Digital streaming OTT sports service DAZN will add baseball to its lineup of ring sports content as part of a three-year, $300 million deal announced Thursday.

The $9.99 a month DAZN service -- which sent shock waves through the boxing and MMA sports circles this year with its signing of marquee fighters such as middleweight champion Canelo Alvarez to exclusive fight distribution deals and combat sports franchises such as Bellator MMA to long-term distribution agreements-- will offer to its subscribers a live nightly MLB-themed show that will feature look-ins to live baseball games. 

Similar to the NFL’s Red Zone channel, DAZN’s show will “seamlessly whip around the live MLB games to showcase the most suspenseful moments, crucial plays and biggest rallies,” according to the service.

RELATED: DAZN Inks Boxing Champion Canelo Alvarez to Long-Term Deal

The DAZN deal was announced in the wake of MLB’s new multi-year agreement with Fox Sports that will give Fox continued exclusive access to the World Series and MLB All-Star game through 2028.

“DAZN’s multisport streaming platform provides Major League Baseball and our clubs an important opportunity to extend the game’s digital reach,” said commissioner Robert Manfred.

For DAZN, which launched here in the states in September, the deal takes the service beyond the combat sports ring and onto the field of the major sports leagues with content it hopes will appeal to young, cord-cutting sports fans. 

“We are thrilled to partner with MLB on this important new initiative, which will be a great complement to and promotion of the outstanding lineup of live games from its national and regional broadcasters,” said DAZN Group executive chairman John Skipper in a statement. “We will target young multicultural fans, many of whom do not have pay television. The fast-paced nature of a whip-around show will appeal to this audience and bring in new fans. Ultimately, our goal with MLB is to grow both the overall audience for baseball and the burgeoning DAZN business.”

RELATED: Punching Up: How OTT services are scoring wins against pay-per-view with ring-sports viewers

Mediamorph, a provider of cloud-based rights management systems for programmers and video distributors, said it has inked a deal with Redbox, which recently launched a new online streaming service.

RELATED: Going All In on Automating the Rights Stuff (subscription required)

Under the deal, Redbox will use Mediamorph’s platform to streamline the process of avails management and pricing.

Redbox offers DVD, Blu-ray disks and video game rentals via a network of more than 41,500 self-service kiosks. Late last year, Redbox introduced Redbox On Demand, a streaming service that supports web browsers and the Chromecast streaming adapter, apps for mobile devices, Apple TV boxes, Roku players and Roku TVs and LG Electronics and Samsung smart TVs.

“With the launch of Redbox On Demand, we sought out a partner to help streamline our avails management, content ordering and pricing management processes,” Lowell Bike, director of product management at Redbox, said in a statement. “By leveraging Mediamorph’s cloud solution and industry-specific systems, we can seamlessly scale our content offering and ramp up to support consumer demand.”

Examples of other Mediamorph partners include Cinedigm, Liberty Global, Ellation, Frontier Communications and Altibox.

As traditional pay TV providers reach more types of screens, and as more over-the-top video players enter the fray, managing and accounting for massive amounts of content — with respect to tricky distribution rights — has become increasingly complex and fragmented. Given the intricacies of those rights, which include the kinds of devices content can be offered on and when (and for how much), rights management systems have been pivoting away from tedious, manual processes to more automated (and accurate) systems powered by the proverbial cloud.

This trend has played into the hands of digital rights management companies such as Mediamorph, which now works with the world’s top 10 content studios, traditional pay TV providers such as Liberty Global, digitally focused distributors such as Cinedigm, and an array of OTT video specialists such as Ellation, a company tied to Otter Media, the AT&T-The Chernin Group joint venture.

Related: Ellation Taps Mediamorph to Manage Content Rights, Contracts

Multichannel News recently caught up with Mediamorph CEO Rob Gardos to discuss how rights management systems have evolved to meet the challenges of multiscreen video and OTT delivery. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: What are your top priorities this year?
Rob Gardos: I think one of the biggest areas that we’ve been trying to focus on is making the supply chain around publishing as seamless and reliable as the playout experience. You’ve got this mess in the middle, starting from when content providers say, “Get us content that you’re allowed to exploit,” to ultimately that content being made available.

Mediamorph for the past few years has been building — and it has been an uphill battle, I’ll tell you — a lot of the pieces to facilitate the seamless exchange of information: What kind of content is available and when it’s available and how it’s available and what are the financial terms related to its availability. This is the year where that full cycle of content is going upstream seamlessly and money is going downstream seamlessly.

MCN: What’s been the greatest change in rights management in recent years? Is it all now about automation and cloud-powered systems and a move away from more difficult manual processes?
RG: This is not a challenge around rights. This is a challenge around an operational workflow. And it’s something that the industry, I think, is getting a lot better at recognizing as something that is of huge importance.

When I think of the operational workflow, it’s akin to a physical fulfillment workflow — I want a product, I order it, FedEx picks it up, they scan it and it gets delivered. The rights and rules that make up that package all happen beforehand.

What we have found is the need to grab information from all of these different systems to actually execute on that properly. You need to get information rights systems. You need to get information from traditional financial systems, traditional operational fulfillment systems that are internal. Some of the big customers we integrate to [involve] no fewer than 10 systems. And that’s the low number.

The hardest part is … how to normalize [that information] so, essentially, you’re speaking some common language.

MCN: So how do you drive that commonality?
RG: Part of it is this: The more we can embrace standards, the better. We don’t want to recreate the wheel. But the hard part is getting all of this information in and getting it to conform to the standard.

MCN: How has the emergence of over-the-top and multiscreen distribution affected your business? Has that accelerated things?
RG: It’s accelerating things materially. There’s a bunch of new distribution players.

We support specific players that deliver their content over-the-top, including SVOD [subscription video-on-demand] and pure AVOD [ad-based VOD].

But even more so, the traditional MSOs are extending and providing new ways for their customers to consume content. This has happened a lot internationally. You’ve got a variety of legacy platforms that they now have to support — they have set-top box platforms, they have mobile platforms, they have an over-the-top platform.

All of that needs to be centralized. That’s been a huge driver. It increases complexity, and the last thing that these folks want is another set of manual processes and manual profiles and more Excel [spreadsheets] and other things that they use right now. With nearly every implementation … we’re always integrating with a legacy system and some newfangled OTT system.

MCN: Where are you seeing the most growth coming from these days? Is it coming by way of traditional programmers and content suppliers that are pursuing OTT now, or is it from new, pure-play OTTs?
RG: It’s a mix. Some of the traditional players are using it as a vehicle to protect their subscriber-recurring revenue, and some of them — even a few of the traditional players — are looking at ways to increase ARPU [average revenue per user], recognizing full well that they are losing traditional customers who are cutting the cord.

A good [OTT] example is Crunchyroll and Ellation. [Crunchyroll is the anime-focused SVOD service that’s owned by Ellation.] That’s very indicative of new opportunities we have where a provider is reaching critical mass and they need to keep up with all of the content. The ones that are sort of hitting their stride, they quickly realize that the manual processes they have currently are not sustainable. And that’s driving a lot of growth for us.

Ellation, the OTT-focused company tied to Otter Media (the AT&T-The Chernin Group joint venture) has tapped Mediamorph’s cloud-based platform to help it manage content rights and contracts tied to subscription services such as Crunchyroll and VRV.

Ellation manages more than 25,000 titles across Crunchyroll and VRV, a new SVOD aggregation service, along with 20 million registered users and more than 1 million paid subs across both OTT brands.  

RELATED: Mediamorph Lands $21M ‘C’ Round

Ellation joins a list of known Mediamorph customers that includes Liberty Global, Frontier Communications, and Altibox. Ellation is a portfolio company of Otter Media, the OTT-focused joint venture of AT&T and The Chernin Group.

RELATED: Mediamorph Lands Hulu Deal 

“As we continue to grow, it is critical for us to scale successfully and better manage the complex nature of our contracts and title rights,” Susanna Hofmann, Ellation’s CFO, said in a statement. “Mediamorph will both improve the visibility into our library of content to take full advantage of its value, and more effectively aid the automation of our financial processing.”