A marketplace to unlock value for small, unseen interesting films

Last December, Bongo, a Bang­ladeshi OTT pla­tform looking for films to stream, came across ProducerBazaar.com. The Chennai-based online marketplace for film rights was beta testing its website.

Bongo got in touch with Pro­ducerBazaar’s founders, G K Tirunavukarasu and A Sen­thil Nayagam. Two days later it paid $2,500 (Rs 2.05 lakh) for the Bangladesh and non-exclusive worldwide rights of C V Kum­ar’s Tamil science-fiction thriller, Maayavan.

This is the most significant of the six deals ProducerBazaar has done so far, all in its beta phase. “Maayavan was relea­s­ed in 2017. Its producer had alm­ost finished getting any business out of it. Still, we got bu­s­i­ness of $2,500,” says Tirunavukarasu.

This ability to unlock the va­lue of small, difficult-to-discov­er and interesting films is what ProducerBazaar hopes to ach­ieve at scale. If it works, it could clean up a messy area in India’s Rs 161,400 crore media and ent­er­tainment business: rights.

How does it work

ProducerBazaar, which laun­c­hes formally this March, offers an online marketplace based on NFT (non-fungible token) for the rights of films, shows, series and any entertainment content. NFTs are digital tok­ens that contain all the information about the film and cannot be interchanged or rep­laced. Trading in them happens in actual currency.

The idea was born out of Tirunavukarasu’s journey as a producer of three Tamil films. “You gather funds and produce. If it is a success you re-invest; if there is a loss it is gone. Entry-level producers can’t sell IPs (intellectual property),” he says.

Senthil Nayagam, his partner, suggested blockchain technology. Google defines it as a “decentralised, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions ac­ross many computers such that the record cannot be altered re­t­roactively without the altera­t­ion of all subsequent blocks”. The idea was enough for the duo to raise Rs 25 lakh from the Centre’s Startup India Seed Fund Scheme in April 2022.

But it took Tirunavukarasu months of making presentat­i­ons to film associations and pr­o­ducers before a Kerala film pr­o­ducers’ body bought into the idea. Soon others joined. By this Jan­uary, Produ­cerBazaar had “onboarded” 2,500 films in Marathi, Kann­ada, Malayalam and Tamil.

Once a film comes on boa­rd, its rights trail is checked, for which ProducerBazaar has for­ged partnerships. “We have pa­r­tnered with IP law firms and use law interns for legal res­ear­ch,” says Tirunavukarasu. The­se rights are then converted to NFTs and put on the marketp­lace with a green (which shows all legalities are clear), orange (some doubts) or red tag (rights trail not clear). Tirunavukarasu reckons only a fourth of the 2,500 films have green tags and a fifth have orange ones. More than half have red tags. “Most producers don’t have docume­n­ts for films they produce.”

The fine print

“It is entirely possible the same film has been sold several times over and there are overlapping rights,” says Ameet Datta, partner, Saikrishna Associates, and an IP law expert. This is Pro­d­u­cerBazaar’s biggest challenge.

Thousands of older films were sold on one- or two-page non-specific contracts. From 1913, when the first Indian feat­ure film was released, to the ’70s, most producers were sim­ply not interested in rights beyond theatrical, because oth­er fo­r­mats did not exist. The clau­se, “and all other rights that may emanate in the future”, was standard in contracts. When satellite TV arrived, there was a flurry of litigation ar­ound old films. It’s only by the late ’90s and early 2000s that contr­a­cts and deals bec­a­me specific, thanks to film corporatisation.

Datta points out that in 2016, Zee took Saregama to court alleging infringement of Zee’s copyright over 29 films, including Mausam (1975), An­dha Kanoon (1983) and Maang Bharo Sajna (1980) by streaming songs and videos from these. “Both Saregama and Zee brought the same rights (sound recordings, and underlying wor­ks), but Sare­gama brought them decades ago. Zee argues the ‘new digital rights’ like stre­aming, etc. could not have been passed on to Saregama since this technology wasn’t even known then,” says Datta. Jud­gment in the case is awaited.

This is another challenge for ProducerBazaar. Once it has tags a film, it unbundles 20 different rights — dubbing, rem­ake, dialect, Metaverse, overseas, etc. — and lists them for sale online. This is great in theory because it unlocks the value of individual rights. But, “you can’t license derivatives without the film”, reckons Datta. He points out that ProducerBazaar could really add value only for films from 2004-05, when film corporatisation truly took off.

Not everyone is excited by what ProducerBazaar is doing.

“There is nothing new in this. There are people and age­n­­­cies that trade in movie rig­hts,” points out Siddharth Roy-Kapur, managing director of his eponymous production firm.

Ajit Andhare, COO, Viac­om­18 Motion Pictures, agrees. “The demand for known hits like say Pushpa or Singham is high. It (the marketplace) will serve well for films without significant premium that have a discovery issue,” he says.

Tirunavukarasu agrees. “Our focus is not on the big pro­jects but the ones between Rs 1 cr­­ore and Rs 10 crore in budget and individual producers,” he says. It will take thousands of Bongo-type deals to achieve the scale where produ­cers sim­ply cannot do without Prod­u­cerBazaar. For that it needs an army of lawyers and tech expe­rts. That is why it is raising an­o­ther million dollars (Rs 8.2 crore).

Wait for the proof of the pudding.