A highly competitive media landscape
In today’s highly competitive media landscape, broadcasters are vying against other and against a range of streaming services for consumer attention and therefore advertiser investments thanks to the creation of new contents. Artificial Intelligence can be a concrete ally to create quickly new and original 2D and 3D contents for extended reality. In this context, the opportunity to bestow the proper licences for the content use and monetisation require innovative rights managements system based on blockchain and Smart Legal Contract reveals itself as the powerful engine to organize, systematise and monetize the huge volume of imagines, audio and video. As a matter of fact, rights management solutions need to provide a measurable business impact, maximizing every asset’s return over different channels: this includes rights concerning extended reality.
Fincons Group for XReco
On the basis of its extensive experience in the media sector and within rights management and its strong attitude in Research and Development activities, Fincons Group has been selected to join the XReco project consortium working in the dedicated Horizon Europe programme, with the objective of facilitating data discovery, sharing and re-use of 2D and 3D assets and XR experiences.
The XReco project deploys several tools that aim at facilitating data sharing and fostering the creation of new content in the media domain. Among them, Fincons took charge of the development of the rights management solution by experimenting with the use of frontier technologies such as blockchain and smart legal contracts which can play a key role for the development of innovative rights and monetization management platforms.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a ledger that enables the creation and management of a digital, immutable, transparent, and distributed register of transactions. Transactions are grouped and held in blocks that are chained together. Whenever a new block of information or data is added to the chain, blockchain “hash" is created. This means that the information contained in the block is hashed, and then the hash value is added to the end of the chain. Any time the data contained in the block is altered or changed in any way, the hash value will also change. As a result, no single entity has control over the entire network, reducing the risk of fraud and manipulation and preserving the integrity of the blocks.
Blockchain has notoriously been applied to cryptocurrencies and has extended its use cases well beyond, to cover areas such as supply chain, healthcare, finance, and smart contracts.
Smart Legal Contracts
Smart Legal Contracts are basically code that runs on a blockchain platform that have the legal validity of an actual contract.
They link and automate the legal and physical aspects of contracting by translating a contract language into executable code. This code communicates with external sources, allowing self-execution based on input data. In this way, we can dynamically create and validate asset licences with smart legal contract without manual operations.
It will thus be possible to notarize the data of a Smart Legal Contract onto blockchain benefitting from the technology’s immutability, visibility and transparency, while maintaining the ability of Smart Legal Contracts to articulate and execute the terms of an agreement.
Rights and Licence Management in XReco
In the XReco architecture, the creation and registration of blockchain and related smart legal contracts is handled by a component dedicated to rights and licence management developed by Fincons. This component contains various microservices such as Rights Management (RM), a Monetisation Manager (MM), an SLC Engine and a Blockchain Service Provider (BCSP).
More specifically, RM is responsible for managing the other microservices while the SLC Engine handles all aspects of SLC, such as creation, validation and execution. The Blockchain Service Provider handles the communication with blockchain, such as deploying and interacting with SCs and the Monetization Manager calculates the economic value for the transaction in correlation with the relevant business model.
This project has provided Fincons with the opportunity to test first-hand the opportunities and benefits of using these cutting-edge technologies in rights management, confirming Fincons' focus on investing in research and development to keep up with the times and bring fresh innovation to its customers.
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