Microsoft, in partnership with the global accounting firm EY, announced on Wednesday the launch of their blockchain based content rights and royalties management solution for initial deployment with game publishing partners.
The new rights and royalties solution is designed to reduce operational inefficiencies within the payment distribution process and increase trust and transparency between industry players, eliminating the need for costly manual reconciliation and partner reviews. The existing system can take 45 days or longer for participants along the value chain – songwriters, developers, authors, and more – to receive payments.
EY Global and EY Americas Blockchain Finance Lead for Advisory Services, Deep Ghumman said, “Enterprises are looking to use blockchain technology to solve their business challenges. They are especially looking for scalable blockchain products that can easily plug into their existing processes and systems. The rights and royalties blockchain solution on Microsoft Azure is a great example of how blockchain will transform the way we do business and how EY and Microsoft are collaborating to empower digital transformation with blockchain.”
The network was built using the Quorum blockchain protocol and Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure and blockchain technologies and will provide near real-time visibility of sales transactions to participants in the network, allowing calculation of royalty positions while still retaining confidentiality of agreements across entities. Ubisoft, a longtime gaming publisher and Microsoft partner, is conducting initial tests of the framework.
EY Global Innovation Leader for Blockchain, Paul Brody said, “The scale, complexity and volume of digital rights and royalties transactions makes this a perfect application for blockchains. A blockchain can handle the unique nature of each contract between digital rights owners and licensors in a scalable, efficient manner, with an audit trail for the participants. By deploying this on Microsoft Azure, we believe this will be highly scalable across thousands of royalties and content partners.”
