Overview
The Estonian Authors Society represents directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, designers and other authors of audiovisual works.
As the volume of content and streaming data grew, managing royalty payments manually became increasingly complex and time consuming.
We built a comprehensive royalties automation platform - a system that processes view reports from broadcasters and streaming services, calculates distribution across productions and authors and provides full transparency for everyone involved.
The Challenge
The Society needed a single system that could:
- Store and manage a complete database of all audiovisual works — films, series, documentaries and animations.
- Connect every work to its authors and creative roles.
- Process viewing data from multiple external sources with varying formats.
- Automate royalty calculations and payments with accuracy and compliance.
- Provide interfaces for both authors and administrators, ensuring transparency and control.
The legacy process relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual reconciliation -too slow and error prone for modern scale data.
Our Approach
We designed and built an end-to-end royalty management platform tailored to the organization's operational and legal workflows.
Key capabilities include:
- Centralized database: all productions and authors, structured and validated.
- Automated data imports: view reports from broadcasters, streaming services and distributors.
- Intelligent matching engine: cross-referencing productions and author data via external APIs for maximum completeness.
- Author-facing dashboard: allowing creators to log in, see their works, earnings and performance data.
- Administrative console: tools for bulk imports, corrections, verification and manual overrides where needed.
- Feedback loop: authors can suggest fixes to records, which admins can review and approve seamlessly.
The systems design emphasizes transparency, reliability and maintainability - built for a sector where accuracy truly matters.
The Outcome
The platform now serves as the operational backbone for audiovisual royalties in Estonia.
- Full automation of royalty distribution for hundreds of authors.
- Accurate data matching across multiple content and author databases.
- Real time visibility for both administrators and creators.
- Significant reduction in manual workload and processing time.
- Improved trust and transparency within the creative community.
Technologies & services
System Architecture, Database Design, Backend & Frontend Development, API Integration, Data Automation, UX/UI Design