This month we completed another international distribution, paying out £3.1 million to 2,742 eligible members.
As part of this distribution we collected and distributed payments from 15 different countries, for over 35,000 titles. If you were to watch them all, it would take you well over 8,000,000 minutes!
Over the past few months, our Distribution Team have put in a lot of hard work to ensure our members are fairly compensated for their work being shown overseas.
Below Distribution Assistant Georgina Trott gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the work that went into this recent international distribution.
You may have read my blog from last year on how our UK distribution scheme works. Whilst our UK distribution is made possible by our UK Rights Agreement with UK broadcasters, our international distribution is possible thanks to agreements we have with overseas Collective Management Organisations (CMOs).
Some countries around the world have laws which allow CMOs to collect payments for directors related to the local exploitation of UK produced film and TV programmes. UK directors retain rights to these payments, even if they have assigned their worldwide copyright interest to a producer.
Our Head of International has built and maintained close relationships with CMOs based in more than 25 countries where such laws exist. These CMOs send reports to Directors UK throughout the year of all the programmes that could be due royalty payments.
Distribution Assistants like myself examine the titles in these reports, to locate the programmes in our database and identify who the director is and whether they are a member of Directors UK.
Once we’ve returned these initial reports to the relevant CMO, we’re then sent back a full distribution report from each international society, including details like work, channel, date, and time of transmission. Our Head of International and International Officer will then format all this information into spreadsheets, which the Distribution Assistants use to allocate the payments due to members.
Spreadsheets vary from thousands — to tens of thousands —of lines of data. No matter how big the spreadsheet is, our team sorts through all the data to make sure we allocate every possible payment to the correct member. Where possible, we use unique identifiers or other data to match the information but there are always titles that are new, or don’t automatically match up. When this happens we have to manually research the title.
For example, it can be difficult to identify the exact episode that aired for long-running British programmes like Escape to the Country, for which we have a record of 1687 episodes in our database – that, includes 32 “Cotswold” episodes, 44 “Hereford” episodes and 53 “North Yorkshire” episodes.
One of my tasks in the recent distribution was to sift through online archives from an international newspaper’s TV guide to work out exactly which episodes had been shown in their territory.
The information sent to us from the CMO’s is often in their native language, or uses their own programme titles, which can be hard to translate. From the French society, Call the Midwife is reported as SOS Sages-Femmes and Midsomer Murders is Inspector Barnaby. Our team have become experts at identifying the correct programmes for these cases, especially with the help of some of our bilingual colleagues.
While preparing for an international distribution, we regularly consult our own internal database of programmes which we are constantly updating. We also upload this data to a centralised database for copyrighted audio-visual works, which give us and the international CMOs a standardised way of identifying programmes, and helps us confirm which CMO represents the director of that programme.
Making sure the international database is up to date helps international societies distribute royalty payments across borders to the correct CMO, and helps make sure rightsholders, like our members, receive international payments as smoothly as possible.
In the final stages of a distribution, our team carries out one last round of inspections. everyone is involved in the process, and between us we have 77 years of experience distributing royalty payments — that means this process is swift and accurate.
Most CMOs will have already allocated an amount of money to be paid to that programme so all we need to do is identify and match it to the correct title and director. Sometimes though, the CMOs send us a lump sum payment with little or no reporting. In those instances, we use a 'points scheme' which takes into account factors like genre and transmission duration. For more complex distributions we may refer to our Distribution Committee to advise us on the fairest way to allocate the payment based on the limited data available.
Once everything is in order, our Distribution Officer uploads all the information we have collected and sorted to our database so that we can begin processing payments. Once we know the exact amount each member will receive, our Distribution Manager and Distribution Reporting Manager upload this information to our database, and statements are made and sent out to members.
Payments are then finalised by our Head of International and Director of Distribution, before making their way to our members’ bank accounts.
At the end of a distribution, any money allocated to non-members is held for up to three years while we try and contact the individuals to grant them their royalty payments. We circulate a list of these non-members amongst our membership, who can play a key role in helping make sure their fellow directors get in touch with us.
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