AllRites expedites the film rights acquisition process

Its platform will shorten the month-long process to a day.

Buying film and TV content rights is a long and painful process for producers and distributors, involving a lot of time and money from face-to-face meetings and contract negotiations. It poses a higher risk of losing money as some distributors do not pay what they owe to content creators.

To solve this pain point, Riaz Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of AllRites, created a platform that can condense a month-long process into a day. A content creator or distributor can list their film/TV shows on the platform by uploading a poster, trailer, an episode along with synopsis and rights availability information.

The buyer can simply go to the website and search for content by genre, language, etc. and check out trailers, screeners and rights availability information. The deal can be negotiated with the seller through the platform and a contract is electronically signed.

AllRites will then take a commission of up to 10% of the deal from the seller.

Traditionally, a film or TV series distributor approaches a potential buyer either via an office meeting or at a trade fair. The distributor usually brings a physical catalogue of 100 film and TV shows and picks a few of them to pitch to the buyer during a half hour or one hour meeting.

Once the buyer expresses interest, the distributor provides additional materials via email and may discuss the availability of the desired rights and determine the price. Then a contract is issued, which goes back and forth between the parties until it is finally signed. Once all of that is done, the distributor will then send materials through a third-party service such as Aspera.

All of this takes a minimum of four weeks and as long as six to 12 months.

In January 2020, AllRites secured $1.54m (US$1.1m) from a seed funding round led by Australian VC fund Artesian. Mehta admitted that this was a struggle for them as there were not a lot of VCs who are familiar with the media industry and that they were hesitant to invest in the startup as it didn’t fall under their investment thesis.

“We believe that the content industry is on the cusp of major disruption,” said Aertesian’s managing partner Tim Heasley and director Melody Zhang. “AllRites is targeting the disruption of long-standing inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in the large and growing industry of video content production and distribution.” 

Photo credit: AllRites official Facebook page