustainable business model in the VOD market, speed is everything. Having a system that allows you to close deals and deliver content efficiently makes a tremendous impact on revenue. By removing obstacles like manual labor, and providing him with powerful business intelligence, Molten Cloud allows Vito to leverage his library to its full potential.
Scaling at this magnitude would simply not have been possible without Molten Cloud. By managing rights, content, and financials in one place, Molten Cloud is able to streamline operations with greater intelligence, efficiency, and flexibility than anywhere else.
“It’s not all about the pure quantity of sales, but also about the quality of the deals and the quality of the relationship with the clients. As the operations are so very well streamlined, there are also much more capacities for setting up proper sales & acquisitions strategies and so on” - Vito