Richard Rosenblatt
CEO & Founder, Whip Media
The Future Of Global Film and TV Content Licensing
When we founded Whip Media in 2014, we saw the media industry at an inflection point. Cord-cutting was on the rise as consumers were migrating to streaming services as their primary viewing option, and entertainment companies were changing their business models to cater to this change. Our vision was to help them navigate this new world of television.
As more shows and movies were created for streaming platforms, choosing what to watch and finding where to watch it, simply became overwhelming. We launched our TV Time app to solve this problem. TV Time helps viewers find and track the shows and movies they want to watch, while also recommending new ones we believe they will like and provides information on which platform they can watch them on.
Today, TV Time is a global community of 16 million users who have tracked more than 19 billion episodes of TV and movie content. Viewers use TV Time to find the titles available to watch in their region across 170 countries and 1,100 global platforms. TV Time also provides insightful first-party sentiment and engagement data as to why consumers are watching certain titles, what content is most anticipated and their emotional response to the content they watch.
New Models for the Streaming Era
With consumers streaming content more than ever, we saw a need for better analytical tools to help entertainment companies identify what content consumers really wanted to watch and help them better distribute and monetize their content globally.
Whip Media’s enterprise software platform combines sophisticated AI and machine learning models, along with sentiment data collected from the global TV Time community, to enable entertainment companies to connect content to the right audience and identify new acquisition and distribution opportunities.
We currently manage more than 2.2 trillion global VOD and EST transactions annually as a trusted partner of the world’s biggest content sellers, including all major studios.
The Whip Media Exchange
As we watch the media industry’s rapid transformation, we continue to expand our vision and suite of products and services. Our newest evolution is the Whip Media Exchange. The Exchange, launching in beta today, is a next-generation data and AI-powered content marketplace that makes global film and TV content licensing smarter, faster and more efficient.
Global content licensing has become increasingly complex due to fragmented viewing across a landscape populated with new viewing options, overlapping availability windows, and evolving business models across traditional linear viewing, VOD and newly developed streaming services. The market is changing too rapidly, and the way we buy and sell content must change along with it.
The Exchange connects buyers and sellers in a centralized platform to streamline discovering, buying and selling content rights. Using proprietary first-party data, the Exchange drives smarter licensing decisions through a new set of predictive analytics not previously available to the entertainment industry.
The Exchange uniquely marries data and technology to meet the evolving needs of buyers and sellers, on a new, industry-leading platform that facilitates the entire content licensing process.
Our predictive data and proprietary models help our customers maximize the value of content whether they are a buyer or seller. These technologies combined with the scale of our solutions architecture and streamlined workflow provide a solution no other company can.
The launch of the Exchange is a significant step for our company that would not be possible without our amazing team. Throughout this journey, we have acquired three companies: Mediamorph, TheTVDB, and TV Show Time. These acquisitions have made the launch of the Exchange a reality by providing the technology, work flows, metadata, and deeply experienced teams that are crucial to our platform. We’ve also formed strategic partnerships with BB Vision and twelve of the largest digital content management companies in the supply chain ecosystem.
Streaming has drastically changed the media landscape and is only poised to grow, as SVOD subscribers are projected to nearly double to 1.25 billion by the end of 2024 (according to LightShed Partners). Streaming platforms need the right content to attract new users and retain existing ones. Content producers want to maximize the value of their libraries and reach a global audience. Streaming has changed the media ecosystem more rapidly than any innovation of the past, and the Exchange will ensure that everyone in the ecosystem also benefits.