The new platform draws on a development put togther for Microsoft’s gaming arm, with the potential to be rolled out to other sectors where royalties are paid, as Fortune reports. The development aims to digitise a current process of royalty calculation used by businesses, which is invariably a manual porcess reliant upon offline data.
The blockchain solution has been built with an embedded smart contract architecture. This is designed to enable a buisness to perform accurate and real-time calculations of each participant’s royalty position. The use of blockchain ensures enhanced visibility for recording and better securuty for reconciling of royalty transactions.
The network has been designed uisng the Quorum blockchain protocol together with Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure and blockchain technologies. Quorum is an open-source project launched in 2016 as a permissioned version of ethereum, created by JPMorgan. Microsoft Azure is designed for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
Once in place, as Business Line reports, Microsoft’s gaming partners will be provided with improved visibility in relation to transactions, permitting partners to be bale to generate accounting accruals on a daily basis (someting not possible with current technology) and to make use of data that is closer to real-time for improving forecasting.
It is hoped this will lead to increased trust and transparency across the enterainments industry players and lower operational inefficiencies relating to both rights and royalties. To test out the new platform, Ubisoft, which is based in France and which is one of Microsoft’s gaming partners, is testing the solution. If this is successful, a bigger role out will follow.
Once trials have been completed in the gaming area, the blockchain solution will be made available to any sector that relies on intellectual property and assets that are licensed to other parties, especially where creators are paid royalties. This could, therefore, extend to authors and song writers, as well as production houses.
