Content, subscription and rights systems engineered for modern media.
Publishers, broadcasters and digital media companies run on content velocity and subscription economics. Most of them also run on CMS platforms built for a web that no longer exists. We rebuild those systems to be headless, API-first and actually able to ship.
What actually breaks in this space.
CMS bloat blocking editorial velocity
Editors wait on deploys to add a content type. Every template change is a ticket. Every A/B test takes a sprint.
Subscription billing that breaks on every pricing change
A new bundle, a regional promo, a B2B tier, and something in the billing stack quietly breaks reconciliation for two weeks.
Rights and royalties in spreadsheets
Contracts, territories, exclusivity windows and royalty calculations live in a set of Excel files nobody has touched since the person who built them left.
Recommendation and search that feel random
The on-site search returns irrelevant results. Recommendations are untuned. Readers bounce, and nobody can explain why.
Capabilities we bring to this industry.
Headless CMS platforms
Custom or Sanity, Contentful, Strapi-based headless CMS with structured content, workflow and multi-channel delivery.
Subscription and metering platforms
Multi-tier subscriptions, metered access, regional pricing and revenue recognition engineered to survive constant pricing experiments.
Rights and royalty systems
Contract ingestion, territory and window modeling, royalty calculation and statement generation for publishers and catalog owners.
Broadcast and OTT workflows
Ingest, transcoding, metadata management, playlisting and live streaming integration with major CDN and DRM providers.
Editorial workflow tooling
Commissioning, scheduling, review, approvals and multi-channel publishing on a single surface the newsroom actually uses.
Identity and paywall
SSO across properties, regional metered paywalls, fraud signals and account-sharing detection.
Measured, not modeled.
Shapes these engagements usually take.
Headless CMS replacing a 12-year legacy platform
Migrated 400,000 articles and 80 editors to a structured headless CMS with multi-property publishing and SEO-safe URL preservation.
Subscription platform across 4 regional brands
Unified subscription and identity across four properties. Shared login, per-brand paywalls and metered access rules.
Royalty system for a music catalog
Contract modeling, territory and window logic, royalty calculation and statement generation replacing a spreadsheet stack.
Tools and technologies we reach for here.
Common questions
- What media and publishing software does FictiveBox build?
- Headless CMS platforms, subscription and metering platforms, rights and royalty systems, broadcast and OTT workflows, editorial workflow tooling, and identity and paywall systems.
- What problems does this address for publishers?
- CMS bloat that slows editorial velocity, subscription billing that breaks whenever pricing changes, rights and royalties tracked in spreadsheets, and recommendation and search that feel arbitrary to readers.
- When should a publisher replace its CMS?
- When editorial throughput is limited by the platform rather than by the newsroom, and when front-end change requires a CMS project. A headless, API-first approach separates the two so each can move at its own pace.
- Which technologies are used for media platforms?
- Next.js, Sanity, Contentful, Stripe, Redis, Elasticsearch, CloudFront, Postgres and Kafka.
Replacing a legacy CMS or subscription stack?
Book a working session with an architect who has shipped publishing platforms at scale.