Microsoft and EY launched a blockchain solution for managing content rights and royalties for media and entertainment industry on Thursday.

The solution will be first deployed in gaming within Microsoft and its game publisher partners, according to a statement. The solution attempts to digitise the current process of royalty calculation that is manual and managed via offline data.

This is how the solution will work. The blockchain solution has an embedded smart contract architecture that 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.

The network is built using Quorum blockchain protocol and Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure and blockchain technologies. Once implemented, Microsoft’s gaming partners will get improved visibility to the transactions versus the legacy process, which could take up to 45 days or more. The partners will be able to generate accounting accruals on a daily basis and use the timely data to improve their forecasting.

According to the statement, this will result in increased trust and transparency between industry players and significantly reduce operational inefficiencies in the rights and royalties management process. It also eliminates the need for costly manual reconciliation and partner reviews.

French gaming company Ubisoft, one of Microsoft’s gaming partners, is testing the solution currently. The tech giant will implement this solution in a phased manner.

Though the solution is being tested in the gaming sector, the statement explained that it is designed to 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 value chain can include authors, song writers, production houses and developers, whose intellectual property generates royalty.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW