Data

By Chris Tribbey

The Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) hosted their second annual Smart Content Summit yesterday in Los Angeles, which saw more than 300 data, operations and technology executives from the M&E business in attendance. The Summit concluded a full day of MESA supported activities including the Women in Technology: Hollywood Breakfast workshop “New Year, New You”, as well as the “Metadata Madness” Luncheon.

In the days leading up to the event, Matt Turner, CTO of media and publishing for MarkLogic, found a new analogy to define what makes content “smart” in the media and entertainment industry.

“It’s not just about putting all the data in a garage. It’s about having a well-ordered, neat garage, where you can [take] what you need out later,” Turner said, relaying a conversation he had with a CIO at a major studio. “To me, that’s what smart content is about. That’s the intelligence you need: the organization.

“The whole notion around smart content is it’s not just the data, it’s the intelligence behind it.”

Turner’s message — that data on its own can be easily wasted without proper organization — was echoed by other early speakers at Summit.

“We have to start thinking about the fact that Bob in the basement no longer remembers what file is where,” said Aaron Edell, VP of operations and professional services for metadata company GrayMeta. “An Excel spreadsheet isn’t going to cut it, with the variety of data we’re dealing with.”

Edell argued that traditional data processing applications used by media and entertainment companies remain largely inadequate. And the problem lies not so much in how M&E companies store their data, but in how they retrieve it, he said. The volume of information continues to increase, yet the tools to handle it haven’t kept pace.

And if Turner’s garage analogy doesn’t work, he offered up a more straight forward assessment of what makes content smart: look at the data around assets, at every stage, from inception, pre-production, production, post, distribution, archiving and more, and then push the capture of that data upstream.

“Ultimately, “smart content” is data that stays with audio and video content, as it moves through the chain, and” added Guy Finley, executive director of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), which produced the Smart Content Summit. “Smart content is the idea of the importance of that data, and that data is the critical driver for the future of our business.”

Metadata Industry Standards Discussed

Before the Smart Content Summit kicked off, attendees were treated to the Metadata Madness Luncheon, where leading industry associations had a chance to share what standards and best practices they’ve been working on within their respective group to help make ease the metadata process for media and entertainment companies.

• Sean Bersell, VP of public affairs for Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), which aims to make the digital supply chain more efficient for retailers with its committees and work groups, updated Summit attendees on its EMA avails content availability metadata work, which currently covers roughly 40 different fields, and has been widely adopted by the film side of the industry. “You would think this would be automated in this industry, but when we first began working on it, we found it was very, very manual,” Bersell said. Currently, EMA is working on the “much more complex” TV side of the avails issue.

EMA’s newest product is its Media Manifest Delivery Core spec, a schema for the delivery of media assets related to online film and TV content, jointly developed by EMA and non-profit tech research firm MovieLabs. Used to identify assets associated with a video (including trailers, video and audio files, subtitles, closed captions, images and more) delivered to online distributors for a video title, the spec enables online retailers to scale up global operations and deliver assets to more than 100 countries.

“This allows the retailer to really manage the user experience, by indicating what’s connected to what,” Bersell said.

Next, EMA is working to standardize how media and entertainment companies log and categorize errors. “Seems like a small thing, but boy does it enhance communication,” Bersell said. EMA also has a work group looking at international ratings, as well as one for closed captioning.

• Harold Geller, chief growth officer of Advertising Digital Identification (Ad-ID) (“the Entertainment ID Registry [EIDR] for ads,” he quipped), which tags a 12-character code to ads, said more than 3,000 advertisers are now using Ad-ID, accounting for about 66% of TV ad dollars, and as of the end of January, Ad-ID had registered its two millionth ad ID.

Geller said that the Internet of Things (IoT) has already to reshape where ads appear and how people consume them, and “unique identifiers and metadata are necessary, and ad value.” Recently, Ad-ID debuted Complete External Access (CEA), a new service that gives broadcasters and media vendors access to metadata registered with Ad-ID. CEA launched in January, and aims to simplify how advertisers and agencies share ad ID data for cross-platform commercial management. ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Viacom and others have announced their support of CEA.

“It’s a cross-check, but also a way to move that metadata around in a standardized manner,” Geller said.

• From the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (ETC@USC), Joshua Kolden shared the latest on ETC’s Cinema Content Creation Cloud (C4) asset identification framework, an ID system that looks to create a unique ID for any single file or block of data, regardless of origin, so users in different locations can be certain of what they’re working with.

“You have an ID that’s not based on a central registry, it’s generated from the content itself,” he said. “It creates the ability to connect data permanently to the information you want to associate with it.”

Another critical aspect of C4 is the ability to create an unchangeable file name to ease identification and minimize risk of error in a multi-user environment.

• Laura Rooney, managing director of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), touted the “shared knowledge and collaboration” coming out of the group’s work groups, singling out the gains AMIA has made in helping advance digital workflow preservation, at every stage.

“The focus of AMIA overall and our committee on metadata is shared knowledge,” she said. “Beyond that, collaboration, both with other standards bodies and our sister organizations.”

• Thomas Stilling, a member of the DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) technology and operations committee and VP of product and promotion management for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, brought a moment of levity to the metadata discussion: “Who is on the DEG technology and operations committee? These are the people you see in various lines at IBC, CES and NAB talking about EIDR,” he said.

He said the DEG committee is especially focused on the supply chain (“the processes, the bottlenecks, the standards”) and is working to advance EIDR, as well as on avails and transactional reporting solutions.

“As a committee we’re committed to helping give our studios, our vendors, our colleagues and our partner organizations a narrative to be successful internally, because metadata’s tough to sell,” Stilling said, reminding the room: “We compete on content. We don’t compete on metadata standards.”

• Bill Wilson, VP of digital strategy and business development for the Music Business Association (Music Biz), shared how the group’s focus on the digital supply chain is about educating executives on the importance of metadata.

“We’ve built a music industry database … and we’ve created a music industry style guide,” Wilson said. Current industry issues Music Biz is tackling include rights resolution and transparency, and developing a central registry of content identification.

Look for more coverage of the Smart Content Summit next week in the M&E Daily and Smart Content newsletters.

The Smart Content Summit was sponsored by Mark Logic, GrayMeta, FilmTrack, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Avere Systems, Deluxe, Rovi Corp. and Wymsee, with Ad-ID, AMIA. DEG, the Entertainment Technology Center, the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) serving as association partners.