7 Major Pain Points In Entertainment Supply Chain Mapping

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7 Major Pain Points In Entertainment Supply Chain Mapping

7 Major Pain Points In Entertainment Supply Chain Mapping

The entertainment supply chain globally is massive, fragmented, and complex! And this global value chain has never been mapped for all its different specialist companies, distributors, buyers, sellers, and corporations. 

As streaming and broadcast multinationals develop, produce, acquire and license content across geographical boundaries, the paucity of information about prevailing norms, local players, and regional insights is limiting them to roping in the right specialist partners. The challenge also extends to picking the right partners from a host of production houses, studios, dubbing/ localization companies, distributors, and ancillary service providers, who together constitute the content entertainment value-chain.

Changes in Business Models

Outsourcing, offshoring of animation and Post work; new deal structures for IP and content financing; cross-border Co-Pro deals; traditional upstream studios moving downstream into streaming and vice-versa; P&L margin or cost pressures – all these causing changes within the supply chain and new business models.

Data Scarcity & Antiquated Methods

There is negligible data about specialist service providers across markets. Most sellers and buyers physically visit trade shows like MIPCOM, NATPE, and DISCOP, then sift through distributed material, jot down names and contact details of potential collaborators, and then engage them individually via email to reconnect and reconfirm services, content offerings, coverage, and other transactional details. Clearly, a time-consuming, inefficient, antiquated way to work in a globalized, post-pandemic world!

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Subjective Choices

Patchy, outdated information leading to faulty assessment parameters delay the process of selecting a local vendor. This tends to happen even in high-demand specialist categories such as IP Licensing, Distribution, Dubbing & Localization services, VFX, Post-Production, and Animation. Compounding these issues is also the absence of a curated list of the best and next-rung players leading to subjective, ad-hoc, and inadequate choices. Bias is common, and the risk of the same names appearing repeatedly is high. Asking your network of colleagues and peers from other offices for vendor names, again introduces bias usually referred to as ‘tribal knowledge’. The biggest danger with this tribal knowledge is the lack of discovery of newer, better, and trending prospective partners that are completely missed! By the time a new name does filter through these human systems, a rival has already taken away the vendor.

Rapid Disruptive Technologies

Changes in Virtual Production, VFX and animation due to gaming engines; use of AI in dubbing and localization; the migration of Post workflows onto cloud; the Ad-Tech choices for Freemium VoD and FAST-channel players are just some of the examples that are bringing new entrants or changing the erstwhile players.

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No standardization

The lack of standard forms and questionnaires to seek information or negotiate with vendors is yet another stumbling block. Collaboration often involves long, complex questionnaires. There’s also no uniformity of keywords and vocabulary across boundaries. Often, the service and specialization names tend to be different across countries – leading to a lot of confusion and wasteful conversations that are ‘lost-in-translation’.

Innovation by Competition

Intense competition is constantly causing companies to change their offerings by upgrading their talent, tech, facilities and unit-economics. Hence, the need on the Buyer-side to constantly review partners, vendors, suppliers.

Demand-Supply Mismatches

High demand constraining the best vendors, service providers and facilities. That in turn, creating a need for options and alternatives at the Buyer-end.

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Current scenario

Many streaming companies are asking their sourcing and procurement groups for the vendor, supplier, and distributor data that simply does not exist. So, they have to rely on dated industry directories and shared spreadsheets that are in private circulation. Commonly called trackers, these spreadsheets are dated that have missed all the real-world changes that have occurred with vendors including supplier upgrades, M&A activities, coverage expansions, new specializations, and competitive moves on those vendors.

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‍ The Vitrina Way

Vitrina’s primary objective as the global sourcing hub for the entertainment industry is to build the world’s best search and intel platform for this sector so as to effect smoother, faster, and secure transactions within the industry. 

As a first step, we conducted a simultaneous census of all the major global markets and all companies within the content supply chain in those territories. The exercise culminated in an extensive list of 600,000 companies that include studios, production houses, post-production, localization, streamers, broadcasters, and other service providers or tech solutions. This initial companies census also traced inter-company relationships, the strength of every company’s networks, their specializations, and their corporate ownership structures. All these are critical signals for buyers and sellers to find the partners they desire to work with.

Thorough vetting

To ensure the information about the companies in its system is accurate and unbiased, Team Vitrina cross-checks facts through multiple data sets and gets past and current work profiles vetted from diverse sources.‍ And the best part – the company profiles for each of these vendors is updated in real-time – both independently by Team Vitrina as well as by a host of the vendors and suppliers themselves!

Uniform taxonomy

The Vitrina system uses many classification models as part of its proprietary taxonomy to segment content, specialized services, and company types.

Team Vitrina has a deep understanding of this industry, along with an accumulated global experience in content and industry intelligence within the entertainment value-chain.

The result

Vitrina is today acknowledged as the most powerful and sophisticated search-&-intel system for the video entertainment marketplace.

Get started with Vitrina AI and eliminate your company’s pain points in the global entertainment value chain.

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