In 1985, a small group of CPAs and media and entertainment professionals launched an audit company specifically for the broadcast and premium television network industries. In 2020, nearly 35 years later and 80+ employees strong, and a few name changes along the way, SymphonyAI Media has grown into a robust audit, revenue, and subscriber management company.
To offer a bit more perspective on that growth: the SymphonyAI Media audit business currently provides audits for more than 90% of all broadcasters, cable operators, and premium television networks domestically in the US. We’ve expanded our audit services to include services for digital OTT platforms, including SVOD, PVOD, and AVOD. We offer audit services for gaming developers, ensuring their licensing agreements are being adhered to by their publishing platforms like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, Steam, Stadia, iOS, and Android. In 2004, we added revenue management services to the SymphonyAI Media product portfolio, to help clients manage their monthly remittances, account reconciliation, month-end reporting and close, billing services, and financial forecasting. Today, we process over $8 billion in licensed revenue annually on behalf of our customers.
Addressing Today’s Evolving Challenges
As we look into the future, we’re listening to the challenges that you are facing today and working with the team of SymphonyAI Media data scientists, engineers, and product management to create products that solve for not only current challenges but provide the flexibility and scalability to adapt to future changes as our industry evolves.
The biggest challenges that we’re solving for you today are:
1) Access to Data
Challenge: Vendor agreements are stored in disparate locations and require a manual review to capture all contents of those agreements. Audit reports are hundreds of pages in length, stored in shared drives, and challenging to search through to gather specific data points manually. This can lead to miscategorized data and manual data entry errors, which translates to incorrect or missed revenue uplift opportunities.
SymphonyAI Media’s solution (available today): In the cloud-based Revedia environment, you can gain access and make searchable all vendor agreements and audit reports. This gives you the ability to dynamically search all audit rights dates, expiration dates, agreement terminology, audit finding, and variance analysis. This ensures that you don’t miss any audit rights windows and associated findings per MVPD. It allows you to plan your annual audit strategy better by understanding which MVPDs are up for renewal for that calendar year. It allows for more language consistency across all of your agreements. And it allows you to dynamically search across all audit and subscriber reports to gain quicker access to any hard or soft report findings. This can uncover new efficiencies and streamlined operations.
2) Revenue Trends and Forecasting
Challenge: Live revenue information around remittance, transaction, and subscription data is stored in disparate in-house and third-party locations. This can present difficulties for consolidation, forecasting, and revenue projections.
SymphonyAI Media’s solution (available today): Funnel your live revenue data into the AI-powered Revedia platform for instant access to live revenue data, including month-over-month and year-over-year trends broken down by geography, DMA, or distribution partner. Gather revenue projections based on market trends, historical data, and changes in revenue models. This allows you to be less reliant on excel sheets and not worry about the potential of human error that comes along with that strategy. It enables you to quickly and efficiently factor in variables that can impact forecasting that allows you to make informed business decisions based on the most up to date revenue intelligence that your company has.
3) Subscriber Churn
Challenge: Direct-to-consumer content platforms experience, on average, 35% subscriber churn every month. It’s challenging to provide consistent growth and forecasting data when one out of every three of your consumers are canceling their subscription each month. This forces additional budget dollars to be allocated to customer acquisition, which is costly.
SymphonyAI Media’s solution (in development): The Revedia dashboard highlights churn data, broken up into different high-risk subscriber categories, to identify those that will likely churn in the next 90 days based on different subscriber behaviors and trends uncovered by the AI-powered Revedia churn detection solution. The software then provides recommendations targeted to specific subscribers to assist in reducing churn and retaining subscribers. This helps with providing more consistent forecasting and can reduce the OPEX spend on customer acquisition.
SymphonyAI Media is paying close attention to the issues facing our clients. We’re working to address these issues with robust, scalable software solutions enhanced by the power of our AI engine. Our goal is to ensure our clients are maximizing their revenue returns from their products of today and tomorrow.
While we can’t predict which show will be the next Tiger King for our clients, at least not yet, the SymphonyAI Media team is committed to helping maximize the value we bring to your distribution partner, revenue management, and subscriber engagement strategies.
