M+E Daily

By Guy Finley, Executive Director, MESA
From M&E Journal Winter 2013-14

The road to a standard is long and winding – but is worth the effort.

Everyone knows it needs to happen sooner or later. Everyone is working on it in their own unique ways. There is no doubt that the road to a new digital Hollywood will be paved with metadata.

Metadata greases the wheels of the content creation machine from production, to postproduction and through distribution. A single metadata standard will advance the fluidity, timeliness and consistency of the supply chain across all studios and their business partners, representing an enormous opportunity for cost efficiencies and collaboration.

However, despite all the efforts by a host of industry bodies, there is no such standard in sight. Each of the stakeholders along the entertainment supply chain has specific metadata needs. Besides, any metadata standard needs to be future-proof to anticipate the next inevitable upheaval to the entertainment supply chain status quo. This is complicated stuff and extremely hard work. Ultimate success comes with a fundamental understanding that creating a common metadata schema for digital entertainment requires cooperation from our upstream partners at the very point of content inception (think Guilds), into creation (think Unions, creatives and technology providers) and along through distribution (think solution providers, retail, broadcast and long tail). From the perspective of home entertainment, it also comes with a realization that what was once the “last step” in the content value-chain must now be a consideration in the earliest creative stages of production in order to maximize the long-term value of the assets and effect ongoing digital distribution efficiencies.

So What’s the Next Step?

Unfortunately, the next step is accepting that this is going to be a many-step endeavor that is going to require patience, commitment and ongoing communication between industry bodies and associations (DEG, ETC, EMA, EIDR, HITS, etc.), their working groups and respective constituents. It is our responsibility as an industry organization to continue to make meaningful connections between other professional groups and their members to work towards a collective common good. Yes, this will take considerable time but it is an absolute requirement if we are looking at global scale to deliver a substantial amount of digital pennies to replace those physical dollars.

In the meantime, there is plenty of other work that still needs to be done. For example, HITS (the Hollywood IT Society – which is managed by MESA) has created special interest groups (SIGs) consisting of technology and production executives of film and TV networks and broadcast divisions of the studios, that are addressing the real-world needs of bringing the multiple pieces of the production workflow into an interconnected network of software and apps to assist business units in all aspects of production. This group has its feet firmly planted on the ground to address the realities of supporting a digital business. By addressing simple, solvable concerns around new digital systems and tools like asset management processes both upstream and through archival, centralized risk analysis and management, localization automation, rights and royalties, these companies are dedicated to making a profound impact on their individual digital futures.

We don’t need to boil the ocean! How about something as simple as creating a common lexicon of terminology so that everyone throughout the process (and across industry bodies and associations) is speaking the same language?

When you reinvent an entire industry’s way of doing business along a complicated product lifecycle you impact all divisions of the enterprise and all their individual processes. While marketing is adapting to new social analytic systems and big data, creative is inventing new forms of multiscreen engagement; while finance is dealing with digitizing everything from payroll to vendor management, anti-piracy is identifying and trying to eliminate new vulnerabilities in the digital distribution pipeline. And while our industry searches for the holy grail of metadata, we can still concentrate on putting our house in order so we can handle the workload that will happen once metadata helps open up the content pipeline to serve new and unprecedented numbers of global consumer platforms.

That’s the role that MESA has been directed to serve. The groups we manage, in both the U.S. and Europe: HITS (serving Hollywood’s IT departments and their partners), 2nd Screen Society (developing a new consumer engagement experience) and CDSA (championing digital content protection and anti-piracy efforts) are all involved in various SIG projects to get these business basics settled now. And when everyone else finally comes together around metadata, we’ll make sure the rest of the business systems are ready to go.

Guy Finley is Executive Director of MESA and the 2nd Screen Society.