Educational Recording Agency

What Educational Recording Agency does

Educational Recording Agency (ERA) is a UK-based non-profit copyright licensing agency founded in 1990 and headquartered in London. The organization enables UK educational institutions — including schools, colleges, and universities — to legally record, store, and stream TV and radio broadcast content for teaching and learning purposes. ERA holds aggregate licences from copyright holders, providing institutional customers with a single point of copyright clearance that would otherwise require negotiating rights with multiple broadcasters individually.

ERA's core offering consists of two interlinked products: the ERA Licence, which grants legal access to stream broadcast clips for educational use, and the ERA Streaming Service, which delivers the actual video and audio content through a platform organized across 40+ subject areas aligned with the UK national curriculum. Coverage spans Humanities and Social Sciences (e.g., English, History, Politics, Psychology), STEM subjects, Creative Arts and Media, Modern Languages (including French, German, Mandarin, Spanish), Vocational subjects (e.g., Health and Social Care, Building and Construction, Travel and Tourism), Primary Education, and PSHCE Education. The platform also surfaces teacher resources and supports institutional user accounts.

The business model is B2B subscription/recurring licensing sold directly to UK educational institutions; pricing is not publicly disclosed. The organization employs between 1 and 10 people and serves the United Kingdom market exclusively. ERA markets primarily through its official website (era.org.uk), which functions as both a content catalog and licensing information portal. As a non-profit, ERA has no disclosed funding rounds, parent company, or external investors in the source data.

Name

Educational Recording Agency

Legal name

Educational Recording Agency

Website

https://era.org.uk

Company type

Private

Founded year

1990

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Educational Recording Agency (ERA) is a UK non-profit founded in 1990 that licenses TV and radio broadcast content to UK schools, colleges and universities for educational use through its ERA Licence and curriculum-aligned streaming platform.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Educational Content Licensing

NAICS

Motion Picture and Video Industries (5121), Motion Picture and Sound Recording Industries (512)

SIC

Services-Motion Picture & Video Tape Distribution (7822)

akta.pro primary industry

Clip/Short-Form & Archive Footage Syndication (Libraries/Stock) (MPABAMAL)

akta.pro secondary industries

Archive & Library Footage Licensing (News, Sports, Entertainment) (MPABANAC), Audio Learning Content (Podcasts, Audiobooks, Listening Programs) (EDAGALAM)

Keywords

• Educational content licensing
• Broadcast copyright licensing
• Educational media streaming
• Curriculum-aligned content
• UK education licensing

Headquarters

HQ city

London

HQ country

United Kingdom

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Digital Commerce or Content

Cost components

Personnel, Licensing, Technology or R&D, Operations

Revenue model

1. ERA Licence: Educational institutions purchase licences that grant access to stream TV and radio content for teaching and educational purposes. The licensing model enables compliance with copyright law while providing educational access to broadcast content.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels1 record

Core offering

Educational Recording Agency (ERA) licenses UK educational institutions to legally record, store, and stream television and radio broadcast clips for teaching. It sells the ERA Licence and provides a streaming platform with broadcast content organised across more than 40 UK curriculum subjects, serving schools, colleges, and universities.

Product overview

Educational Recording Agency (ERA) operates as a single unified licensing and streaming platform for UK educational institutions. The core offering consists of the ERA Licence, which provides legal access to stream TV and radio broadcast content, combined with the ERA Streaming Service that delivers the actual video content. Content spans multiple subject categories including Humanities and Social Sciences (Business, Economics, English, Geography, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, Religious Education), STEM Subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Computing, Design, Engineering, Maths, Physics), Creative Arts and Media, Modern Languages, Vocations, Services and Trades, Primary Education, and PSHCE Education. The platform organizes content by subject area and offers teacher resources alongside the streaming service.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• ERA Licence

Named customers1 record

Segments2 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature1 record

Scale indicators1 record

Recent moves3 records

Expansion highlights3 records

Others

• Jisc: Jisc is the UK digital, data, and technology agency for higher education and research, providing shared infrastructure and content services to UK colleges and universities. It is an adjacent ecosystem participant to ERA, serving overlapping UK further/higher education customers with digital resource and infrastructure services, though not a direct licensing competitor.
• BBC Bitesize: BBC Bitesize is the BBC's free, curriculum-aligned educational platform that delivers video, audio, and interactive learning content aligned to the UK curriculum. It is a thematically adjacent platform - both serve UK schools with curriculum-tagged broadcast media - but Bitesize is owned and operated by the BBC itself rather than licensed through an independent rights aggregator.

Broad incumbents

• PRS for Music: PRS for Music is one of the world's largest music rights collectives, licensing musical works and collecting royalties on behalf of songwriters, composers, and publishers across many use cases including broadcast, public performance, and online. It is a BROAD_INCUMBENT peer: it operates in the broader rights-aggregation space that ERA sits in for broadcast content, but at far greater scale and across all customer segments, not just education.
• Findel / BBC Learning (BBC Studios): BBC Studios is the commercial arm of the BBC and a major UK content rights holder that licenses BBC programmes - including a substantial educational catalogue - to institutions worldwide. It is a BROAD_INCUMBENT peer in that it both holds rights ERA licenses and operates its own education-focused distribution products (e.g., BBC Bitesize), so it is both a supplier and a competing channel to ERA's offering.
• PPL PRS: PPL PRS is the UK's music licensing joint venture, providing public performance and broadcast licensing for both recorded music (PPL) and musical works (PRS) to UK businesses and organisations. It is comparable to ERA as a UK-based collective rights-licensing organisation serving institutions, but operates in music performance rights rather than broadcast-clip educational licensing.

Direct peers

• Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA): The CLA is the UK non-profit collective licensing body that grants licences to schools, universities, and businesses to copy and reuse extracts from books, journals, and magazines. It is structurally analogous to ERA: same UK geography, same B2B institutional licensing model, same education-sector focus, and same regulatory-aggregator moat for a different content category (print vs. broadcast).
• NLA Media Access: NLA Media Access is the UK non-profit that licenses the reproduction of newspaper and online news content to UK schools, universities, and businesses. It is directly comparable to ERA as a content-rights aggregator licensing archived/curated media content into UK educational institutions under a recurring licence model.

Regional players

• Screenrights: Screenrights is the Australian non-profit rights organisation that administers educational recording rights and distributes royalties for off-air recording of television and radio broadcasts in Australia and New Zealand. It is the most direct international analogue to ERA - same educational-recording licensing function, same broadcast content category - but operating in a different geography.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat3 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/ERAResources
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/era-educational-recording-agency-

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Educational Recording Agency