Bayerischer Rundfunk: Strategic and Operational Redesign of Rights and Royalties Management

Bayerischer Rundfunk, the public service broadcaster for the federal state of Bavaria, recognized the impact of the media digitization on rights management.

Being proactive, the broadcaster teamed with Accenture to conduct a strategic and operational redesign of its rights and royalties management.

Now Bayerischer Rundfunk has a collective, comprehensive foundation for dealing with rights and royalties management, and has already improved several rights and royalties processes, reduced the operating cycles and the quantity of physical structures, and eliminated the difficult coordination processes for content and media infringements.

Because of recent market developments—forces such as increasingly complex and structurally diverse license models, digitization of media, rising prices for utilization rights and an increase in the use of archive material from program content—public broadcasting authorities faced three major strategic tasks:

• Develop a comprehensive and sustained acquisition of rights and licenses strategy.
  
  
• Be prepared to continuously react to market changes.
  
  
• Conform to regulatory standards and frameworks.

To meet the challenge, Bayerischer Rundfunk engaged Accenture to analyze the rights and royalties management situation for all of its media platforms: television, radio, and online services. The goal of the analysis was to establish the current situation, identify areas for improvement, and develop solutions.

Accenture used a modular approach to conduct the analysis, working in close cooperation with the client’s various operating departments. The improvement potential for all of the areas examined was identified and an evaluation was made of their dependencies on certain influence factors.

In order to strategically and operationally improve rights and royalties management, Accenture used this foundation as the basis to create concrete operating recommendations for all dimensions of the organization’s rights and royalties management processes.

Accenture then laid out the operating recommendations in a pragmatic deployment concept, taking into consideration the strong operational interdependencies, such as the interaction with finance management, program planning or editorial processes.

Now with a new reference model for managing utilization rights, devised by Accenture, Bayerischer Rundfunk has a collective, comprehensive foundation for dealing with rights and royalties management.

The reference model provided a comprehensive and structured picture of the various opportunities for Bayerischer Rundfunk, and established a foundation for the future development of rights and royalties management. Accenture also provided a new structure for the respective responsibilities and scope of authority for rights and royalties management to better align with both the current and foreseeable challenges.

As a result, Bayerischer Rundfunk improved several rights and royalties processes, reduced the operating cycles and the quantity of physical structures, and eliminated the difficult coordination processes for content and media infringements. By formulating assorted operating requirements, the organization also was able to improve the various IT applications that support the rights and royalties management processes.