The licensing of a streaming platform is not regulated in Georgia by a separate statute — and this should be said plainly. On the content side, streaming rests on the licensing of copyright: the right of public communication, meaning the making available of a work to any person at a time and place chosen by that person, is precisely the right the platform licenses. On the service side, a provider of on-demand audiovisual media services established in Georgia requires the authorization established by the Broadcasting Law — mentioned here only as context, since the corpus of this page is the copyright act.
The Right of Public Communication — the Foundation of Streaming
Under the copyright act's relevant norm, the author or other holder of copyright has the exclusive right to use the work in any manner — the right to carry out, permit or prohibit every form of use. Central to streaming in this catalogue is the right of public communication: the transmission of a work by wire or wireless means so that it is accessible to any person at a time and place chosen by that person. This description is on-demand streaming itself: the consumer chooses the time and place, and the work is accessible. For a platform this means that every work placed in the catalogue requires a right of use — the author's consent embodied in a license. The author also has the right to receive a royalty for any use of the work, and the amount of the royalty and the manner of its calculation and payment are set by contract — for a platform this means the payment model is part of the license's price, not a side detail.
Exclusive and Simple Licenses — the Architecture of Exclusivity
The type of license determines the platform's strategy. By the exclusive-license contract the author or other holder grants only the licensee the exclusive right to use the work in the manner and within the limits defined by the contract, and gives the licensee the right to prohibit such use by other persons, the author included; a right transferred by contract is considered simple unless otherwise provided. This default matters: where the contract does not expressly write exclusivity, the license is simple and the holder keeps the power to deal with other platforms. Building an exclusive catalogue therefore requires a clear formulation of the exclusive license — by territory, term and type of use.