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By Chris Tribbey

It’s no secret that collecting metadata at the outset during content creation makes everything easier down the line in a product’s lifecycle.

But during a production the make-up artists, costume designers, hair dressers and everyone else on the production team is focused on doing their jobs, not logging in data for their film or TV episode.

That challenge was tackled by content creation experts at the second annual Smart Content Summit, where panelists agreed that it’s become more important than ever to capture metadata at the outset, and continue capturing it upstream.

“When you have someone say you can’t do that because it takes too much time and effort, the thing is if you take five seconds now to tag something correctly, you save someone three hours next week trying to get the same thing done,” said Thomas Stilling, VP of product and promotion management for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. “Part of our job as archivists is to make it easier for people to provide that data to us, with tools and mechanisms that make it easier.”

He added that it’s important for those on the front lines of content creation to simply gather the data, and not be charged with trying to plan on what it will be used for down the line, an assessment Daniel Gonzalez, creative director of Deluxe Media’s Creative New Media Group, agreed with. Gonzalez also stressed that it’s important that everyone along the chain keep an eye out for opportunities for data collection that may have been missed the first time around.

For Anthony Accardo, director of R&D at Disney ABC Television Group, said that while everyone is still trying to figure out how to make metadata collection simple, and then accessible and valuable, he’s noticed a trend: there’s more data collection occurring on the film side vs. TV.

More attention paid to capturing metadata on the film side vs. TV, partly because there’s often a more rabid fan base behind films, and also because the sheer volume of TV content makes it more difficult to keep up with metadata collection, he said.

“But when you’re watching TV, there are things you need … but you have to go on your phone, search the show, search the episode. If there’s a way to have that metadata without making it a high-friction experience, that’s a sweet spot,” Accardo said.

And to Alex LoVerde, CEO of tech company Wymsee (which offers solutions for designers to create content), he sees that as an opportunity missed, considering today’s “golden age” of television. He said he’d love to see the day when advertising is replaced with in-show data: see a suit worn by your hero, and all you have to do is click on it to find out more. “I’d love to be able to just click through and buy the stuff I see on TV,” he said.

And that’s another part of the challenge, Stilling added: after you do get all the data, what’s next?

“It’s like deep-sea fishing: you throw the net out early enough, and you pick up everything. You bring everything home, though, and it’s ‘What do I do with this?’” he said.

The Feb. 4 Smart Content Summit, presented by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) brought together more than 300 top data, operations and research executives from TV, film and home entertainment. For previous coverage of the conference, click here, here and here.