ETC Metadata Working Group

The explosion of online digital content has heightened the need for complete and accurate marketing metadata to assist consumers in search and discovery of movies and television. In addition, the increase in online distributors with widely different content submission requirements makes the delivery of accurate metadata a time-consuming and difficult process for content owners. For this reason, the Entertainment Technology Center organized the Metadata Working Group to create best-practices for the creation and distribution of marketing metadata. This working group is made up of metadata experts from the major Hollywood Studios, film service, and technology companies.

Historically, each digital service provider has created its own metadata specification and required that content providers conform their product information to that format. Unfortunately, the lack of standards underpinning those metadata elements — their names and definition, and the terms used to populate them — has confounded efforts to streamline the digital distribution, and ultimately the search and discovery, of content. The goal of the ETC Metadata Working Group is to further the industry discussion around the standardization of metadata creation and delivery.

The first deliverable from the group is the ETC Marketing Metadata 1.0 document. This document provides a set of best practices, based on the combined wisdom of the metadata experts who produce and distribute digital media for the leading Hollywood studios.

Scope: The ETC Metadata Working Group identifies three major categories of metadata necessary for delivery of content:

• Technical Metadata – format, codec, size, bitrate, etc.
• Business Rules Metadata – price, availability date, etc.
• Marketing Metadata – title, genre, synopsis, etc.

The working group has decided to first focus on marketing metadata to the North American market. Future work will address the other categories of metadata, internationalization and metadata delivery formats.

Methodology: In order to evaluate which metadata fields were the most useful and widely used, the ETC Metadata Working Group conducted a survey of metadata requirements from major online distributors, content owners and film service companies. Since metadata can be used by a variety of different users for different reasons, wherever possible, the group chose to look at metadata from a consumer search perspective.

Contributors: KC Blake (ETC), Theron Trowbridge (Deluxe), Jim Bower (Walt Disney), Eric Iverson (Sony Pictures), Kellie Nolan (Sony Pictures), JR Yasgur (Sony Pictures), Jeff Stevens (Warner Bros.), Ed Elliott (Technicolor), Sean Vilbert (Paramount Pictures), Patrick Kennedy (Singapore Infocomm Development Authority).

The ETC would like to give a special thanks to the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority for raising the initial questions surrounding distribution metadata that sparked this project.