M+E Daily

Systemic change is yet again impacting the media and entertainment (M&E) business and existential questions, as a result, are now on the table.

As members of the M&E community voice their concerns about the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and deep fake technology, the autonomy and value of talent’s identity essence is on everybody’s radar, along with their Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) rights.

Talent will increasingly want the option to be virtual — to have a digital twin — and will want to properly license, track and monetise themselves.

Therefore, the need for tools to help attest to the provenance and authenticity of ALL the players in the value chain is crucial, Will Kreth, CEO of Human & Digital (HAND), said 15th Sept. at the ITS: Automation event, held during IBC at the W Amsterdam.

It is said that “you cannot automate what you cannot Identify” and, during the session, Kreth explored the arrival of the interoperable HAND Talent ID, what the company says is the first global ID registry for notable legal, virtual and fictional talent in performing arts and sports.

Kreth started the session, “Identity Forces: The Future of Talent Identity Provenance Automation,” with what he called “a little story” because “stories are powerful,” he said.

Back in 2018, in Hollywood, Kreth recalled, there was a sit-down meeting between myself, when I was running” the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), and a gentleman by the name of Eric Iverson, who many of you may know, who was at that time not at Amazon Studios and not at Amazon but at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), said Kreth.

CAA was “considering the notion of a talent identifier for above the line credits in Hollywood” and said they loved what EIDR did for content identification. And they wanted to know if the same thing could be done for talent in the industry above the line, he said. “I said, ‘we’d love to do that,’ so we took the idea back to the EIDR board.” It was a “great idea,” but the question they had to ask was: ‘Do we have the capital in the bank? Well, we just kind of did not at that time. We were also busy on a re-design and upgrade of the tech stack of EIDR. And a funny thing called the pandemic came along.”

Many people ended up changing jobs during the pandemic and “a lot of things basically got upset in the apple cart at that time and it didn’t happen.” But Kreth and others later decided to pick up the idea and try to make it a reality, he said.

In January, his group was made an “official DOI registration agency under their registration authority,” he told attendees. “Geeky stuff, I understand…. But you know, the thing here is that they do ID resolution at scale. And that’s powerful.

To download the presentation, click here.

To view the session, click here.

The inaugural ITS: Automation event was produced by MESA and sponsored by Amazon Studios Technology, Fabric, Eluvio, EIDR, and HAND (Human & Digital).