I am the Entertainment Tycoon

Chapter 172 Streaming Service Plans

While the candidates were racing against the time in the last 30 minutes before the deadline, Theo and Ryoko were chatting in her office.

Ryoko was telling him her initial results about the purchase of the rights to put old animes in their streaming service.

"Boss, I contacted some old studios, and it seems that they don't care about selling the rights for us. Apparently, they already sold these rights to other streaming services." Ryoko informed.

"That's great! It seems that we can buy these animes at a cheaper price because they already are in another streaming service." Theo replied with an amused smile.

Even though these animes were already in other streaming services, Theo still wanted them.

After all, he was launching a streaming service exclusive for animations.

He had to have tons of animations in it.

Theo also wanted to put in his service not only anime series but also old anime movies.

"Did you enquire about the price of recent animes?" Theo asked with a thoughtful face.

"Yes, and boss, they are way more costly." Ryoko replied hesitantly.

"I asked the price of the license of the [Stone Age] anime. And with the money that they asked for, we can buy at least 3 licenses of old animes." Ryoko informed.

Theo had a reluctant face when he heard that.

He wanted to put new animes to make his streaming service more attractive to potential subscribers, but it seemed that he would have to work only with old animes.

There were three ways of buying the license deals between studios (or content right-holders) and streaming services. 

The first method has a Fixed License Fee, the platform (streaming service), pays a fixed negotiated amount for a specific amount of time. No reports will be shared and the success or the failure of the content is generally unknown to the content owner.

With this method, the content owner has no right whatsoever to demand more money than it already received after the first payment, if the anime makes a huge success the streaming service can enjoy all the profit from it.

After all, the streaming service already paid the agreed amount stated in the purchase contract.

And what happened was that the license of all these old animes that Ryoko was talking about was being sold with this method.

The studios that owned the rights of these animes did not care much about selling these animes so cheaply.

At the end of the day, these animes were too old and it was already a victory to be able to sell these licenses.

The second method consisted of a Revenue Share between both the rights-holders and the streaming services. Both parties share a percentage of the revenue collected by the platform on the content. 

For example, if an anime made a huge success on the streaming platform with lots of viewers. The streaming service would pay the content owner a percentage according to the view count.

This method was often used in works that had no certainty of success.

The third method consists of a Minimum Guarantee with a Revenue Share, it is the same as the other two methods.

However, the platforms guarantee a minimum share for rights-holders. This minimum guaranteed share is paid upfront to the rights-holders. If the streaming service overachieves on the rights-holder's share, they pay out the excess money collected. 

In other words, the streaming service has to pay two times with this method.

The first time to buy the license, and the second is when the view count is released.

And based on the view count, the amount of money can be low or big.

If the anime get low views, the streaming service will suffer a loss of money because the amount they would get from the subscribers watching will not be enough to pay for the cost of the purchase license of this specific anime.

This method was mainstream when studios sold anime licenses to streaming services.

Recent animes' licenses were all bought this way.

And that was exactly the deal that the studio that Ryoko inquired about offered her.

The upfront price was too much and that's why she was hesitant to tell Theo about this.

"It seems that will only be able to buy these old animes. We will have to use our own animes to attract subscribers." Theo pondered after thinking for a while.

"But what will do will be unprecedented because no streaming service available at this moment has the amount of anime that we will have when we launch our platform. So, I guess we will still be able to attract subscribers." Theo added with a thoughtful face.

"I agree." Ryoko replied with a nod.

"And while you are buying the licenses for these anime series. You can see if there are any old anime movies in that price range. It would a great move if we can have anime movies on our platform." Theo suggested suddenly.

If he were not mistaken, the Crunchyroll service from his past life did not have any anime movies on their platform.

But Theo wanted to have these movies on his platform.

After all, he was planning to make an anime movie!

But that was planned for much later, so he didn't want to think about that yet.

But he still wanted to plant the seeds of anime movies in his streaming service.

"That's a great idea, boss!" Ryoko exclaimed with an approving smile.

"I will enquire about the prices of all these animes. But we still need a huge amount of money to pay for these licenses. Even though they are cheaper, we will buy them in a bulk." Ryoko added after thinking for a while.

"That's why you won't make a move to buy them until the end of January. Currently, I don't have any money to spare to buy the licenses. But in January money will enter my account and we can proceed to buy these licenses." Theo replied while he shook his head wryly.

Even with the monthly profit of November and December, he would not be able to pay for these licenses at the moment.

At the end of the day, Theo was planning to buy more than 200 animations, and that would cost more than 10 million dollars.

Each anime license had an average price of 50 thousand dollars.

Theo did not have that much money in his bank account.

Another thing that prevented Theo from buying these licenses before January was that he had to pay for the expenses of the launching of his music album and the beginning of production of the [SAO] Anime.

But Theo predicted that he would earn tons of money with the streaming of his music album on Track, so he was not worried about the money to pay for the launching of his streaming service.

"That works for me. This way I can make a thorough search about the best animes to have in the streaming service." Ryoko replied after thinking for a while.

She didn't even want to imagine from where Theo would get so much money in this short amount of time.

She figured that he must have invested in other things.

After all, he was a rich guy.

The two of them continued talking about other details of the streaming service until they got a notification that the projects from the 300 candidates were ready for their evaluation.

Theo and Ryoko stopped what they were doing and looked at these projects with shining eyes.

They were excited to see if these candidates lived up to the expectation that they both had.

Both started reviewing these projects with focused eyes.

In the last phase, Theo and Ryoko in addition to looking for talented people; they also had to be attentive to the behavior of the candidates.

But this fourth phase was different because they had to only focus on the projects of the candidates. 

After all, they eliminated the ones with unbearable behaviors.

Throughout the day, Theo and Ryoko saw amazing projects coming from the candidates.

Some candidates like Nora, Aidan, Bruno, Brianna, and others, performed so well that Theo and Ryoko had to consider giving them a better position.

When they finished the evaluation of the 3 candidates, they smiled at each other happily.

Tokyo Studios took the last step to be able to open for business!