Metadata Matters Podcast

This week we speak to Carl Jones, Senior Director at FTI Consulting about some of the key trends he's seeing in terms of metadata management in the Media & Entertainment industry.

Carl shares his perspectives based on his work in the Media & Entertainment industry providing advisory services around OTT technology, metadata management and digital supply chain.

FTI Consulting is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations manage change, mitigate risk and resolve disputes. In the TMT space, FTI Consulting provide a combination of corporate strategy, business transformation and digital transformation, as well as evaluating M&A decisions.

During our discussion with Carl, we discuss:

• the key trends he's seeing relating to metadata management, like the consolidation of data systems
• challenges faced by customers around metadata, such as the organizational and process complexities when consolidating systems
• navigating a complex vendor landscape when selecting a new system or making a build, buy or acquire decision
• using time-specific metadata to drive contextual advertising, targeted e-commerce, a more personalized recommendations
• the role metadata plays internally within an organization like FTI Consulting

Florian Bauer, Chief Solutions Officer at Semantic Web is our guest this week and he helps us explore the topic of metadata and knowledge graphs.

Semantic Web has a knowledge graph product called Pool Party, which helps companies structure their metadata and understand their content better.

During this episode, Florian discusses:

• How knowledge graphs help make better decision making, improving content discovery, and increase end-customer satisfaction through personalisation.
• The challenges faced by many content companies - such as the lack of a controlled media vocabulary
• Some great practical advice to start creating a control vocabulary.

If you are interested in reading the whitepaper series that Florian mentioned, here's the link: https://www.poolparty.biz/upcoming-white-paper-on-product-360

This week, we talk to Rob Tucker, Founder & CEO at Meta about how their film & broadcast content metadata platform is helping customers manage their data. We discuss a range of topics including:

• the impact of bad data to a media organisations
• how metadata drives viewer engagement and reduces churn
• and some exciting example of how using different types of metadata could improve content personalisation

We speak to Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant this week about how Signiant is helping meet their customer's metadata challenges. Signiant is a trusted broker in the exchange of media files across the content supply chain and Margaret discusses a range of topics including:

- chain of custody metadata allowing content owners to know where the content has been and where it is going

- How products like CloudSpex are helping checking expected metadata is present before moving files

- using machine learning to optimizing movement of content based on the package being sent

- using usage data to better understand trends and emerging needs of the industry

- taxonomies & schemas - when they need to be strict and when they need to be flexible

- the trade off of human curation vs automation

- and corporate memory

This week we're looking at how metadata can be used as part of knowledge management platform and industry research. To help me explore this topic, I talk to Ben Dales, Head of Digital & Lorenzo Zanni, Head of Knowledge at the IABM.

The IABM's use of GrayMeta's Curio platform is a great example of how the same machine learning metadata can be used by different functions within a company. Lorenzo and Ben also share some practical advice on adopting machine learning technology.

To find out more about the IABM, their website is: https://theiabm.org/

Chris Lennon, Office of CTO, Director of Standards Strategy at Ross Video talks about metadata and his new book, co-written by Clyde Smith, "The Media Workflow Puzzle: How it all fits together".

We discuss a wide range of topics including:

- the role metadata plays in interoperability and standards

- editorial metadata and driving discoverability

- how capturing metadata within production is key to drive usage downstream

- IMF format as a key enabler for repurposing and versioning content based on metadata

- globalisation and consolidation of the media industry

- how our approach to building standards needs to change with the pace of innovation happening in the industry

https://www.routledge.com/The-Media-Workflow-Puzzle-How-It-All-Fits-Together/Smith-Lennon/p/book/9780815392903

This week, we talk to Matt Westrup, VP Technology & Operations at A+E Networks UK about the importance of metadata to a multi-territory broadcaster. A+E Networks UK's brands include HISTORY, CI, Lifetime, H2 and BLAZE.

During the interview Matt discusses:

- their pragmatic approach of continuous improvement to metadata

- the 3 big challenges to metadata - the past, the present & the future

- sharing corporate knowledge and the impact of COVID

- the growing importance of archives and metadata enrichment to find relevant content quickly.

- how metadata plays an important part in environmental sustainability

As a former camera operators, Matt also discusses the value of metadata captured during the production process.

https://www.aenetworks.tv/

This week GrayMeta interviews Sarah Nichol, Senior Business Architect and Claire Feeney, Head of Technical Operations at All3Media International, the distribution arm of the global content producer.

Matt Eaton talks to Claire and Sarah about a broad range of topics from the multi-faceted role metadata plays in rights & availabilities to metadata as customer service and the economics of metadata in distribution.  We discuss:

• The challenges working with a lack of international delivery standard for metadata

• Opportunities for improving metadata in the future, for example, by having metadata follow the content through the supply chain and understanding from distribution partners how effective the metadata is in terms of driving discoverability.

• The unintentional bias within metadata and the consideration of the use of language in metadata to avoid excluding minority groups

• Corporate memory and internal discoverability

In this week’s podcast episode, Matt Eaton talks to Dan Carew-Jones, Post Production Consultant about how the leading factual producer, Arrow International Media, has been using the GrayMeta Curio Platform and machine learning to log and access its catalogue of unused content.  The adoption of machine learning involves a lot more than just technology decisions - it involves people, skills and new competencies, and being open to try new ways of working to improve processes.  Arrow International Media is a great example of how to successfully adopt machine learning and use this as a spring board for further innovation. 

During the interview, Dan and Matt discuss:

- how the role metadata played within their production operations has changed

- the importance of keeping humans at the heart of the operation to continually refine and curate the tags and how this results in a constant evolution of the metadata model.  

- the potential of using APIs to make metadata more widely available to different teams and systems

This week, we speak to Eric Fulmer, VP Operations at Shotflow, a company that delivers Studio Production Management solutions to retail and apparel brands.

We thought it would be fun to talk to Eric to compare and contrast metadata in Shotflow's world of retail brands with metadata in the media and entertainment world.

Key parallels we discussed included the importance of capturing metadata as early as possible in the production process and how metadata plays an important part in delivering quality and optimizing speed to market.