In the recent webinar Bringing Order to Chaos: Optimizing Revenue Operations with Revedia, presenters Karin Bleiler (EVP & GM of Revenue Solutions) and Ashley Kindsvatter (Sr. Director of Product Management) provided valuable insights into the following areas:
- The changing state of revenue operations in 2023.
- Challenges and opportunities for media finance teams dealing with revenue complexity.
- The growing importance of revenue data (and the workflows needed to manage it).
- The role that Revedia can play in streamlining and automating revenue management workflows.
Here we highlight five of the top revenue management insights our speakers shared.
1) Hybrid revenue management is here
There’s been seemingly endless discussion about the cord-cutting trend, the upcoming generation of cord-nevers, the growing popularity of OTT media distribution, and the potentially shaky future of traditional linear Pay TV. But the latest available data shows that it’s far too early to ring the death knell for linear Pay TV.
Global Pay TV revenues fell by $49 billion between 2016 and 2022 but are expected to fall by just $17 billion between 2022 and 2027.
While global Pay TV revenue continues to decline overall, Pay TV subscriptions are forecasted to remain strong in the future and many media organizations are still largely powered by the revenue they receive from linear distribution.
At the same time, media companies are investing in OTT streaming and direct-to-consumer (D2C) distribution where they expect revenue growth into the future – even if earnings are relatively low today.
Projected growth in OTT TV and video revenue is driving investment in those distribution channels, despite their low revenue return today when compared with traditional linear distribution.
As OTT revenue increases, content sellers are working to balance profitability from traditional distribution channels with investments that drive digital growth and position them to capitalize on a more OTT-centric future. This strategy necessitates a hybrid approach to revenue management where media finance teams are managing revenue from both profitable (but declining) linear sources and less profitable (but increasing) OTT sources.
2) Diverse stakeholders now depend on revenue data
With traditional linear distribution, content sellers benefitted from a stable and mature business model with standardized long-term agreements, basic and predictable data sharing, and simple rate calculations. But with the rise of OTT distribution, content sellers are increasingly entering into more complex deals with variable licensing windows, shifting payment terms, and inconsistent data-sharing requirements.
As a result, revenue management is becoming increasingly complex and data-driven for content sellers operating in a hybrid revenue management paradigm. We also have a growing set of stakeholders who depend on the availability of timely and accurate revenue data:
- Linear Finance teams need to ensure proper delivery of payments and reasonable reporting variances from MVPD partners,
- Compliance/Audit teams need to validate that agreement terms and revenues are being reported correctly,
- Distributor Sales teams need revenue data to successfully negotiate and renew licensing deals,
- D2C Finance teams need to manage and validate payments from D2C revenue streams,
- Marketing teams need to measure the impact of campaigns and forecast demand for specific types of content,
- OTT Finance teams need accurate revenue data to manage increasingly complex OTT licensing deals and rate terms,
- IT & Security teams will need to support and secure new technologies and systems of record to support effective revenue management,
- Product & Content teams will use revenue data to inform content creation decision-making.
As revenue management becomes increasingly data-driven, content sellers are seeing an evolution in the ecosystem of stakeholders that depend on access to timely and accurate revenue data.
3) Data workflows are critical for maximizing the value of revenue data
With the influx of revenue data from OTT platforms and the growing number of stakeholders who depend on it, media finance teams will need to get serious about data operations to succeed in the new environment. That means adopting new data workflows to take control of revenue data, automate and streamline revenue management processes, and deliver revenue data to other stakeholders in time to support business decision-making.
Karin Bleiler mentioned five areas of data workflow where finance teams should be looking at their processes:
- Ingest – Do you have an automated way to ingest data into systems of record, or is it still done manually?
- Normalize – Do you have an automated way to normalize OTT platform data from multiple streaming partners?
- Analyze – Can you scale your analytics capabilities to make sense of OTT data in real time?
- Understand – How easy is it to access, share, consume, and communicate insights from your data?
- Optimize – Can you efficiently leverage your data into optimized distribution, monetization, and audience engagement?
4) Media finance teams need specialized tools to handle revenue complexity
For media finance teams in 2023, revenue data comes from a variety of sources and must be ingested into systems of record, normalized, and analyzed rapidly to enable data-driven decision-making for other stakeholders.
To achieve this, media finance teams need specialized software tools like Revedia that automatically ingest and normalize revenue data and licensing agreements, capturing critical data at the most granular level to enable a streamlined approach to revenue management.
Revedia automates the process of ingesting and normalizing content licensing agreements.
At this point in our webinar, Ashley Kindsvatter demonstrates how Revedia can automatically ingest content licensing agreements and revenue data. Both Revedia Linear and Revedia Digital can capture all of the granular details such as payment rates based on subscribers or different MVPD/platform assignments.
Automating data ingestion and normalization with Revedia means that media finance teams can start analyzing, understanding, and sharing data without the up-front cost and complexity of manually entering licensing agreements and revenue data into a system of record.
5) Revedia brings order to your data chaos
Revedia automates the process of ingesting and normalizing content licensing agreements, as well as revenue data from linear and OTT distributors, into a centralized system of record. From there, media finance teams can leverage their data to streamline revenue management processes, including:
- Monthly Revenue Analysis
- Payment Validation and Reconciliations
- Programmatically Generating Accruals
- Monthly Standard & Custom Reporting
You won’t want to miss the last five minutes of this webinar, as Ashley Kindsvatter goes in-depth in demonstrating the Revedia platform. You’ll see how Revedia automatically captures granular revenue data from invoices and license agreements, tracks payments and compliance at the most complex and detailed level, and then uses your revenue data to automate and streamline revenue management processes.
Ready to learn more?
Looking for more revenue management insights from our experts at SymphonyAI Media? Watch the full webinar to learn more about the changing state of revenue management and how media finance teams can streamline revenue management with Revedia.
