Content owners, what rights do you put the most value on?

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Well this is a question related to the content owners, brokers and licensors, if you were never involved in licensing, reading this might be as well a waste of time.

- imagine you have a library of top notch exclusive content
- now you own all the rights and can distribute any way you want to

This brought me to a question:

What from all the different distribution outlets will raise or decline on value? What rights are the most important for you to keep or not gamble with?


Now here is my 2 cents from what I've seen lately:

DVD rights - suck, there is a very few companies that would be able to pay you a reasonable price these days.

Well I am no psychic to predict that the value of the DVD rights will continue to decline, DVD's already turned into more of a promo tool than something that would pay for your beer

TV rights - might decline a little bit with more providers in the field and the raise of internet / IPTV , but I assume there will still be money in TV rights for a while, most likely because TV is so integral part of most peoples lives.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you would want to put your whole content library to be accessible to a huge audience as a part of a cable offering, you might be as well cannibalizing your own internet business.

Speaking about PPV, VOD rights, not hotel rights, I guess hotels will remain to be a way more impulsive and therefore way more lucrative way of distribution (unfortunately usually not for the content owners..)

Mobile rights - I would expect them to probably rise and stay at some level, depends on the revenues that the pseudo boom that happens lately brings, yet it will still be possible to buy them cheaply, especially from the US based producers as far as there is no direct mobile distribution in the States

Internet Rights - I am concerned there is still a lot of potential, confirmed by the fact that there are producers that don't do physical DVD's anymore, it's already a way better deal to produce for established programs and get paid in cash than for DVD's on your own, and there are marketers that can make a serious dime out of exclusive content with their huge internet audience

Well this all would happen in the ideal world, where people are still horny but not flooded with your stolen product for free.

That's a side factor that can decline the overall value of the content (maybe apart from the mobile rights, as far as the non accessibility of the bigger screen is the key factor there I guess).

Let me know your thoughts.