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NEW YORK – Metadata plays an important role in the lifecycle of media and entertainment content, but companies continue to face challenges in being able to use it properly and access it when needed, due to a lack of industry standardization and a reluctance among some companies to change with the times, according to speakers at the Metadata Madness East: Data, Analytics and AI event July 25.

“Metadata really is the king of your content through the entire production lifecycle,” said Mike Petro, director of value engineering at Ooyala.

Petro pointed to Ooyala Flex, his company’s media logistics platform that he said serves as an effective solution for media and entertainment companies because it “can tie together all of the systems in your video production and distribution workflow and sort of seamlessly integrate them so that you can automate every step of your workflow that doesn’t require a human to make a decision or to be creative.” Flex can present information that humans need at any given moment that will allow them to then “make the right decision,” he said.

Flex integrates with third-party systems and can be run on premises, in the cloud via the services of companies including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, or as part of a hybrid model, he noted.

“One of the issues” that content companies tend to have is that, even if they’ve “got something tying all of your systems together, there’s disparate data in each of the systems,” he pointed out, adding: “Every one of those systems has data that’s in it, and quite often the data is different” and “if you have very structured metadata, the structure from one system doesn’t necessarily match the structure from your next system. And what generally happens as you pass files … from one system to the next [is] you may be leaving some metadata behind.”

There’s typically been either an issue where the metadata is tied to a certain file — in which case the workflow becomes complicated because users must wait for a file to reach their systems to know anything about it — or the metadata winds up staying in a system when moving a content file and users end up with silos containing metadata they don’t have access to anymore, he said.

Flex “takes a very different approach” than prior systems in that it ties together all the data across a production into a data layer that is separate from the rest of one’s workflow, he said.

That makes the metadata available and visible to users at all times, and they can also get access to metadata before even receiving files, making it possible to start planning ahead for workflows and allocating resources appropriately, he said.

Flex also features a “robust” permissions function so that those in control of the content can set who can see the metadata and edit out metadata such as actors’ salary information that certain users shouldn’t be able to see, he said.

“One of the most interesting places” that the technology is going is the enhancement of Flex functionality through the use of artificial intelligence, he went on to say, pointing to Ooyala’s close collaboration with Microsoft on that front. Elastic search is another important next step, he said, noting that allows content users to “find any asset anywhere,” whenever they need it.

Publishing executives from the Associated Press (AP), Conde Nast, Pearson and Time then discussed the challenges their companies faced in a session called “An Inconvenient Data Truth: The Challenge of Integrating Data Across All Business Units.”

As the industry changes constantly, the difficulty in breaking down silos between companies’ various divisions is one of the major challenges that Conde Nast is seeing when dealing with the integration of data, Kristy Ramsammy, its director of digital asset operations, said.

“As we’re trying to integrate data, you can imagine, some people are very protective over their data,” she said, adding: “One brand doesn’t want another brand to see their data.”

Agreeing, Dan Rosenberg, associate director of asset management at Time Inc. Studios, stressed “the need for flexibility.” He explained: “A lot of the companies that the people up here work for are very old companies that have been around for a long time and they have a certain idea of how things should work. And everything’s changing so quickly in the landscape that you really have to be able to adapt to the new technologies, new distribution platforms, new challenges with new generations coming in with their ideas.”

“What’s pretty common” now in the industry is “sprawl — sprawl across devices, formats, products and territories,” and — especially in the educational space – there is a need for the localization of content, James Cooney, director of system engineering at education publishing company Pearson, said. But he added: “The specific technical and business and cultural requirements there really add some challenges.”

One issue that AP is seeing is that “we are experimenting a lot” with “transforming” its own internal publishing systems and “our customers are experimenting a lot” also, and “there’s that fine line — that kind of x factor — of when do you decide that you have enough information to bring it to leadership and say that we need this giant change or when do you just keep experimenting.”

More than 300 people in the media and entertainment sector attended the inaugural Microsoft Media & Entertainment Day, which included the half-day Metadata Madness track, along with tracks on content protection, video in the cloud, and AI, machine learning and bots.