Are You Ready To License Your Content?

Are You Ready To License Your Content? from 1timstreet on Vimeo.



If someone emailed you today and said, "We would like to license your content." are you ready?

"You bet your ass I am Tim"

Are you really? Do you have all your talent agreements together? Do you have all your music cue sheets done? Location and property releases? Do you have all the paperwork that proves you own your content?

Are you ready to track multiple licenses for your content on a global scale?

Michael Gorman from Image Span was speaking at Digital Hollywood Building Blocks in San Jose and had a moment to tell me about LicenseStream a new web service platform for content owners (enterprise or creators) that allows buyers and sellers an easy way to license and syndicate content safely.

The result? Dramatically lower costs, faster time-to-market for all types of digital media – images, audio, video and text – and no liability.

LicenseStream has a licensing and billing platform to manage your whole media transaction cycles of: rights, permissions, pricing assignment, license generation, commerce management, royalty and billing settlement for existing and newly-created media content.

"To license content previously required arduous, person-to-person negotiations that often took weeks and months. Content creators had to contend with non-standardized licensing statements, manage their own invoicing, billing and collections, forcing them to put as much effort into the business of licensing the content as they had put into creating it. Our solution leaves them much more time to create. In addition, we are opening an array of transaction markets that allow the unrestricted flow of digital content between them."

LicenseStream even has a tracking code associated with your content.

Beyond Revver

If no one buys Revver and Revver can't generate enough revenue to stay in business they will go out of business and many of us like Happy Slip who have enjoyed free video hosting and rev share monetization of our videos on Revver will need to look for new video hosting.

Revver is great because I can post my videos and watch them make money. I've not yet found a site that works the same way as Revver but I have started looking.

Blip.TV is a great video hosting site that is loved by many video creators for its ease of use, quick response to problems and understanding of our community. I like Blip.TV a lot and I'm seriously considering moving there as they are in New York (Where the US advertising world is) and they are building their ad sales.

I have phone calls and emails out to other Video Hosting sites to see what they have to offer in terms of both Flash and QuickTime hosting and how to monetize both videos on my site and videos in my RSS feed.

Moving beyond the Revver issue if we are going to go it alone as video creators and take on the whole monetization thing ourselves we have several things to consider in monetizing our videos.

1. Video and Website Hosting
2. Ad Sales (Banner and Video)
4. Dynamic Video and Banner Ad Insertion
5. Stats Tracking
6. Content Management
7. Social Network

Right now to my knowledge there is not one place that provides this for content producers.

Ask A Ninja is using Federated Media for AdSales and Castfire for video hosting, dynamic ad insertion and stats. They are using a custom build Drupal content management system, Ning for their social network and I'm not sure who they are using for their website hosting.

I was ready to launch some new non sponsored videos for French Maid TV but I'm not sure I want to do that until I know that I'm going to get some money for the views.

I'm ready to post some new content but I need to rethink things first.

I'll let you know what I do.