KC Blake, ETC director of business development, reported on Thursday about the status of work by an ETC-chaired working group to “make the metadata mess manageable.”
Although dozens of groups are working on metadata schemas, the ETC’s focus is on driving consensus of the most basic distribution/marketing metadata like genre, director, actors, synopsis, and other fields. Every distributor has different requirements and widely different vocabularies. This problem is compounded as new distributors come on-line, introducing even more variation in metadata.
Creating industry best practices for distribution metadata would bring consistency to this confusion, and eliminate the need for studios to reconfigure their data to different requirement docs each time they work through a new distributor. It would also help consumers more easily search for their favorite content in a future where digital delivery is the norm.
The members of ETC’s group bring a unique expertise in distribution issues for entertainment content. The group includes members from Deluxe, Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Technicolor, Cisco, and Singapore Infocomm Development Authority.
They’re working on problems including:
– Create industry-wide schema superset
– Define fields and common exceptions
– Unique identifiers, including for assets, cast, and crew
– Standardize XML delivery
– Develop mappings to major distributors
ETC has set up an industry reflector forum for the exchange of ideas and moderated discussions on specific topics around the standardization of distribution metadata.
Anyone interested from content creators, distributors, device manufacturers, and standards bodies is invited to join the conversation.
To sign up, send an email to kcblake@etcenter.org, and your name will be added to the reflector mailing list.