M+E Daily

The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), MicroStrategy and solutions architecture agency Island Pitch are working together to solve a key analytics challenge that EIDR and companies using its identifier registry face today, according to the companies.

The registry has, from the very beginning, been a clear value proposition for each member and user, according to EIDR. For 12 years, EIDR members have registered their content, amassing more than 2.5 million records. Now, EIDR will provide the tools to use this data within an organization’s workflows, making the process a whole lot easier, it said.

The challenge today is that there are two ways to access EIDR data and neither of them are perfect solutions, Richard Kroon, director of technical operations at EIDR said March 10 at the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (APM), held in conjunction with the Smart Content Summit in Los Angeles.

During the session “EIDR Kicks Off Analytics,” representatives from the three companies looked at what’s been built, what it does now and where EIDR is going with a project designed to simplify the process.
EIDR currently provides two mirror services that organizations can subscribe to (push and pull) but the problem is that it delivers raw EIDR XML records that can be parsed and stored locally and then must be converted to a database for analytics work to be done, Kroon explained.

The other option today is an XPath-based query service EIDR offers allowing an organization to query the registry, he noted. But the system has “fundamental conceptual limitations,” he noted. For one thing, “you can’t count things so you can’t retrieve all the EIDR records with more than three titles,” he pointed out. Also, you can’t compare and count things, can’t link field attributes and values, can’t aggregate things, and can’t reference the record hierarchy, he said. Companies must “fetch a large dataset,” locally ingest it and then do their analytics work, he noted.

“It’s inconvenient” and not so simple to use, and “the whole goal of this is to make it convenient and easy to use” so that there are no “barriers,” Kroon added.

Enter Island Pitch and MicroStrategy.

Island Pitch helps companies “do cool things the right way,” said Jonathan De Armas, owner and solutions architect at the company.

“We augment your ability to ride the wave of innovation with the rhythm of the tide,” he said, adding: “We really like to research your challenge with you and develop novel solutions” to the problems faced by the M&E industry.

Island Pitch is working to help improve EIDR’s challenge using a full modern cloud approach that leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture, he noted.

Its new relational database enables new query types and de Armas said it can compare things, count things, link field attributes and values, aggregate things and reference the record hierarchy, unlike with EIDR’s current solutions.

MicroStrategy will be the first integration of the Island Pitch solution and MicroStrategy is working with EIDR to help it leverage the Island Pitch strategy, according to Jim Whelehan, sales director, M&E at MicroStrategy, who noted he also runs his own film production company (Sun-Spot Productions in South Bay, California).

MicroStrategy is working on the cloud-based solution now with EIDR and Island Pitch and expects the partnership to “grow and be fruitful,” Whelehan said.

EIDR APM was presented by Whip Media, produced by MESA in association with the Smart Content Council and EIDR, and sponsored by BeBanjo, Signiant, Qumulo, Adio, Alteon, Digital Nirvana, Slalom and Rightsline.