HITS

At the recent Hollywood IT Society’s (HITS) “Holly-wired: Where IT and Entertainment Meet” conference in Los Angeles, Teresa Phillips, SVP for V2 Solutions, called on media and entertainment companies to do something in their best interest: adopt standards, and stick with them.

In today’s global, digital world, that’s the best way to take advantage of your content, she stressed.

“We hear all the time that nobody is following these standards, that everyone has a one-off,” Phillips said. “Apple does it’s own thing, Disney does it’s own thing, Netflix does it’s own thing, and that’s true.

“But we have to pick something as an industry and do our best to follow it … people don’t want to buy more products, they want to have agile solutions with something they’ve already invested in.”

So much of what makes or break content monetization nowadays rests with the metadata associated with your files, she said, especially considering all the languages, subtitling, and ratings you’ve got to take into account when distributing globally, she added. That’s where things like the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) come into play.

“Having a unique ID is really important, and we know there are a string of proprietary IDs in the marketplace … but having that one unique identifier … to track a title from inception, to fulfillment … is so critical, especially when you get into global distribution,” Phillips said.

The challenges for metadata aren’t simple, she added: you’re dealing with multiple file formats and a ton of data sources.

Best practices and standards are the name of the game to make the job simpler. “Data in from all sorts of areas, and pretty much in real time, [means you] have to pick and choose which of those attributes [you] want, and how you’re going to match them, merge them, and feed them into the downstream systems,” she said. “It’s a very complex and dynamic environment.

“How well your data is going to perform downstream is directly related to how well you manage it on the front end. We all know that.”

Adoption of the Entertainment Merchant Association’s (EMA) content availability spec for avails is another must nowadays, she added. And another of the biggest mistakes she sees content companies make is the lack of foresight when it comes to international ratings.

“We see a lot of many being left on the table in terms of ratings, foremost that 30% to 40% of retailers don’t allow you to place a title in their market without a rating, and if they have a local classification system, you can’t have an MPAA rating. That title doesn’t go to market,” she said.