ETC Metadata Working Group
. The explosion of online digital content has heightened the need for complete
and accurate marketing metadata to assist consumers in search and discovery
of movies and television.  In addition, the increase in online distributors
with widely different content submission requirements makes the delivery of
accurate metadata a time-consuming and difficult process for content owners.
For this reason, the Entertainment Technology Center organized the Metadata
Working Group to create best-practices for the creation and distribution of
marketing metadata.  This working group is made up of metadata experts from
the major Hollywood Studios, film service, and technology companies.

Historically, each digital service provider has created its own metadata
specification and required that content providers conform their product
information to that format.  Unfortunately, the lack of standards
underpinning those metadata elements — their names and definition, and the
terms used to populate them — has confounded efforts to streamline the
digital distribution, and ultimately the search and discovery, of content.
The goal of the ETC Metadata Working Group is to further the industry
discussion around the standardization of metadata creation and delivery.

The first deliverable from the group is the ETC Marketing Metadata 1.0
document.  This document provides a set of best practices, based on the
combined wisdom of the metadata experts who produce and distribute digital
media for the leading Hollywood studios.  This document is the beginning of
what we hope will be an ongoing dialogue — people learning from each other
in this rapidly evolving marketplace.  Our hope is to expand this set of
best practices as time goes on so that, so content owners can provide
consistent and meaningful metadata that will make it that much easier for
the distributor to accept and market the content and for the consumer to
find, purchase, and/or enjoy it.

Scope 
The ETC Metadata Working Group identifies three major categories of metadata
necessary for delivery of content.

Technical Metadata ­ format, codec, size, bitrate, etc.
·

Business Rules Metadata ­ price, availability date, etc.
·

Marketing Metadata – title, genre, synopsis, etc.

The working group has decided to first focus on marketing metadata to the
North American market.  Future work will address the other categories of
metadata, internationalization and metadata delivery formats.

Methodology
 In order to evaluate which metadata fields were the most useful and widely
used, the ETC Metadata Working Group conducted a survey of metadata
requirements from major online distributors, content owners and film service
companies.  Since metadata can be used by a variety of different users for
different reasons, wherever possible, the group chose to look at metadata
from a consumer search perspective.

Contributors 
This document was created with contributions from the following people:

KC Blake – Entertainment Technology Center

Theron Trowbridge – Deluxe

Jim Bower – The Walt Disney Company

Eric Iverson – Sony Pictures Entertainment

Kellie Nolan – Sony Pictures Entertainment

JR Yasgur – Sony Pictures Entertainment

Jeff Stevens – Warner Bros.
Ed Elliott – Technicolor

Sean Vilbert – Paramount Pictures

Patrick Kennedy – Singapore Infocomm Development Authority

The ETC would like to give a special thanks to the Singapore Infocomm
 Development Authority for raising the initial questions surrounding
distribution metadata that sparked this project.

If you have any questions or are having trouble getting the draft please feel free to email us at: imf@etcenter.org

Building on foundational work by Art Hair and David Wertheimer, the ETC is bringing major content industry and cloud resources players together to develop a credible high-level next gen production and distribution workflow framework that can inform the development of voluntary standards in this space.

The effort will take into consideration the entire life cycle of film and media production and collaboration, and will leverage lessons learned from a parallel effort underway within the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

An invitation-only organizing meeting for this project will take place on December 20th, from noon-2pm, at the USC School of Cinematic Arts building.