The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) announced it is working with Vuulr to establish EMA’s first international arm in Asia.
For more information visit: www.entmerch.org
Unedited press release follows:
EMA Partners with Vuulr to Establish “EMA Asia”
First International Arm of EMA Will Promote Digital Supply Chain Efficiencies
LAS VEGAS, NV (January 10, 2018) … The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) today announced that it has partnered with Vuulr to establish EMA’s first international arm: EMA Asia. EMA Asia will advance EMA’s digital supply chain efficiency initiatives in Asia through conferences, seminars, and workshops that will create awareness and promote adoption of EMA’s standards, specifications and best practices for online video. Vuulr, which provides digital transaction solutions, will operate EMA Asia from its offices in Singapore under an exclusive multi-year license from EMA.
Increasing global utilization of EMA’s standards, specifications and best practices for online video will open more markets to a greater diversity of content and allow more content to get online, and more quickly and at a lower cost, benefitting content providers, retailers, and consumers.
“It has long been a goal of ours to expand the reach of EMA and its digital supply chain efficiency solutions beyond the U.S. market,” noted Mark Fisher, President & CEO of EMA. “EMA Asia will allow us to connect with the large and important community of content providers and retailers in Asia using the regional expertise and experienced leadership team of Vuulr.”
“The Asian marketplace for content is large, fast growing and vibrant” said Ian McKee CEO of Vuulr. “We are especially proud to have been chosen by EMA to work with them to build EMA Asia. We look forward to bringing the wealth of best practices and specifications they have to the Asia Region and to support the industry to save time and cost, and increase efficiency by bringing automation to the supply chain for the TV and film content industry. We look forward to working with content originators, content distributors, broadcasters and OTT platforms around the region.”
EMA’s digital supply chain standards, specifications, and best practices are developed to reduce friction points in the supply chain identified by digital video retailers and video programming distributors. The best known EMA digital supply chain initiative is “EMA Avails,” a comprehensive schema for communicating digital video content availability that has been adopted by the major U.S. studios and electronic sell-through and video on demand retailers. A complementary schema for subscription video on demand content is in the final stages of development. Other EMA digital supply chain initiatives address metadata, media manifests, image assets, closed captioning, ratings, and quality control nomenclature. EMA develops its digital supply chain standards, specifications, and best practices in collaboration with industry partners and makes these solutions available without charge to the industry as part of its mission to support the home entertainment industry.
Members of EMA Asia will receive certain EMA member benefits and member rates for EMA conferences and events.
For the purpose of the agreement, Asia is defined as China & Greater China, India, Japan, South Korea, and South East Asia.
As part of the agreement, Vuulr will also become a sponsor of Digital EMA, EMA’s community for the online video industry, and participate in EMA’s digital supply chain workgroups and meetings.
About EMA
The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) is the not-for-profit international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of the $35 billion home entertainment industry. EMA-member companies operate approximately 35,000 retail outlets in the U.S. and 45,000 around the world that sell and/or rent DVDs, computer and console video games, and digitally distributed versions of these products. Membership comprises the full spectrum of retailers (from single-store specialists to multi-line mass merchants, and both brick and mortar and online stores), distributors, the home video divisions of major and independent motion picture studios, video game publishers, and other related businesses that constitute and support the home entertainment industry. EMA was established in April 2006 through the merger of the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) and the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA).
About Vuulr
Vuulr is a Singapore-based team of people with marketing, digital platform and TV/Film Content expertise. Using industry standards such as EMA Avails, Vuulr is building out a set of full service solutions including education, implementation consulting & technology platforms to allow the industry to transact digitally, reducing friction, increasing speed & accuracy and eliminating the needless manual re-work currently involved in going from Discovery to Delivery.