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My Eye Media’s Reyes: Promising Initial Feedback for STORM Platform

Initial client feedback to My Eye Media’s new digital Storefront Testing and Online Retail Monitoring (STORM) platform has been “very positive,” Juan Reyes, the company’s chief innovation officer, said at the June 14 Transforming Home Entertainment (THE) Summit in Los Angeles.

STORM enables movie studios and other content owners to check the accuracy of digital storefront listings across a multitude of distribution platforms around the world using automated software tools. The cloud-based solution was introduced by the technical and post-production services company in March, and the software monitors data including content pricing, release dates and local ratings.

Ensuring that clients’ storefront information is accurate is “essential,” but it’s been “very, very difficult to monitor,” Reyes said. That’s because content availability data aren’t standardized across the supply chain, he explained. “You have companies going back and forth with different types” of Excel and PDF files, and the requirements and formats for each of the content owners and different platforms vary between each of the different groups, he said.

“There’s a lot of standardization going on” in the industry when it comes to content availability data, but “we’re just not there yet,” he said. As a result, there are many cases where products are listed as available but haven’t gone live or products have gone live but are listed as not available, and there are incorrect local ratings and incorrect or missing artwork for content, he said. These are the kinds of “inaccuracies which can create a negative user experience” and even hurt a client’s bottom line and hurt the reputation of the company or its products, he said.

As a growing number of retailers develop application programming interfaces (APIs) that are “opened up, we’re able to integrate into those to provide additional data” about all of the information for clients’ content, he said.

STORM has been tracking digital storefronts including Amazon.com, Apple’s iTunes, Google Play, Microsoft’s Xbox, and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) including Comcast and DirecTV, he said. The platform has been covering markets including the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Austria, U.K., Japan and South Korea. Clients are using STORM globally and the platform is something that My Eye is “continually developing,” he said, adding it was “designed so that it can be nimble and adjust to any of the needs of our clients.”

My Eye is looking to Integrate STORM with additional storefronts and territories, and is enhancing it based on feedback from users, he said. Feedback so far has been “helpful in finding issues” with content that have been quickly addressed, he said.

My Eye, meanwhile, has started testing content as part of a Dolby Vision pilot program, he also said, pointing out that his company provides an end-to-end solution for testing of just about any home entertainment content including HD, Ultra High-Def (UHD) and high dynamic range (HDR) video. It can also test Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio with channel configurations up to 7.1.4 he said. My Eye’s testing clients include Hulu and it’s been a preferred partner of Netflix since 2014, he said.

My Eye now has all commercially available UHD Blu-ray players for testing of compatibility and other issues, along with pre-release players from the U.S., Japan and European markets, he said. Because that format is new, “compatibility is a key factor in making sure that the products are working properly,” he said. The company also has a wide variety of different types of 4K displays for testing, including HDR displays with different luminance capabilities and consumer displays supporting Dolby Vision, he said. A growing number of 4K TVs are featuring HDR, be it the baseline HDR 10 standard or Dolby Vision, so an increasing number of streaming services are supporting those technologies.