Kinow is pleased to introduce the new Multi-country feature, an essential parameter to broadcast and manage your content internationally.
What are the advantages? How does it work? We will tell you everything!This article explains the Multi-country feature and discusses the obstacles encountered to distribute your content internationally.
Which obstacles?
More and more platforms want to open up to an international market to seize new opportunities, but the journey is sometimes long to get there.
Each audiovisual content is linked to one or more rights contracts between the production company, broadcasters and distributors. The production company also has contracts with the authors, actors and directors who contributed to the production.
The distribution of content in several countries is therefore subject to distribution rights and copyrights. Each of your videos will therefore not necessarily be broadcast worldwide.
Moreover, as each country has a different standard of living and a different cultural approach, it is recommended to apply specific pricing and content editing to each country, which can be complex to manage depending on the technical solution used.
The emergence of VPNs, on the other hand, increases the risk that a user from a restricted country will still access your videos even if you have set up geolocation by IP address.
There may also be a discrepancy in the distribution of certain content between France and abroad thanks to the media chronology.
What is media chronology?
This is a French regulatory system that originally aimed to protect movie theaters from competition of broadcasters which were facing a significant drop in movie attendance by establishing a delay between the release of a film on the big screen and its distribution on physical media. With the multiplication of subscription-based video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms, this delay has been revised downwards, but as you will have understood, the release of content differs from one country to another.
In order to constantly improve our solution, we have created a feature that allows you to offer content adapted to each country targeted by your platform!
Expand internationally your content
No worries about managing copyrights, distribution, and territory thanks to our Multi-country functionality.
This new feature allows you to manage the restriction by geolocation on multiple entities of your platform:
- Category sheet
- Product sheet
- Video sheet
- Video extract sheet
- Subscription plan
- Widget : Slider
- Widget : Top menu
- Blog post
Thus, it is possible to choose which part of your catalog you wish to make accessible and to propose an interface, articles and subscriptions specific to each country.
For limited countries, it is possible to define three behaviors:
- Inaccessible (hidden) entity
A hidden entity is not viewable at all by the user who is in a restricted country, including metadata (for example. a movie from the catalog).
- Entity accessible but not purchasable (for Films and Subscriptions)
The user in the restricted country will be able to see the information (metadata) of the subscription or the video (title, description, images, ...) but will not be able to buy it if it is paying. If the video is free, he will be able to view it.
- Entity not viewable (for Videos and Teasers)
The user in the restricted country will be able to see the information (metadata) of the video but will not be able to view it.
The implementation of such restrictions makes it possible to respect the constraints mentioned above by offering a different catalog, prices and editorial content depending on the user's country (Multi-country sites).
Restricting VPNs and access by country
We provide a connector to the Maxmind GeoIP2 Precision Insights Service API to determine a user's geographic location based on their IP address (geolocation) and to avoid the use of VPNs by users in restricted countries:
Added value of the web service
This is a paid service to which you have to subscribe from the Maxmind website: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-precision-insights
The use of this paid service allows :
- To use a database updated in real time through the use of their webservice (API) rather than using our local database (updated weekly)
2. Detect VPN / Proxy / Anonymisers through the use of Maxmind Anonymous IP Database.
These two points are prerequisites for Hollywood-style rights holders.
Maxmind Connector Configuration
It is necessary to configure the Maxmind API key on the Kinow administration panel (in Settings > Application Integration), in order to retrieve the editorial recommendations :
Blocking VPN / Proxy
This option allows to detect when a user is behind a VPN or proxy, and to use the "Other countries" behavior, usually applied when we are unable to detect the geographical origin of a user:
An advanced analysis of your statistics
In order to better analyze your results, we have added a menu allowing you to filter TVOD and SVOD revenues and sales by country or across all countries on a consolidated basis:
You will also be able to analyze your audience with statistics of plays, views and hours watched per country.
To conclude
As you will have understood, this feature allows you to open up to new markets with total peace of mind and control your platform from the beginning to the end.
If you want to know more about the Multi-country feature and how to adapt it to your streaming platform, the Kinow team can help you transform and improve your video contents. Contact our experts!