Metadata

During a “Metadata Across the Supply Chain” at this month’s Metadata Madness event in New York, Christy King, a strategic consultant with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), asked the 200-plus people in attendance a simple question: “How many people have their rights information — metadata attached — to their video content?”

Nobody rose their hands.

In a conversation that covered how media and entertainment companies are working toward capturing data at the moment of creation, how organizations are integrating solutions to manage their data, and whether anyone’s doing it all well enough to make sense of their content across the supply chain, King’s question kicked off the most spirited part of the discussion.

“The entire supply chain world is driven by rights: what you can and can’t do, when you can start and stop doing something,” she noted.

Michael Jeffrey, VP of client engagement for Rovi, said the way consumers look for content nowadays has changed how content owners need to address their metadata. No longed can content owners dictate ingestion. It’s the end user who’s in control.

“As we move to what we call ‘interest-based’ consumption … I can’t find things that I’m interested in at that moment,” he said. “And yet there’s tons of content. It’s a chore.”

For Tris Baer, VP of business solutions, strategy and innovation for Prime Focus Technologies, agreed, and part of the problem is, internally, many media and entertainment companies are still ingesting and outputting metadata within several silos, creating a series of “islands of information.” And “a lot of consumers know more about your content than you know about it,” he cautioned. Unique identifiers are a must today, he added.

“My biggest pet peeve, and I’m seeing the tide turning, is metadata has been seen as a necessary evil for business properties,” said Felix Cisneros, VP of digital supply chain operations for AMC Networks. “But there really is becoming an awareness and acknowledgement just how important it is.”

However, Aaron Edell, VP of operations and professional services for GrayMeta, said standards like Ad-ID and EIDR can help solve some of these problems, especially “trying to put too much metadata in your file names, relying solely on that, and I absolutely can’t stand seeing that. If it’s a movie — Superman, 1972, 16×9, 1080p, etc. — it’s not going to work. How you get the data in the first place [determines] how you use it.”

But standards can only do so much he stressed. “These things are changing so quickly. If you’re interested in 4K … is there a standard for that? Let’s take six months and make a standard for that. But now you want 8K. We need to figure out how to be more agile with standards,” Edell said.

Yet, standards are a must with metadata today, added Tony Gill, global director of library science and information management for Wunderman Production.

“The quality of metadata among different sources is varied. It’s not how much metadata, it’s how much trust I have in the metadata,” he said. “People kind of make stuff up, just guess. I want to know when the metadata can be trusted.

“Standards are not perfect. But without them, nothing works at all.”