Data

During the second annual Smart Content Summit there was plenty of discussion on media and entertainment standards for metadata and more.

But the way a lot of people in the industry react to collecting data all along the lifecycle of content, Denise Evans, VP of information technology for Miramax, often wonders what’s the point. “We shouldn’t have any standards,” she said, tongue firmly in cheek, earning laughs from attendees. “We should just let the data flow and figure out after what it is.”

The collection of metadata is an every day challenge, she said, especially with new productions. Evans is heavily involved in finding the right tools for people to use to collect data, with Miramax using only third party vendor supply tools, and working hand in hand with production houses, post production houses, and other people to create data that proves crucial down the line.

However, imposing just a little bit of structure and best practices often results in resistance, she and other panelists agreed.

“We can’t get them to follow standards, and it seems hopeless.,” she said. “It’s important for us to have standards, but I can’t impose standards on others. I don’t even care about the monetization, I just want to know what it is. I’m tired of people coming to me and saying ‘Do you know what this is?’ I’ll get to you on that one.”

Evans recalled a recent situation where someone in sales wanted all the information on a title’s bonus materials, but finding out which of that content had been pre-approved for consumption proved difficult. “That’s a business requirement, and that’s all metadata,” she said. “Even when you provide the tools, the psychology of why it’s important isn’t there.”

Her frustrations were echoed by Linda Tadic, CEO of digital preservation company Digital Bedrock, who can’t stress enough how important it is to take metadata creation seriously at the start, and have a very clear workflow in place as you go down the supply chain. It doesn’t even require complicated tools: it can be done effectively with things like Excel, Google Docs and Dropbox.

But getting people to do is a different story.

“Especially when you’re asking the creatives to please add some metadata, but they’d rather just do their own thing, and how dare you ask them to do something,” Tadic said. “The only thing you can really do is try to automate the process as much as possible. And you have to be strict. It’s OK to have people not like you now and then.”

For Yasmin Dessem, audiovisual preservation specialist for the UCLA Library, she’s used to dealing with a ton of content — created in an analog world — that has almost no data attached to it. But when the content begins to be digitized, that’s where it becomes crucially important that everyone pay attention to the metadata, and track it consistently, she said.

All this added data around content is good business for companies like storage companies like Qumulo, according to Mike Bott, principal systems engineer for the company. Media and entertainment companies are light-years better today than they were recognizing that all data is valuable, and should be accessible down the line.

“From the storage point of view, we like this flood of data coming in, this strategy of keep everything forever, so mainly it’s about building a system that can scale to handle lots of ingest points and different kinds of ingest points,” he said. “You want a system where you don’t have to buy big up front, you want a system that when it gets full, adding to it doesn’t take down the whole system.”

Danny Seitz, media and entertainment sales specialist for enterprise storage and data management company Avere Systems, added that all this added need for data storage is why the cloud has become especially attractive.

“What I find working with IT folks is there’s often not a lot of capacity, and storage pools are segregated,” he said. “That’s why going to the cloud is very attractive … you’re creating more data, and new workflows around it, being able to have one spot to store it is important.”

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.