Metadata is the New King of Content

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

If you’re paying attention to trends in broadcasting and media in general, you may notice a trend that is – to put it nicely – freaking them out:

People are canceling cable and revenue streams broadcasters have had for generations are dwindling.

To be specific, the highly sought after 18-34 year olds (aka Millennials) are cutting the cable faster than ever. According to Time Magazine, television viewing in that group dropped by over 10% in the last quarter of 2014 and it’s only accelerating.

That said, media companies have massive libraries that they can put to good use and they’re working to do that but there’s one piece missing: Metadata.

Metadata can be used for a variety of things. Starting simply, you can use it to sort and categorize through tagging. That tagging can also allow you to browse and move between pieces of content within a given concept or theme. The next step is using the metadata to choose ads and track engagement within the media itself. The final step is to understand what people do within the content. While tracking viewing and start/stop times can do some of it, we still need the metadata.

At the moment, most companies outsource creating the metadata to other companies who literally watch the videos and take notes. They log information like actors, locations, and occasionally scene descriptions. While this works, it’s expensive, time consuming, and completely outside their normal production workflows. And for these effort to be useful, they need to decide what information to capture at the beginning of the process. If requirements change, they have to go back to the media again.

But so far we’ve assumed the media is already digital, according to Forbes, most of it isn’t:

An estimated 98% of archived media is not available for digital distribution. “It’s imperative that companies migrate video content to digital formats,” says Petricola (Vice President for Digital Media Solutions at Oracle).

So we’re not even to the metadata collection stage yet.

Luckily, most companies are automating this conversion process. These systems take a variety of tape formats, convert it to the numerous digital formats required, process the results, and organize it.

But now we’re back to the manual metadata collection!