"Content Discovery" refers to the ability of audiences to encounter Public Media content — even when they aren't explicitly looking for it. Yesterday's electronic program guides and platform-specific interfaces have been replaced by universal search and discovery engines that deliver highly personalized recommendations to help audiences find what to watch from an over-abundance of content options.
What is a program's value if audiences can't find it? What do we have to do to ensure that content discovery means a "frictionless findability" experience for our viewers?
At the core of content discovery is industry-standard, machine readable program metadata. Without it, public media content can wind up being invisible to search and discovery tools and therefore to current and future public media fans. Metadata is the language of our now fully digital world. By embracing industry-standard models and best practices, we can deliver on public media's universal access mission, no matter what changes in technology and viewer preferences come next.
Why is Content Discovery One of the Media Industry's Biggest Challenges?
According to Rachelle Byars-Sargent, who heads up the PBS Metadata Co-op team, “We are seeing a surge of interest from platform, search and discovery partners for unique, universal identifiers for video content—much like the book industry has had with ISBNs. Now that the industry has EIDR, there’s trust,” she said, referring to the non-profit Entertainment Identifier Registry, which now includes industry-approved unique identifiers and a core set of descriptive metadata for video content from all major U.S. television networks (and is already a critical piece of the production life-cycle for the film industry).
The EIDR registry is growing rapidly to include deep back-list titles, international programming, and links out to many external sources of rich metadata such as that found on IMDb and Common Sense Media. “For the first time,” said Byars-Sargent, “on-demand partners are asking for EIDR and Gracenote IDs instead of manual metadata exports—once they knew that PBS had those IDs, that’s all they wanted. The industry is eager to automate, and the primary prerequisite for that effort is trustworthy, machine-readable metadata."
When asked about EIDR IDs, Gracenote emphasized the value of using both: “The ultimate goals of identifiers are to help the Video industry at large ensure that all forms of content can easily be distributed to services…. Gracenote IDs can do this alongside EIDR IDs.”
Public media distributors PBS, APT, and NETA and a growing number of stations are now incorporating EIDR IDs into their content distribution workflows. Challenges remain: content creators need to deliver much richer metadata and promotional visual assets much sooner in the process, for example, and transitioning siloed legacy systems to a "data democracy" (both within each station and across the public media system) will take some work.
But the efforts described above (as well as others not covered here, including SEO), the growing urgency around program metadata, and the number of stations registering for and attending the Metadata Co-op webinars are all positive signs on the path to a “frictionless findability” experience for our audience.
Links for Further Reading: A Content Discovery Playlist
