Content Arena, the online media rights trading platform, has made two new appointments, adding Lukas Zajancauskas as director of strategy and business development, and Harrison Hancock as director of business operations to its management team.
Zajancauskas joins from the NBA, where he was manager of media research and insights in the EMEA region, while Hancock’s background is in technology consulting, having worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers as a manager for over three years and a boutique consultancy before that.
Content Arena was co-founded by Sascha Kojic and Erik Lorenz in 2017, along with Klemens Kögl and Bernie Riedlsperger of investor Hogmore Media.
Lorenz said today (Wednesday): “We are delighted that Lukas and Harrison have joined us. The complementary expertise that they bring to our young and growing organisation will be vital as we enter the next stage of our company development.
“Our marketplace continues to grow with registered buyers and sellers from over 75 countries, and we are very excited to see an increasing interest in our Rights Manager solution, which is being continually developed to address rapidly changing rights-holder needs.”
Earlier this year, Content Arena secured fresh investment and a commitment of expertise from DAZN chief business development officer John Gleasure and Sportradar head of innovation Alexander Fryba.
The platform is designed to address a perceived ‘bottleneck’ in the market created by the growth in the number of both buyers and sellers as the amount of available programme increases and OTT operators and others swell the potential customer base.
Content Arena generates revenues through a commission charged to sellers on each transaction.
Kojic and Lorenz founded the company on the belief that, while premium rights will still be handed in the traditional manner, rights further down the established value chain – together with the long-tail rights for premium properties – can be handled more effectively by a digital system which matches buyers and sellers, facilitates the transfer of funds, and takes care of the legal paperwork.
Given Hogmore Media’s involvement, the platform was initially skewed during its testing phase towards football rights, but has since broadened out to include various other sports, such as basketball, handball, ice hockey, and rugby union. An agreement with boxing promoter Team Sauerland was also announced in 2019.