Entertainment and media software development - streaming, publishing, community and ticketing platforms, built so every item's licence is provable and the content you didn't make stays lawful to carry.
Intention InfoService builds the software behind media products - streaming and video-on-demand platforms, digital publishing and news sites with paywalls, creator and community platforms with the moderation and takedown machinery built in, and event-ticketing and venue front ends. In media the thing your product serves was made by someone else - a rightsholder who licensed it to you on terms, or a user who uploaded it on none - so we build so every item's licence is provable and the content you didn't make stays lawful to carry. What we will not do is become your licensing counterparty, your royalty payer, or your host of record; those roles, and the liability they carry, stay yours by design.
A paid discovery first, a fixed price before any build, and the code is yours.
- We build the machinery, not the liability
- Rights and safe-harbor logic, in the software
- Senior-direct, incorporated 2016
What your platform carriesStays yours
- Who made it
- A rightsholder or a user, not you
- Every item needs
- A provable licence, and a way out
- Licensee & host of record
- You - we build the machinery
- Payments
- On a licensed processor, not us
You didn't make it. The software is why you may carry it.
The platform and the machinery - not the licence or the liability
Media software is content delivery plus the machinery that keeps carrying other people's content lawful: entitlements, moderation, takedown, consent and honest ticketing. The rights sit with the licensor, the money and the licensed roles sit with the seller or the platform, and the interesting engineering is the delivery, the gating and the safe-harbor machinery. A typical engagement is one of these:
Streaming and video-on-demand platforms
Adaptive video and audio delivery, a searchable catalog and playback UX, and entitlement resolution that answers can this viewer play this title on this device right now - with licensing windows and territory enforced at request time, over CMAF-packaged HLS and DASH with the client's chosen multi-DRM.
Digital publishing and news platforms
A headless content model and editorial workflow - draft, review, scheduled publish, correction with an audit trail - behind a fast, crawlable front end, with metered, hard or hybrid paywalls enforced server-side rather than as an overlay a reader can bypass.
Creator and community platforms
Upload and creator tooling with a moderation gate before public exposure, and the DMCA notice-and-takedown, counter-notice and repeat-infringer machinery, plus trust-and-safety tooling, that keeps the legal shelter for hosting other people's content alive - built for you to operate, never operated by us.
Event ticketing and venue front ends
Event discovery, seat and venue-map selection, and inventory held with time-boxed locks so a seat is never double-booked under an on-sale rush, with all-in price shown up front and enforceable purchase limits - the ticketing correctness a demo never stress-tests. Payments ride a licensed processor.
Rights, entitlements and content metadata
The data model that carries each item's rights facts - licence window, territory, holdback, platform rules - alongside the media, and the admin surface where your rights team sets and sees them, so an expired or out-of-territory item cannot be served by accident. Your rights system-of-record; we build the software that honours it.
Accessible players and caption pipelines
A player and authoring pipeline built so captions, subtitles, audio description and described-audio tracks can be authored, ingested, synchronized and rendered in accessible player controls - built to the accessibility requirements as a method, never claimed as a finished accessible state.
What this page is, and where the build actually lives
This page is about the sector, what building for it demands, and which roles - the licensee, the rights-holder, the royalty payer, the host of record - stay yours. The engagement itself is priced and scoped on the service pages:
A bespoke platform or the machinery, scoped before it is priced - a streaming backend, a community platform or a rights-and-shelter machinery layer is custom software, so it enters through where a media build is scoped before it's priced. A publishing or news site is often web-dev-shaped - our web design and development service - and which stack any of it lands on is answered on how we choose the stack.
Subscriptions, ticket payments and money are a licensed, separate job - the money movement, the cardholder-data environment and the billing engine ride a licensed processor, not us. It is the same regulated-rails posture as the way we build for fintech. We build the paywall gate, the ticket-inventory and the subscription flows; the payment core is theirs.
A store, an app, and AI - a shop that sells physical goods with a cart and checkout is a Shopify or WooCommerce build, not a media platform; a native mobile experience is a mobile build, on honest terms - and we have shipped no mobile app for anyone yet. Recommendations, tagging or moderation assistance with AI routes to adding AI to a media product, carefully.
"Can you build me a copyright-safe, DMCA-compliant platform?" No one can, and be wary of any vendor who says they can.
"DMCA-compliant" is not a state software ships in. Safe harbor is something your platform keeps qualifying for by how it behaves - a DMCA agent kept registered and renewed every three years, takedowns actually actioned, counter-notices actually reviewed, a repeat-infringer policy actually enforced - and it can fall away retroactively if one of those lapses. Whether your catalog itself is licensed depends on licences we do not hold and cannot verify for you. What we can do is build the machinery - the entitlement checks, the takedown and counter-notice pipeline, the renewal reminder, the audit trail - so that meeting those obligations is something your team can actually do and prove. The compliance is yours and your counsel's. The software that makes it reachable is ours.
What building for media actually demands
Every sector claims to be special. In this one you are almost never the author of what your platform carries, every item you serve needs a permission that may already have expired, and the legal shelter for hosting what users upload is only as current as your last renewal and your last actioned takedown.
You did not make what you carry
The thing your product serves was authored by someone else - a rightsholder who licensed it to you on terms, or a user who uploaded it on none. That single fact, not custody or uptime, is what makes media software its own discipline: every design decision is really about content you do not own, and the liability for getting it wrong reaches whoever built the distribution.
Every item needs a provable licence
A stream, a play, a download or a republish is lawful only if a live permission sits behind it - and licences expire, differ by territory, and open and close by release window. Copyright statutory damages attach per work, so a catalog of thousands of titles is thousands of possible counts. That is why the rights have to be data the software can check before it serves, not an assumption in a spreadsheet.
Safe harbor is a behaviour, not a status
If your platform hosts what users upload, the legal shelter that lets you do it is not a form you file once. It is kept alive by what your code does over time - a DMCA agent registered and renewed on a three-year clock, takedowns actually actioned, counter-notices actually reviewed, a repeat-infringer policy actually enforced - and it can fall away, retroactively, for everything ever uploaded, if one condition lapses.
Two shelters, two condition-sets
A user-content platform relies on two different shelters at once. Section 230 covers third-party content torts like defamation but expressly does not cover intellectual property, which is why copyright lives under the separate DMCA 512 safe harbor with its own conditions. Building them as one pipeline is the amateur tell; we architect copyright takedowns and content-tort moderation as distinct systems with distinct triggers and proofs.
A tag near video can name you a defendant
The Video Privacy Protection Act bars disclosing what a person watched without consent, and a live wave of class actions alleges an analytics or ad pixel dropped next to video does exactly that. The exposure is a software decision - a tag added to a video page can turn your site into a defendant - so third-party tags near video have to load behind consent, and viewing identifiers have to stay out of anything that leaves your domain.
We would rather scope than guess
A media platform is custom software. It enters through a paid discovery that ends in a written scope, a map of where the rights, the uploads and the viewing data flow and which pieces you should buy rather than build, and a fixed price - because the alternative is a whole-platform quote invented before anyone knew whether you needed DRM, a moderation stack, a paywall, a ticket engine, or just the machinery around a product you already have.
When we'd tell you not to build, and when we'd turn the work down
If a turnkey streaming, publishing or ticketing platform you configure gets you to a generic player, paywall or ticket page faster and cheaper than a build, use it and keep your money - that is a column in the table below, and it is the honest answer more often than a bespoke platform. If what you need is large-scale automated content matching or fingerprinting - the Content ID-class problem - that is a specialist product to integrate, not to rebuild from scratch, and we will point you to the integration rather than bill you to reinvent it. If the project is really a native, game-engine or Web3/NFT build - Unity, Unreal, crypto, token-gating - that is scoped out; we have zero exposure and will not pretend otherwise. And if you want a vendor to take the liability - to be your licensing counterparty, your rights system-of-record and royalty payer, or your host of record so the copyright risk sits with someone else - that vendor is not us; the legal role does not transfer, and anyone who says it does is selling you something that is not real. Where a custom build genuinely wins: when the rights, entitlement, moderation, safe-harbor and consent machinery is the part no package gives you, and that machinery is the product. That is where a media build is scoped before it's priced, and we will make that case with you in writing. Talking you out of a platform you don't need to build is the only credential we can offer before the first media build ships.
Twelve things a media build turns on
Almost none of it is the player or the article page a visitor sees. This is the layer a media product is actually judged on when the rights have to be provable and the shelter has to hold - and it is where a team that treats a licence as data the software checks, and safe harbor as a behaviour the code performs, is worth more than a team that treats them as an afterthought.
Adaptive streaming and multi-DRM delivery
CMAF packaging so one encode feeds an HLS playlist for Apple devices and a DASH manifest for everything else, an adaptive bitrate ladder that tracks bandwidth, and one encrypted stream wired to the client's Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady license flows behind tokenized, geo-gated CDN delivery. We integrate the DRM; we do not resell it or imply a partnership.
Catalog, entitlements and windows
Title, season and episode models with subscription, rental and ad-supported entitlement resolution, and licence-window and territory eligibility evaluated at request time - so an expired or out-of-territory item cannot be served by accident, and the gate is enforced in the software, not just hidden in the UI.
Accessible player and caption pipeline
A player and authoring pipeline built so closed captions, subtitles, audio description and described-audio tracks can be authored, ingested, synchronized and rendered in accessible controls - built to the reservation-of accessibility method, versionless, and never called a finished accessible state.
Headless CMS and editorial workflow
A structured content model with a real editorial workflow - draft, editorial review, legal or standards hold where needed, scheduled publish, correction and versioning with an audit trail - behind a decoupled, crawlable front end rendered for speed and search.
Paywalls and subscription machinery
Metered, hard and hybrid paywalls enforced server-side rather than as a CSS overlay, with clear pre-purchase disclosure, express-consent capture, a retained record of that consent, and an online cancellation path at least as easy as sign-up - built to support the client's ROSCA and state auto-renewal obligations, whose compliance conclusion stays with the client and its counsel.
Upload and media-asset pipeline
Resumable, chunked uploads, malware scanning, transcode and normalize on ingest, thumbnailing, and a moderation gate before public exposure - with rights and provenance metadata attached to every asset in a media-asset layer that holds masters, renditions and derivatives.
DMCA 512 safe-harbor machinery
Designated-agent intake, the three-year Copyright Office renewal wired into your operational calendar as a tracked event, notice-and-takedown with a review step rather than a blind auto-delete, counter-notice handling built with 512(f) misrepresentation liability in mind, and the strike-tracking data model that lets you apply and prove a repeat-infringer termination policy.
Trust and safety and moderation
Layered moderation - automated pre-screens, human review queues, user reporting - and hash-matching against known-illegal-content databases, with the detection, escalation, preservation and CyberTipline reporting workflow for apparent CSAM under 18 USC 2258A built for the provider to operate.
DSA and OSA notice-and-action
For EU and UK users, notice-and-action intake, trusted-flagger channels, statement-of-reasons to affected users, internal complaint and appeal handling, and the transparency-report data plumbing the Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act call for - built as the machinery, cited by shape, never as a compliance claim.
Ticketing integrity, all-in pricing and anti-bot
Seat and general-admission inventory held with time-boxed locks and atomic seat-locking so a seat is never double-booked under a thundering herd, oversell prevention, a fair virtual waiting room, all-in total price shown up front for the FTC fees rule, and enforceable purchase limits and velocity controls for the BOTS Act. Payments route to fintech.
Rights and royalty-reporting integration
A client-owned rights metadata system-of-record and reporting exports shaped to the bodies that collect - the MLC for the blanket digital-audio mechanical, the PROs for public performance of the composition, SoundExchange for the statutory sound-recording digital-performance royalty - with the two-copyright split modelled correctly. We integrate and report; we never become the licensor, the collector or the payer.
Consent-gated tag governance
A tag and consent layer so third-party pixels near video load behind consent, viewing identifiers stay out of URLs and out of anything that leaves your domain by default, and a consent state the video layer checks before any viewing data is shared - so an analytics snippet does not make a disclosure decision the Video Privacy Protection Act reaches on your behalf.
Our default for a media build: CMAF packaging so a single encode serves both HLS and DASH instead of encoding twice. Entitlements and paywalls enforced server-side, never as an overlay a reader or viewer can bypass. The moderation gate before public exposure, not after. The DMCA-agent renewal wired into your calendar as a tracked three-year event, because a lapse silently forfeits the shelter. Copyright takedowns and content-tort moderation built as two systems, because they answer to two different shelters. Third-party tags near video loaded behind consent by default. And before any of it, the honest question - which of these pieces a packaged platform already does well enough that you should buy it, and which is the machinery worth building - because the parts worth building are the rights, the shelter and the consent logic no package ships, and the rest is often better bought than reinvented.
You are almost never the author of what flows through your platform.
We have no streaming, publishing, community or ticketing clients, no media logos, no viewer or subscriber numbers to quote, and no such platform in production, and you should weigh that. What we have instead is the fact this sector's slickest pitches are built to skip: the thing your product serves was made by someone else - a rightsholder who licensed it to you on terms, or a user who uploaded it on none - and that single fact, not features or scale, is where the liability lives. Below is what we build so every item has a licence you can prove and a lawful way out, who each obligation actually binds, and what standing on the honest side of it costs us.
Every item needs a reason to be there, and a way to leave.
In media the thing your product serves was made by someone else, and that single fact splits into two liabilities no contract can carry for you, because both are settled by what your software actually does, not by what your terms of service say. Every item you distribute needs a live permission behind it, or serving it is infringement, and copyright statutory damages attach per work - a catalog of thousands of titles is thousands of possible counts, which is why the software has to be able to prove the licence, not just assume it. That is the reason to be there.
And every item a user hands you needs a lawful way out - a registered agent, a working takedown, a counter-notice path, a repeat-infringer policy your code can actually enforce - because the legal shelter that lets you host other people's content is conditional on that machinery and can fall away, retroactively, for everything ever uploaded, if one condition lapses. That is the way to leave. Build both into the system and they hold; bolt them on after launch and they do not.
The roles we refuse on purpose. The stickiest, most billable positions in this sector are the ones that take on the liability - becoming your licensing counterparty, your rights system-of-record and royalty payer, or your host of record so the copyright risk sits with a name that is not yours. We decline all of them, not because we cannot build the software around them, but because the legal role does not actually transfer: it stays yours whatever a contract says, so a vendor who offers to take it is selling you a comfort that is not real. We build the machinery. You stay the rightsholder and the host of record - the roles no vendor should offer to take.
Who each obligation binds - and what we build for it
You are the licensee, so every item you distribute has to have a licence behind it. Licences expire, differ by territory, and open and close by release window, and if the product serves something outside its licence, that is infringement. What we build is an entitlement layer that treats the licence as data the player checks before it plays - window start and end, territory eligibility evaluated at request time, availability as a first-class field on every asset - plus the ingest and admin surface where your rights team sets and sees those facts. Recorded music even carries two separate copyrights, the composition and the sound recording, cleared through different bodies, and we model your rights metadata so those facts have a place to live. We are not the licensing counterparty and not the rights system-of-record; you hold the licences and the source of truth, and we build the software that honours them at the instant of playback.
If your platform hosts what users upload, you rely on shelters you have to keep qualifying for. DMCA Section 512 covers copyright; Section 230 covers other third-party content and does not cover copyright, which is exactly why the two are separate systems; and for EU or UK users the DSA and the UK Online Safety Act add their own notice-and-action regimes. Section 512 in particular needs a DMCA agent registered with the Copyright Office, a registration that expires and must be renewed every three years, a working notice-and-takedown and counter-notice flow, and a repeat-infringer termination policy you actually enforce. What we build is the takedown pipeline with a review step rather than a blind auto-delete (because Section 512(f) creates liability for a knowing misrepresentation, counter-notices have to be handled in good faith), the repeat-infringer tracking that lets you apply and prove a policy, the renewal wired into your calendar as a tracked three-year event, and the CyberTipline reporting workflow for apparent CSAM. You are the service provider and the host of record; the shelter is yours to hold, and we build so your software behaves the way it requires.
The privacy and accessibility obligations bind you and whoever holds the data. The Video Privacy Protection Act bars disclosing what a person watched without consent, and a live wave of class actions alleges an analytics or ad pixel next to video does exactly that; whether a newsletter-only subscriber even counts as a covered consumer is in front of the Supreme Court right now in Salazar v. Paramount Global, argued this term with an outcome expected in 2027, so the scope is genuinely unsettled - but the exposure is a software decision, so we build the tag and consent layer that keeps third-party pixels behind consent and viewing identifiers out of anything that leaves your domain. On accessibility, video that previously aired on US TV with captions carries the caption obligation online, audio-description duties phase in by market, and courts read general accessibility law to reach media sites, so we build the player and pipeline so captions and audio description can be delivered, and to the WCAG success criteria as a method. What you will never get from us is the word compliant - not about copyright, not about safe harbor, not about the VPPA, not about accessibility. Compliance is a property of how an organisation operates and is attested by people qualified to attest it. We do the engineering that makes it reachable, tell you where the cost of each gate lands, and leave the attestation where it belongs.
You own all of it, including the parts that name you to a regulator
The content, the source code, the data, the user accounts, the rights and licensing metadata - and the DMCA-agent registration, filed in your name at the Copyright Office, not ours. Nothing that identifies your platform to a rightsholder, a court or a regulator sits under our name, because those are your roles to hold and ours only to build the software around.
No lock-in, and no runtime rent
Built on your own stack and infrastructure, with no proprietary runtime of ours and no plugin licence to keep paying, documented and handed over on final payment so your own team, or another vendor, can run and change it without inheriting a platform only we understand.
NDA before you share
Your catalog, your licence terms, your unreleased windows, your moderation policies and your roadmap stay confidential; we sign first, before you tell us what the platform will carry.
Milestone billing, working software each step
Fixed scope, paid by milestone, so you see working software at each step and the spend tracks the build rather than a retainer - and if discovery says buy the packaged piece instead of building it, the build gets smaller.
Senior-direct since 2016
You work directly with the senior people writing the code, from the same small team - a real Pvt Ltd incorporated in 2016, based in Maharashtra, serving clients worldwide. No account layer, and no handoff to juniors once the contract is signed.
We say the 'no' out loud, at scoping, in writing
When a piece of this belongs to a lawyer - whether a licence covers a use, whether a takedown flow is enough, whether a pixel setup satisfies the VPPA - or to a specialist product like large-scale content matching, or to a role we deliberately do not take, we tell you before you spend, not after. The roles we refuse are exactly the ones that keep the platform, and its liability, yours.
The media badges, named correctly - and the ones we won't imply we hold
The content-security programme film and television actually use is the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), owned by the Motion Picture Association, which assesses service and application providers against the MPA Content Security Best Practices on a tiered model. We are not a TPN member and have not completed a TPN assessment. We build to the security practices this kind of work calls for, and if a licensor or a distribution partner requires TPN status on the vendors that touch their content, that assessment is a defined process you or an accredited assessor run, and we build so your systems can meet the controls it checks. Beyond that, we hold no SOC 2 report, no ISO 27001 certificate and no content-security certification, and we claim none - a SOC 2 is an attestation report a firm writes about an organisation's controls, not a certificate you pass; ISO 27001 is an organisational certification; there is no PCI certificate for anyone to hold, and card data rides your processor, not us. This sector is full of firms that hold one badge, or none, and let it imply a security or media credential they do not have. We name these precisely because we hold none of them, and what we offer instead of a badge is the rights-and-shelter engineering on this page, code and metadata you own outright, and a paid discovery before any price.
What our real work proves here, and where the shape breaks
Our production work is real, custom web builds - a professional training platform rebuild and a financial-services site, both on our work page - with catalogs of items, structured content, enquiry and enrolment funnels, certificate validation, and an admin a non-technical team runs. A media platform shares some of that plumbing, and one part especially: a gate that decides, in code, who is allowed to receive a thing before it is served. Certificate validation asks a version of that question - is this credential valid for this person - and an enrolment gate another, and we have built honest versions of both. Here is the exact seam where that shape stops matching a media platform. Those builds serve content the client owns to anyone entitled to it; a media platform serves content someone else owns, so the gate is not just did they pay or enrol but do you have the right to show them this, here, today - a valid, in-window, in-territory licence - and none of our builds had to prove a licence, keep a safe-harbor shelter alive for what users upload, or keep a viewing pixel honest, because they carried none of those risks. So we claim the catalog-content-and-access plumbing and fence off the rights-and-shelter core, plainly: the real builds on our work page, described honestly. We have no media clients and no streaming, publishing, community or ticketing platform in production. The media-specific part of what we offer is the rights-and-shelter engineering on this page, the boundary above it, and a willingness to tell you which roles to keep and which to route to your counsel rather than build.
The rights-and-shelter map comes before the build
We map what your platform will carry, who authored it, where the rights, the uploads and the viewing data flow, and which roles stay yours, before anyone designs a screen - because that map decides what is worth building and what is better bought. Then we design the entitlement and safe-harbor machinery before the happy path, not after launch.
Discovery & the rights-and-shelter map
1-2 weeksA paid discovery that ends in a written scope, a fixed build quote credited toward the build, and a map of what your platform will carry, who made it, where the rights, the uploads and the viewing data flow, and which roles - licensee, royalty payer, host of record - stay yours. If a packaged player, CMS or ticket engine already does most of a piece, we say so, and the engagement gets smaller.
Rights and entitlement first
before the happy pathHow a licence becomes data the software checks before it serves - window, territory and availability as first-class fields - and how the paywall or entitlement gate is enforced server-side. The provable-licence layer is designed before the player or the article page is polished, because an item served without a right behind it is the failure the whole product is judged on.
Build the safe-harbor and moderation machinery
weeksFor a platform that hosts uploads: the DMCA notice-and-takedown and counter-notice pipeline with a review step, repeat-infringer tracking, the three-year agent renewal wired into your calendar, the moderation and CSAM-reporting workflow, and the DSA and OSA notice-and-action plumbing - built as two systems, copyright and content-tort, because they answer to two different shelters.
Consent, accessibility & the ticketing surfaces
throughoutThe tag and consent layer that keeps third-party pixels near video behind consent and viewing identifiers off anything that leaves your domain, captions and audio description the player can deliver and WCAG success criteria as a method, and where ticketing is in scope, time-boxed seat holds, all-in pricing up front and enforceable purchase limits - built in, not retrofitted. Payments ride a licensed processor.
Deploy, hand over & care
on deliveryDeployed into your own environment, then handed over: the repository, the code, the rights metadata and the DMCA-agent registration are yours. Care runs on the non-sensitive surfaces only - the marketing site, the front-end code, the pipeline - while backups, access and monitoring of anything holding rights-licensed content, user uploads or viewing data stay inside your environment, run by you, not on a system we operate.
A media build has three honest shapes. Most vendors sell you the biggest one.
This is the decision, and it is made before a single screen is designed. We build the middle column, which means we are paid the least every time the honest answer is to buy the packaged platform and pay us only for the rights-and-shelter machinery no package ships. That is usually the answer.
| Configure an off-the-shelf media, CMS or ticketing platform | A packaged core, and we build only the rights, shelter and consent machinery | Everything built custom, end to end | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best when | A packaged product already meets your needs across the stack and you just set it up | A package does the commodity job well, and what you actually need built is the rights, shelter and consent machinery no package ships | No packaged product can meet your requirements anywhere, and you have the budget to own all of it |
| Who builds the player, CMS or ticket engine | The platform vendor | The platform vendor - we do not rebuild it | We do, end to end |
| Who builds the rights, shelter and consent machinery | You bolt on whatever the platform allows | We do - this is the irreplaceable part | We do |
| What you spend with us | Least - configuration, if anything | The machinery only, not the whole platform | Most |
| Time to a working launch | Shortest | Short - a package plus the machinery around it | Longest |
| Licensee, host of record, royalty payer | Yours | Yours | Yours |
| Lock-in and portability | The platform's - you live inside it | The platform's, plus fully portable custom machinery around it | None - you own the whole stack |
| Our take | If a package does most of it, start here and keep your money | The right answer for most people who ask us for a media build | Right when the platform itself is your differentiator - rarely the whole thing |
The highlighted column is the one that most often wins, and it is the one where our footprint and our fee are smallest relative to building the whole platform. The commodity parts - the player, the CMS, the ticket engine - are usually better bought than rebuilt; the rights, shelter and consent machinery is the part worth building, and it is scoped as custom software. Which stack any of it lands on is a separate question, answered on how we choose the stack.
A media build is scoped, not quoted from a page
No quote wall, and no invented range either. Every agency page in this sector prints a custom-platform price band. None of them can know whether your product needs multi-DRM streaming, a moderation and safe-harbor stack, a paywall, a ticket engine, or just the rights-and-consent machinery around a platform you already run - which is what decides the cost and the risk - and neither can we until we have mapped it.
Discovery Sprint
A paid discovery that ends in a written scope and a fixed build quote. It ends in a written scope, a map of where the rights, the uploads and the viewing data flow and which pieces to buy rather than build, and a fixed price for the build - credited toward that build. If discovery concludes a packaged platform already does most of the job, you keep the scope and the recommendation, and the larger engagement never happens.
1-2 weeks
Where the rest of a media budget goes - and where our care plans stop
The platform or the machinery is one line. The site that markets the brand is a different job with its own published starting prices, on our web design and development service. A native mobile experience is a separate build again, on mobile app development, on honest terms - and we have shipped no mobile app for anyone yet. Subscriptions, ticket payments and any money movement ride a licensed processor, the same regulated-rails posture as the way we build for fintech. The platform itself is the paid discovery that prices a media build. One boundary matters more here than the price does: our published care plans - the monitoring, the standing access and above all the scheduled offsite backups - are built for ordinary websites, and we do not point them at a system that stores rights-licensed content under a redistribution-limited licence, that holds user uploads and the moderation records behind them, or that carries the viewing data the VPPA reaches. Taking a routine backup of any of those would put a copy of licensed content, user-uploaded material or viewing records on a system we run - exactly what puts us inside obligations that belong to you, your licensor or your processor. So on a media build we care for the parts that carry none of it - the marketing site, the front-end code, the pipeline and the dependencies - while backups, access and monitoring of anything holding licensed content, user uploads or viewing data stay inside your own environment, run by you.
Not sure which pieces to build and which to buy? That is the first thing discovery answers, and the answer that most often saves you the most money.
Building for entertainment and media, answered
Can you build me a copyright-safe or DMCA-compliant platform?
No one can hand you a copyright-safe platform, and you should be wary of any vendor who says they can. DMCA-compliant is not a state software ships in. Safe harbor is something your platform keeps qualifying for by how it behaves over time - a DMCA agent kept registered and renewed every three years, takedowns actually actioned, counter-notices actually reviewed, a repeat-infringer policy actually enforced - and it can fall away retroactively if one of those lapses. Whether your catalog itself is licensed depends on licences we do not hold and cannot verify. What we build is the machinery - the entitlement checks, the takedown and counter-notice pipeline, the renewal reminder, the audit trail - so meeting those obligations is something your team can actually do and prove. The compliance is yours and your counsel's; the software that makes it reachable is ours.
Do you become our DMCA agent or our host of record?
No. The DMCA agent is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in your name, because the safe harbor is your platform's to hold, and the host of record - the service provider whose name is on the platform - is you. We build the software so those roles work: the intake that routes takedown notices to your agent, the renewal wired into your calendar as a tracked three-year event, the takedown and counter-notice pipeline your team operates. Taking those roles ourselves would not transfer the liability to us in any way that helps you; it would just add a party to your risk surface. So the roles stay yours, and we build the machinery around them.
Who owns royalty reporting and the payments to rightsholders?
You do. We are not your royalty system-of-record and never the payer or the collector. What we build is the rights metadata model and the reporting exports shaped to the bodies that actually collect - the Mechanical Licensing Collective for the blanket digital-audio mechanical, the performing-rights organisations for public performance of the composition, SoundExchange for the statutory sound-recording digital-performance royalty - and we model the two separate copyrights in recorded music, the composition and the sound recording, correctly so the reporting maps to reality. The obligation to license, report and pay is yours; the software that produces accurate, well-shaped reports so you can meet it is ours.
Do you do NFT ticketing, Web3 or crypto drops?
No. Web3, NFT and crypto or token-gated builds are scoped out - we have zero exposure and will not pretend otherwise, and naming that exclusion plainly is more honest than bolting a blockchain feature onto every page to look current. If your product genuinely depends on one of those at its core, you want a team that builds them, not us. Everything else on this page - streaming, publishing, community and ticketing platforms with the rights, shelter and consent machinery - is squarely what we build.
Have you built a streaming, publishing, community or ticketing platform before?
No media work, and we will not dress that up. We have no media clients, no streaming or publisher logos and no such platform in production, and you should weigh that. Our production work is a custom, full-stack online store on its own backend - a searchable catalog with filtering and a checkout that gates who receives the goods, which is the honest skeleton an entitlement gate is built on - and a corporate site. What we offer instead of a portfolio is the rights-and-shelter engineering on this page, the discipline to name which roles stay yours, and a willingness to tell you which pieces to buy rather than build. If a media portfolio is your deciding criterion, there are firms who have one, and we would rather you knew that now.
Can you build the native mobile experience too?
The web platform, the player, the paywall, the community and the ticketing front end are the shape we build. A native mobile experience on phones is a separate build with its own honest terms, and we have shipped no mobile apps for anyone yet, so we would tell you that plainly and route the mobile side to our mobile development service rather than imply a portfolio we do not have. Much of the platform - the entitlement, rights, moderation and consent machinery - lives on the backend and serves both web and mobile, so building the web platform well is not wasted if a native client comes later.
How do you handle DMCA takedowns and counter-notices?
As a real pipeline, not a blind delete button. We build structured takedown-notice intake, an expeditious-removal workflow, and counter-notice handling with a good-faith review step and a restoration window - because Section 512(f) creates liability for a knowing misrepresentation in a notice or a counter-notice, the machinery has to review and process counter-notices, not just remove content on any complaint. Underneath it sits the strike-tracking data model that lets you apply and prove a repeat-infringer termination policy, and the audit trail that evidences you acted expeditiously. Your team operates it and makes the calls; we build so those calls are fast, recorded and defensible.
What is this about a tracking pixel and the VPPA?
The Video Privacy Protection Act bars a video service provider from disclosing what a person watched without consent, and there is a live wave of class actions alleging that an analytics or advertising pixel dropped next to video does exactly that - a software decision that can turn a streaming, publisher or media site into a defendant. Whether a subscriber to your non-video services even counts as a covered consumer is unsettled and in front of the Supreme Court right now, so we do not claim a settled answer. What we build is a tag and consent layer so third-party pixels near video load behind consent, viewing identifiers stay out of URLs and out of anything that leaves your domain by default, and a consent state the video layer checks before any viewing data is shared. Whether a given configuration satisfies the law is your counsel's call; we build so that call is yours to make and enforce, not one your analytics snippet made for you.
Do you handle content moderation and CSAM reporting?
We build the tooling; your team operates it and holds the duty. That means layered moderation - automated pre-screens, human review queues, user reporting - and hash-matching against known-illegal-content databases, plus the detection, escalation, preservation and CyberTipline reporting workflow for apparent child sexual abuse material, which providers are required by statute to report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The obligation to report and to run trust and safety sits with you as the provider; what we build is the machinery that makes doing it reliable, fast and evidenced. We do not become your moderation operator or your reporting entity.
Can you integrate DRM like Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady?
Yes, as an integration, not a partnership we would claim. We package content once in CMAF and encrypt it so a single stream is consumable by Google Widevine, Apple FairPlay and Microsoft PlayReady, and we wire the player's license-request and key-exchange flow to the DRM license services you choose, with tokenized, geo-gated delivery so entitlements and licensing windows are enforced at request time. We integrate the DRM you select; we do not resell a DRM product or imply we are a Widevine, FairPlay or PlayReady partner, because we are not.
What about our EU and UK users - the DSA and the Online Safety Act?
For EU users the Digital Services Act adds notice-and-action, trusted-flagger channels, a statement-of-reasons to affected users, internal complaint and appeal handling, and transparency reporting, with heavier duties once a service disseminates content publicly to an open-ended audience. For UK users the Online Safety Act adds illegal-content risk assessments and removal systems. Both bind you as the service, not us, and whether and how they apply to your product is your counsel's call. What we build is the notice-and-action intake, the statement-of-reasons and appeal flows, and the transparency-report data plumbing, so meeting those duties is something your team can operate and evidence.
Do you handle music licensing and royalties?
We build the software that lets you meet those obligations; we do not become the licensor, the collector or the payer. The important thing we get right is that recorded music carries two separate copyrights - the musical work, or composition, and the sound recording, or master - cleared through different bodies, with mechanical, public-performance and sync rights handled by different collectives and, for sync, by direct deals. We model your rights metadata so those distinctions have a place to live and your reporting maps to the right bodies. Which licences you hold and what you owe is between you, the rightsholders and the collectives; the software that tracks and reports it accurately is ours to build.
Do you hold SOC 2, or are you TPN-assessed?
No to both, and we will be precise about what each is. A SOC 2 is an attestation report a firm writes about an organisation's controls, not a certificate you pass, and we have not undergone one. The Trusted Partner Network is the Motion Picture Association's content-security programme that assesses service and application providers against the MPA Content Security Best Practices; we are not a member and have not completed an assessment. If a licensor or distribution partner requires TPN status or a specific attestation on the vendors who touch their content, that is a defined process you or an accredited assessor run, and we build so your systems can meet the controls it checks - we will not display a badge we have not earned or imply we have already passed one.
Who owns the code, the content and the rights metadata?
You own all of it, outright: the repository, the source code, the content, the user accounts, the rights and licensing metadata, and the data model behind it, on infrastructure in your name, handed over on final payment with no licence back to us. The DMCA-agent registration is filed in your name too. We build on your own stack with no proprietary runtime of ours and no plugin licence to keep paying, and we document and hand over so your own team, or another vendor, can run and change the platform without inheriting a black box only we understand. Nothing that identifies your platform to a rightsholder, a court or a regulator sits under our name.
What does a media build cost?
We publish one number here and refuse to invent the other. Every agency page in this sector prints a custom-platform price band, and none of them can know whether your product needs multi-DRM streaming, a moderation and safe-harbor stack, a paywall, a ticket engine, or just the machinery around a platform you already run - which is the biggest driver of the cost and the risk. So a media build enters through a paid Discovery Sprint from $1,000, which is one to two weeks and ends in a written scope, a map of where the rights, the uploads and the viewing data flow and which pieces to buy rather than build, and a fixed price for the build, credited toward it. If discovery concludes a packaged platform already does most of the job, you keep the scope and the recommendation, and the expensive engagement never happens.
The subscription and cancellation rules keep changing - do I still build for them?
Yes, and it is why our method does not lean on whichever rule is current this year. A federal click-to-cancel rule was vacated in 2025 and is not currently in effect, but the durable obligations do not switch off with it: the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, the state automatic-renewal laws like California's, and the general prohibition on unfair or deceptive practices still require clear disclosure of terms, express consent, and a straightforward way to cancel. So we build the subscribe, renewal and cancel flows to that durable shape - clear pre-purchase disclosure, affirmative consent capture, a retained record of it, and an online cancellation path at least as easy as sign-up - so a future rule change is a configuration change, not a rebuild. Whether any specific rule applies to you is your counsel's call.
Building something for entertainment or media?
Tell us what your platform will carry, and who made it - a rightsholder who licensed it to you, or a user who uploaded it. We'll map the rights, safe-harbor and consent machinery the software has to do, tell you which roles stay yours and which packaged pieces to buy rather than build, and price the part worth building - before anyone quotes you a whole platform.

