SyndiGate vs. DISCO (an explainer article)

In order to clear up any confusion over the roles that both SyndiGate and DISCO play into, we’ve put together the below explainer article.

WHAT IS SYNDIGATE?

SyndiGate is a global rights management, content licensing, sales and distribution business, which at its core, packages and provides licensed content products to its customers via feeds, Content APIs, or via its content marketplace platform DISCO.

Licensed Content

Established in 2007, SyndiGate licenses and offers its customers access to 6,500+ fully licensed publications and content services, with a primary focus on content about Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Oceania, plus select global publishing brands such as Bloomberg. 

Typically, SyndiGate licenses content from providers of news, analysis, features, interviews, photos, video, podcasts, music, realtime data, economic data, research, company information, academic journals and other information. SyndiGate also creates bespoke, original and exclusive content for leading brands via its Content Agency.

Content Curation & Recommendations Service

For customers who are unsure about the content sources that will match their needs, they can tap into SyndiGate’s expert content curation team, who will perform a ‘content discovery’ exercise (at zero cost to the customer), to get a thorough understanding of the customer’s content requirements, business goals etc. Following this, the curation team will dive into SyndiGate’s vast catalogue of licensed content to recommend the right content for the need.

If SyndiGate doesn’t have the right content to match the requirement, it will be sourced (and recommended) utilising either expert media knowledge, or from the various global media contacts databases SyndiGate subscribes to.

On-Demand Content Licensing

Where SyndiGate doesn’t currently have a license agreement in place to provide the content of interest to a customer, SyndiGate’s highly experienced in-bound content licensing team will place a focus on licensing the required rights and the digital content assets as swiftly as possible.

Content Engine

SyndiGate is the content ‘engine’ that aggregates, ingests, processes, tags and delivers (or makes available) the licensed content to its content customers. This includes the content that is made available to users within the DISCO platform – it is fueled by SyndiGate.

SyndiGate utilises multiple entity extraction and Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines to tag each piece of content with crucial metadata, to derive meaning from vast amounts of unstructured content.

These technologies tag the people, places, topics, industries, products, themes, facts, events and more within SyndiGate’s licensed content, to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability. Sentiment analysis is also possible.

Examples of these technologies include: Alchemy, Basis Tech, Refinitiv DataScope Select (Intelligent Tagging) and TextRazor. SyndiGate also utilises its proprietary NLP engine in the process, with a proprietary trained AI in the making, funded by Google.

Content Customers

SyndiGate packages and provides the licensed content to a broad and diverse range of global customers, including:

Professional news platforms & databases; major B2C content platforms; worldwide school, university and public libraries; news websites; non-media brands (editorial content marketing programmes); newspapers & magazines; digital newsstands; broadcasters (TV, SVOD, radio); media monitoring organisations; financial professionals (hedge funds); text/data mining companies; content analytics companies; as well as licensing pure ‘rights’ to worldwide collective rights management organisations.

Legal Entity

SyndiGate is the legal entity that contracts with its content providers and rights holders (known as licensors), entering into a negotiated Content Licence Agreement.

SyndiGate is also the legal entity that contracts with its content customers (known as licensees) and this includes users of the DISCO platform.

So whether the licensed content is being provided to a customer via a feed, via FTP, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, a Content API, or via its content marketplace platform DISCO, the content is being licensed for distribution by SyndiGate.

For a more in-depth look at all this, download SyndiGate’s Licensed Content Offering + Services deck, as well as its Content Distribution Services deck.

WHAT IS DISCO?

DISCO is an innovative and revolutionary digital content marketplace platform, owned and operated by SyndiGate and fueled with content powered by the SyndiGate content licensing machine.

DISCO combines proprietary technology, along with world-class licensed journalism and other content. The service is essential to news and press publishers, broadcasters, brands and creative agencies, who are hungry for fully rights-cleared, trustworthy, multilingual content, that generates audiences and drives revenue.

The Amazon.com For Licensed Content

At SyndiGate, we like to think of DISCO being the equivalent of Amazon.com for licensed content – it marries technology with content in the form of licensed words, images, video, audio and data from hyper-local to super-niche and even worldwide leading publishing brands and content services.

The platform itself is free to use. Flexible content buying and licensing models put the needs of the content buyer at the forefront, including free, pay-per-use, subscriptions, or packages. Instant licenses can be acquired in-platform to download and publish, broadcast, or otherwise use the content of interest.

The platform can work in any market worldwide. It’s simply about curating, sourcing and activating the right content for each user’s needs (and possibly translating the UI and the UX). DISCO currently supports content, search and filtering in multiple languages (15 and growing).

Features, Tools & Technologies

The DISCO platform offers users multiple features, tools and search technologies, which serve to save the user time and streamline editorial processes where the use of licensed content is concerned. Some of these features include:

Our ‘Intelligent Indexing’ that enables the filtering of content by format, language, date ranges, locations, topics, industries etc., ensuring users get relevant content, quickly. 

Our free-text search, which supports ‘Boolean Operators‘ to enhance the relevance of the content users wish to find, yielding more precise searches, saving time and effort.

‘Alerts’ which can be created against any search or Saved Search, to push relevant articles and other content directly to the user’s Inbox (or even a ’team’ of users).

DISCO ‘Pulse’ has direct integrations with Google, Twitter, YouTube etc. so that users can monitor global trending topics and then find licensed content for use around those topics.

DISCO also offers users access to its Content API if they prefer to harness the content, the power and full functionality of DISCO from right within their own CMS, app, website or platform, with absolute ease. 

DISCO is mostly suited to users in the following roles or teams: Account Managers, Art Buyers, Art Directors, Branded Content, Content Marketers, Creative Directors, Deputy Editors, Designers, Editors, Freelance Photo Researchers, Music Supervisors, Online Editors, Photo Editors, Photo Researchers, Producers, Program Directors, Social Media Content Creators and TV teams.

For a more in-depth look at all this, visit disco.info or download the DISCO Overview For Users deck.

Mark GATTY SAUNT is the Co-Founder and Director of Content Sales & Licensing at SyndiGate (which he started in 2007), plus the chief product designer of DISCO (a platform owned and operated by SyndiGate). He has been involved in the licensing and distribution of digital content since the mid 90s and considered an industry veteran in this space. For further information on Mark’s background, please refer to his LinkedIn profile page. 

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