For all the stuff we buy online, e-commerce has been slow to make its way into the video/IP rights trading business. 1,001 reasons, ranging from content/IP security concerns to buyers being reluctant to give up the Champagne and sunshine backdrops to many of the physical markets. Plus, there’s always the human fear of being replaced with machines.

It’s still early days, but the online trading marketplace phenomenon is starting to happen in Asia.

U.K.-based The RightsXchange (TRX), which launched its full commercial platform in early October this year, has just set up a permanent Singapore base, giving it a head start and an edge in this space.

Ian McKee, founder of start-up Vuulr, is putting the finishing touches to his presentation for funding to back the platform out of Singapore.

And Nelia Sutrisno, founder and chief executive officer of GroupGallery, has a beta platform up and running to serve swathes of indie producers and rights holders, first across Asia and then the rest of the world.

Others in the space include three-year-old U.S.-based global platform RightsTrade, which report vibrant activity in Asia but has no feet on the ground. Film-focused player, BidSlate, also based in the U.S., went live at the end of last year and has growth in Asia on its radar; BidSlate’s largest deal so far is the eight-episode “Unlocked: The World of Video Games, Revealed”, which Discovery acquired for Pacific Rim territories.

Buyers elsewhere in Asia meanwhile, are willing to be persuaded if not fully, wholly and absolutely on board yet. Reasons include an experience that’s not as compelling as they might like.

At the same time, RightsTrade managing director, Jaime Otero, says even though Asian buyers make up less than 15% of the total registered community of 18,000, their activity on the platform is 50% higher than the average buyer. Otero says some of the platform’s most active buyers are based in Japan, India, China, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore and Mongolia.

“We believe this is due to a combination of actors such as the emergence of OTT platforms in the region, early technology adoption, huge internal demand that doesn’t require international distribution to turn projects profitable and limited access to physical markets all year round,” Otero says. The most popular genres in Asia are action, thriller, horror and sci-fi.

Selling Asian content, both online or off, is a bit more of a challenge. “Beyond certain genres, such as action and thriller films, a large portion of Asian film and TV titles are not always easy to position in international markets,” he adds.

Of the players with offices in Asia, TRX is furthest along in the region. Set up in 2014 by industry veteran, Matthew Frank and co-founder/executive chairman David Frank, the platform does what any self-respecting online trading platform should: enables programme buyers to search for and find content, get instant rights availability and make offers online. Quick. Simple. Easy.

The platform went live on 9 October with 15,000 hours of content, 500 registered buyers around the world, 75 distributors and major deals with big-brand partners Sky Vision (the production and distribution arm of Sky in Europe) and BBC Worldwide. Both are uploading their entire catalogues onto the platform. By the end of this year, TRX will have about 60,000 hours of content. The goal is to grow with rights to movies, live events, sports and short-form content, says CEO Matthew Frank.

TRX’s deals with the BBC and Sky Vision and other high-value catalogues change the online acquisitions game for the three-year-old company, not least because there is strength in numbers. Frank describes the decisions to make entire catalogues available on TRX as a “huge draw for buyers”.

Based between the U.S. and Asia, Nelia Sutrisno has a similar vision, only her platform – GroupGallery – focuses on indie producers and, for now, smaller broadcasters. GroupGallery has been in beta testing with about 250 hours of content in Indonesia and the Philippines since August this year, and is planning the commercial launch for the first quarter of 2018. The platform is privately funded.

GroupGallery’s biggest differentiator is its human network on the ground in Asia, which fills the gaps in this sector’s digital capability. Local teams guide buyers and sellers through the online process and, if necessary, take the whole transaction offline. The dual-approach is deliberately designed to bridge the still-yawning digital divide in Asia. “There is going to be a transition period... we think we will have to do this for about two years, or whatever it takes towards getting our users comfortable with the system,” she says.

Sutrisno is driven by the “sorry state of distribution” in the media industry.

“There is an all-time high demand for quality content for multiple channels... which the production industry is able to address as technology is making high-quality content cheaper and faster to produce,” she says. “However, the process of delivering content, from producer to broadcaster, is still heavily restricted to the few big industry players locked up in lengthy personal negotiations until the final sale is concluded”.

“On one end, there are smaller indie filmmakers who do a limited number of films and have no access to major distribution outlets. And on the other hand, many local broadcasters are unable to buy content at the rate that they need it because of limited access and budgets. These two under-served sectors is what Group Gallery is all about. To allow filmmakers and producers to access broadcasters who need their content but also have constraints,” she says.

Out of Singapore, entrepreneur Ian McKee is building a trading platform called Vuulr, with pretty much the same aim as everyone else – giving buyers and sellers an efficient place to meet, search, review, screen, negotiate, close, pay and deliver.

McKee too is focused on the largest catalogue possible in a system that is capable of uniquely identifying products so that what buyers buy, they actually get, with all the metadata required to make the process as painless as possible.

Vuulr is about a year into development, backed by a seed round and initial coin offering (ICO). “Our vision is to be able to go from discovery, to deal, to payment to delivery inside 24 hours,” he says.

Everyone involved in the space is quick to head off common fears. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that we are a threat to sales people,” Frank says.

He describes TRX as a sales tool to facilitate more deals. “Sales people are in total control of what they do on TRX. They decide what shows and rights to list and continue to negotiate their deals. TRX is not a robot that replaces sales people. It’s a sales tool that makes sales people much more efficient and allows them more time to do more deals,” he says.

Sky Vision managing director, Jane Millichip, is also eager to assure buyers that they aren’t being forced to buy anything online if they don’t want to. “Whilst buyers are not required to use TRX in order to trade with Sky Vision, we strongly encourage them to try it. We believe TRX will transform the transaction process for buyers and sellers; and like most successful innovations, it will bolster, rather than reduce, human interaction and negotiation,” she said during the announcement in October this year that Sky Vision was putting its entire catalogue on TRX.

The easier-quicker-more-efficient philosophy for buyers and sellers was built into the Franks’ original research, and has become a rallying cry for everyone in the business.

“When we embarked on the TRX project we spoke to many buyers and sellers about if they would like to find a way to improve the efficiency of the deal making process. Almost all of them said ‘yes’ and indicated that the slowness of the current market was a real issue for them,” he says.

Today, the selling point is that TRX takes the grunt work out of the process. “Undoubtedly buyers and sellers will still meet and share a glass of wine over dinner at the markets and cement their relationships face to face, but it’s once they leave the markets that TRX delivers fast efficient deal making,” he says.

Not for everything though. Frank says TRX is able to handle 90% of the deals in the secondary sales market, but co-productions and formats will offline for now. He’s working on it. “Even these are deals that over time we’d like to find a way to bring into the TRX world,” he says.

The digital environment is likely to change the game in other ways, enabling insights and analysis not possible in an analogue world, no matter how much Champagne is poured. Even with all the confidentiality and privacy safeguards in place, the potential or replacing current best-guesses with hard aggregated data are mouthwatering.

“For the first time we will be able to provide hard data on average pricing and trends in the market. The data will also be an incredible sales forecasting tool when looking at the value of particular types of content in the secondary market,” Frank says.

Payment mechanisms vary widely in this evolving space.

TRX’s choice right now is to take the deal from discovery through to signature, and then leave the seller/rights holder to issue invoices and to collect payment. TRX invoices sellers based on the agreed transaction price. The fee is typically between 3% and 9%, depending on how much content they have on the platform and the volume of trade. “The more they use it the cheaper it gets,” Frank says. He adds that TRX’s choice of where to hand the transaction over to buyer/seller to take forward was on the request of sellers. “They have good credit control systems in place and didn’t want a third party collecting money on their behalf,” he says. Indie movie trading platform BidSlate uses an escrow solution provided by Payoneer.

GroupGallery, meanwhile, offers a range of payment methods, including credit cards and PayPal; “Some of the amounts are not large,” says GroupGallery’s Sutrisno. Registered buyers are able to screen trailers or full episodes/films for a fee of US$10. If they buy the title, the fee is deducted from the final price. The distribution agreement is simple, and GroupGallery takes a straight commission from the content owner.

“Our principle is simple. If you are willing to pay US$1,000 for an episode we believe you have a legitimate reason for buying. You can be an ad agency or a theatre owner in the countryside and you need content for your movie house. Those are the kinds of people who might be interested. A lot of the producers and filmmakers just want their work to be seen and distributed. The problem we have in our industry is that there are too many filters and a lot of stakeholders are not adequately served,” Sutrisno says.

Start-up founder/chief executive, Ian McKee, is putting his money on cryptocurrencies. “We are reimagining the broadcast economy... less money will be wasted on the process of doing business and more value will be released for the content,” McKee says.

The block chain-based payment management service means payment will be able to be made on the spot in a day without the bank fees. Digital/fintech makes this possible in an industry that has, for all the progress that has already been made, deep roots in analogue processes.

Whatever the differences in market approach, all face the same challenge of changing long-held habits.

Having spent more than two decades in syndication/distribution, with RDF and Zodiak Rights, Frank is well versed with traditional ways.

“When an industry has traded in one way for the last 30-40 years, getting people to change their habits is a challenge,” he says. But things are changing. TRX’s traction has increased significantly since the October commercial launch. “As with all new technologies,” he says, “it takes a bit of time to get the ball rolling but the signs are really encouraging.”