The problem
Summit Media Group manages a catalog of 4,200 film and television titles licensed across 38 territories. Every title carries a web of rights — theatrical, streaming, broadcast, home video, airline — each with its own territory scope, exclusivity windows, holdback periods, and renewal deadlines. A single title might have 15 active license agreements across different platforms and regions, each with different expiration dates and renewal terms.
The rights management team — three full-time analysts — tracked everything in a 14,000-row spreadsheet cross-referenced with PDF contracts stored in SharePoint. Renewal deadlines were managed through Outlook calendar reminders set manually. Territory conflicts were caught by memory: an analyst would remember that a title’s streaming rights in Germany were exclusive to one distributor and flag it when another deal came through for the same window.
The failure modes were predictable. A calendar reminder would get dismissed during a busy week. An analyst would go on vacation and their renewal deadlines would slip. A new territory deal would get signed without anyone checking whether the holdback period on an existing agreement had cleared. Summit’s legal team estimated they were missing 8–12 renewal deadlines per quarter and discovering territory conflicts an average of 45 days after the conflicting deal was executed.
The cost was real. Missed renewals meant lost revenue or emergency renegotiations at worse terms. Territory conflicts triggered disputes with distribution partners and, in two cases over the previous year, threatened litigation. Summit’s CFO wanted the exposure quantified and eliminated before their next content acquisition round.
What we did
Week one we mapped Summit’s rights data model. Every license agreement became a structured record: title, licensor, licensee, territory (ISO 3166), rights bundle (streaming, broadcast, theatrical, etc.), exclusivity type, start date, end date, renewal terms (auto-renew, option, first-refusal), holdback periods, and financial terms. We ingested the spreadsheet and built a Claude-powered extraction pipeline to pull structured data from 600+ PDF contracts — term sheets, amendments, side letters — that had never been digitized beyond the original scan.
Week two was the monitoring engine. License Radar runs on Temporal workflows that execute daily scans across the entire catalog. Each scan checks three things: renewals approaching their decision deadline (90, 60, and 30 days out), territory conflicts where overlapping rights exist for the same title and region in the same window, and compliance obligations — minimum marketing spend commitments, release date windows, reporting deadlines — that have upcoming due dates. Alerts route to the responsible analyst via email and Slack with a summary card that includes the contract reference, counterparty, financial exposure, and recommended action.
Week three we built the cross-system coordination layer. Summit’s content data lives in three systems: their media asset manager (titles and metadata), their legal contract management tool (deal terms), and their finance platform (revenue share calculations and payment schedules). License Radar pulls from all three through API integrations and reconciles discrepancies — a title marked as “active” in the asset manager but “expired” in the contract system gets flagged immediately. We built a unified dashboard in Next.js that gives the rights team a single view of every title’s licensing status across all territories and platforms.
Week four was the territory rights visualization. We built an interactive map view where analysts can select a title and see a color-coded world map of current rights: green for active, amber for expiring within 90 days, red for expired or conflicted. Clicking a territory drills into the specific agreements, holdback timelines, and renewal options. This replaced the mental model that previously existed only in the analysts’ heads.
Week five we added the audit reporting engine. Every quarter, Summit’s legal team needs a compliance report for their distribution partners showing that territorial exclusivity has been maintained and all contractual obligations met. License Radar generates these reports automatically — a task that previously took one analyst a full week of manual cross-referencing.
Week six was production hardening, historical backfill validation, and training. We ran the system against two years of historical data to verify that it would have caught the known misses. It flagged all 34 incidents that Summit’s team had documented, plus 11 more they hadn’t discovered yet — including two active territory conflicts that were still unresolved.
Results
In the first full quarter of operation, License Radar processed 4,200 titles across 38 territories and surfaced 847 action items: 312 upcoming renewals, 23 territory conflicts, and 512 compliance deadlines. The rights team actioned every renewal on time — a 92% improvement over the previous quarterly miss rate.
The system caught $2.1M in at-risk renewals that would have lapsed without action, including a streaming rights package for Summit’s highest-grossing franchise in three APAC territories. The renewal window was 14 days from closing when License Radar flagged it; the previous spreadsheet system had no reminder set.
The three-person rights tracking team was reallocated. Half of one analyst’s time covers exception handling and deal negotiation that requires human judgment. The other 2.5 FTEs moved to revenue-generating content acquisition work. Quarterly audit reports that took five days now generate in under a minute.
Summit’s general counsel called it the single most impactful risk reduction initiative in their content operations division. The $48k build cost was recovered in avoided losses within the first 60 days.