M+E Daily

Industry standards are typically specific to workflow and business segment, and registries have been developed around their corresponding workflows with little to no collaboration with the others. So, while advertising uses one ID, distribution uses another.

However, different standards groups have been working behind the scenes to simplify and align with one another in an effort to standardise themselves, to benefit the industry as a whole, a panel of industry experts said March 10 at the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (APM), held in conjunction with the Smart Content Summit in Los Angeles, during the session “Identifier Interoperability – The Future of Standards.”

“There are a lot of standards out there and each group seems to be working with a different standard,” Mary Yurkovic, director of smart content at MESA, told attendees and those viewing the event virtually.

Each of those different standards “sort of touch different parts of the industry,” noted Hollie Choi, executive director at the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR).

“Part of the goal of EIDR” was to work on interoperability so all members could “play in the same sandbox together and make it easier for our members overall,” and “align on” certain things, such as the Language Metadata Table (LMT), Choi said. The trick was to do all this while being sure that members didn’t have to give away any of the elements of their “secret sauce, if there is secret sauce,” she added.

“If you talk to all of us. If you put us all in a room and ask us ‘what is it that you think we could do better,’ I think alignment on metadata – the shared metadata – the things that we all use: language, territory. Some of those things are common among all of us but we don’t all do them the same way,” Choi explained. That is the “low-hanging fruit,” she noted.

Remaining flexible is important for member companies, Choi said, noting that “the landscape changes over time” and other peer groups have run into challenges when they weren’t flexible.

Explaining the importance of standards, she went on to explain: “Nobody works in a vacuum. We don’t just work by ourselves. When you work with any of the studios or any of the content creators, they’re not just working alone, right? They license content to each other. All the other ad opportunities and the different ways that the content can end up on social media. There are a million different ways that all of this content is being rolled out around the world. And having standards means everybody is sort of working from the same baseline identification at least. And so, if you have that, then you can sort of put everything else on top.”

Where companies will see their return on investment in metadata and identifying all their content with EIDR IDs start to happen is when it comes to “finding those gems” in their archives that nobody even thought existed, Yurkovic said near the end of the session.

Matt Turner, chair of the Applied Data Working Group, moderated the panel discussion.

To listen to the presentation, click here.

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.