Tracking Revenue Sharing

[Juanita]

How do you track revenue sharing, particularly when you license
content?

I have been doing a bit of research into options for setting up and
tracking media licensing for example. This would be content with a
fixed licensing expiry period and a specific revenue share.

e.g. Music licensed to a distributor for 2 years with a minimum
guarantee up front of $5,000 and a 50-50 split on revenue received by
distributor over the 2 year contract.

Has anyone come across any software that does this? I have found
Maestro for the music industry but their screen shots look
suspiciously like Microsoft Access and they work with big big
companies. Just wondering if everyone builds their own tracking tools
into their products. I imagine complex licensing requirements would
require quite a substantial tracking tool but maybe its alot simpler
when you can write code :p

[Benjamin Scherrey]

My experience in the music industry is that this is typically done manually and using, let's say, non-standard accounting methods. :-) But an area with a similar problem set is book publishing and B2B telecom deals. The latter often have 300+ page contracts with very complicated formula. 

I've built this stuff before and it is pretty expensive. Ah I remember the telecom boom fondly! This is an area where techniques such as Constraint Based Programming can really cut away at the complexity of the coding and push it towards complexity of model (which customers have to deal with in defining the agreement anyway).

-- Ben

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[Juanita]

Non-standard accounting methods? Noooo!

The problem with excel is when you hit 500 different sets of media and
each has its own distribution contract and terms. With just 5 variable
terms its already a nightmare.

[Stephan February]

From a programming/implementation point of view, the various business rules to decide who gets how much is actually not that difficult to implement. 

I would just use a "rules engine" for this. You can declaratively build/encode your rules into text files which are updated separately from the core codebase. Not the nicest name, but one of the top rules engines, which also just so happens to be OpenSource is Drools : http://www.jboss.org/drools/

Here's an example of an actual rule from an actual product I developed :)

>8>8>8 snip 8<8<8<

rule "get the screenshot for ENTOURAGE_2008_ACCOUNT EDIT_IMAP_SETTINGS_SAVE_PASSWORD"

when

    $screenIdentity: ScreenIdentity()

    ConfigScreenType(name == "EDIT_ACCOUNT_SETTINGS", guideType.name == "ENTOURAGE_2008_ACCOUNT")

    EmailSetting(account_type == 'IMAP')

then

    $screenIdentity.name = "EDIT_IMAP_SETTINGS_SAVE_PASSWORD"

end

>8>8>8 snip 8<8<8<

It might look a little hairy, but there are also now GUI tools available (never used one myself) which lets you encode these business rules into your application after the fact. 

Cheers

Stephan

[Patrick Haller]

On 2012-09-06 01:54, Juanita wrote:
> The problem with excel is when you hit 500 different sets of media and
> each has its own distribution contract and terms. With just 5 variable
> terms its already a nightmare.

"A telco is a billing company with some wires attached.", someone once
said[1]. Post-deregulation meant that a lot of people were suddenly
looking to parse and generate call detail records and circuit bills.

A lot of ISPs -> telcos just wrote their own interfaces to handle the
data inter-exchange. Which meant you had a perl hacker reading each
contract and trying to create some kind of database table.

Fast forward a bunch of years and there are many many niche software
packages that allow a billing person and a lawyer to handle each
contract once and then be done with it.

Though, if Billing is a core competency for Distribution, then it should
be in-house because no one wants to wait on some outside vendor to get
their act together before money starts rolling in. ;)


[1] B/OSS World, I thought; can't find it now, though.

[Justin Lee]

From my experience, it's usually agar-ation. :P

Regards,
Justin Lee
Software Development Consultant,
Tech-Schizo, Deputy Editor in Chief of Tech65
blog: www.justinlee.sg
twitter: @triplez82