Problems of the media industry

The problem of international media license trade has been further intensified by the COVID-19 crisis. Even prior to that, the industry suffered from a very outdated approach to content license trading. Around the world, all of the major programming trade fairs have been canceled and won't likely resume anytime soon. This results in less variety, less innovation and more and more repetitions. In addition the current climate debate is keeping the content industry in check. Due to the climate crisis, it is unsustainable for hundreds of thousands of media industry representatives to fly across the world every year to try to sell their content. Currently, all relevant worldwide program trade fairs have been cancelled and their return in this form remains questionable. Prior to this time, it was practically a requirement for relevant program vendors or buyers to attend these trade fairs on a regular basis. The result has been exorbitant costs for the participation in these fairs, and of course, immense travel expenses. At the same time the discovery process for buyers to find the right video content at such fairs is a confusing one with sometimes several hundreds of thousands of participants and an unmanageable flood of offers. If you do not know exactly what you are looking for as a buyer, it is difficult to find the right program. Nevertheless, the participation in trade fairs is far from being the conclusion of the sale. A buyer's basic intention to purchase a particular program package is then followed by the process of actual license negotiation. Often, lawyers work their way through a time-consuming and costly process to develop a bespoke license agreement, which could have been more easily achieved in the form of a long overdue international license standard. This means that almost every license agreement is developed and implemented over and over.

Standards hardly exist to this day. Version 2.0 4 Very often, intermediaries play a major role in the license trade. Most of them, in the form of distributors, who offer their networks and contacts to buyers in their respective territories to support the process of program distribution. The respective distribution fee can easily amount to 30-50% of the sales price. This is a major disadvantage for both the seller and the buyer. The seller has to make his program artificially more expensive so that he can afford these intermediaries and still keep enough budget left for his production. This often makes his program too expensive for the buyer. The buyer, on the other hand, pays distribution fees that he knows do not go into production and thus into the quality of the program he has bought.

The trade in valuable program licenses currently takes place entirely in an analogue form and is an unnecessary waste of money and important resources unnecessarily. Countless distributors and other intermediaries control the markets, preventing creators from accessing potential buyers. Their fees drain money from the program, or make it more costly. Additionally, lawyers renegotiate every license agreement. However, digital norms and standards could simplify this process and thus make it much cheaper