Connections

ThinkAnalytics: Metadata is Currency in the ‘New Hollywood’

Media and entertainment companies know it’s a competitive world out there today, but on July 25, Gabriel Berger, CEO of personalized recommendations specialist ThinkAnalytics, offer a stark example of just how competitive.

“From the sublime to the ridiculous,” there are 228 OTT providers presently operating in the U.S., a mind-boggling figure compared to just a few years ago, he said at the Smart Content Summit East event, part of the Media & Entertainment Day in New York.

His presentation — “Leveraging Metadata in the Moment” — served as both a warning and a sign of hope: consumers can ditch your service at a moment’s notice, but there are a few ways you can try to keep that from happening.

“We live in an attention economy, that’s very, very real. [Metadata] increases meaningful personalization,” Berger said. “And what we’re looking for is that nexus of information science and data science.”

The volume of content and the velocity of the content supply chain is a challenge for everyone involved, but that combination of data science (Ingestion, management and analysis of user behaviors) plus information science (melding of content and language to add nuances to data) can mine truly meaningful discovery and personalization, leading to both better analytics and business decisions.

The steps to building better engagement, as ThinkAnalytics sees it: Enrich the metadata with the purpose of learning more about the content, build a consolidated metadata “container” to better optimize your catalog distribution, and then create personalized discovery for both browsing and search.

“With AI and machine learning, you can bring all that together,” Berger said, adding that OTT players can now use those tools for real-time viewer engagement and to deploy discovery algorithms.

The 2018 M&E Day, which also included Content Protection Summit East conference tracks, was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council, and was presented by Microsoft, with sponsorship by Akamai, BTI Studios, ISE, LiveTiles, MarkLogic, RSG Media, ThinkAnalytics, Amazon Web Services, the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) and Richey May Technology Solutions.

Click here to download audio of the ThinkAnalytics presentation. Click here to download the slide deck.