EY and Microsoft launch blockchain solution for media and entertainment industry

Tech giant Microsoft and Financial conglomerate EY partnered to announce the launch of a blockchain solution for managing content rights and royalties for media and entertainment industry to enable increased trust and transparency between industry players.

It will significantly reduce operational inefficiencies in the rights and royalties management process, and eliminate the need for costly manual reconciliation and partner reviews. The solution is first being deployed within gaming with Microsoft and its game publisher partners.

Blockchain solution will serve any industry where intellectual property or assets are licensed to other parties and where the creators are paid royalties based on royalty agreements, the announcement said. It will give near real-time visibility of sales transactions to the participants in the blockchain network.

The royalty calculations along the value chain are mostly manual and generally managed via offline data sources. The royalty value chain may include authors, songwriters, production houses, developers and more.

Each month royalty transactions aggregate to billions of dollars. These are mostly the result of millions of intellectual property transactions.

It will provide improved insights into the content purchases and help quickly react to changing market dynamics.

The embedded smart contract architecture is designed to enable accurate and real-time calculation of each participant’s royalty position, providing enhanced visibility for recording and reconciling of royalty transactions.

Built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure and blockchain technologies, the network implements Quorum blockchain protocol and implements confidentiality of agreements across entities.

Credit:https://www.ey.com/

Microsoft’s gaming partners participating on the network will get improved visibility to the transactions versus the legacy process, which could take up to 45 days or more. The participating partners will be able to generate accounting accruals on a daily basis and use the timely data to improve their forecasting.

Once fully operational, this blockchain network will be one of the world’s largest enterprise blockchain ecosystems. It will process millions of transactions per day from thousands of Microsoft royalty partners and process.

Loic Amans, Senior Vice President, Finance & Strategic Planning at Ubisoft said, "We are always looking at how to leverage emerging technologies in all facets of our business. The opportunity to collaborate with EY and Microsoft on blockchain use cases in the domain of digital contracts and royalties is truly exciting.” Ubisoft, one of the world’s leading game publishers and a Microsoft gaming partner, is testing the solution.

Paul Brody, EY Global Innovation Leader, Blockchain, said, “The scale, complexity, and volume of digital rights and royalties transactions make this a perfect application for blockchains. A blockchain can handle the unique nature of each contract between digital rights owners and licensors can be handled in a scalable, efficient manner with an audit trail for the participants. By deploying this on Microsoft Azure, we believe this will be highly scalable across thousands of royalties and content partners.”

EY and Microsoft are currently deploying the solution with Microsoft’s key business partners and will explore opening the solution to other partner organizations as a general exchange infrastructure for royalties-related transactions on everything from software to the digital media, says the announcement.

EY organization previously announced different blockchain platform.  These are a blockchain for automotive services, the world’s first marine insurance blockchain platform and a suite of blockchain audit technologies that enhances the ability to perform an in-depth review of cryptocurrency business transactions.

This post is subject to the original announcement.
A similar announcement is made by Microsoft.