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Public Media Metadata Co-op

Do You Have a Metadata Strategy? If Not, Your Content May Not Get Found

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by Meg Varley Keller • Published on • Last modified on
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Metadata Co-Op Blog Posts

What is "Content Discovery" ?


"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 Yesterday's electronic program guides and platform-specific interfaces have been replaced by universal search and discovery engines that deliver highly personalized recommendations to help audiences find what to watch from an over-abundance of content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?

Whether you call it “discoverability,” “siloed metadata," or “content discovery,” there is a growing consensus that it's one of the media industry’s biggest problems.

Which is not a revelation—see this 2013 story in Wired. But the rapid adoption of voice-driven search and recent improvements to universal searchare fueling a new sense of urgency. A Politicostory from January includes a quote from PBS’s Chief Digital and Marketing Officer Ira Rubenstein at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) when he commented that “Discovery is going to voice and … [in the TV world] it’s a nightmare…. All the metadata has to be so robust and it has to work. You can do all the ads you want, but if you can’t find it, it’s worthless.”

Multiple industry players are working to address the findability problem. In 2019, the CEO of ThinkAnalytics, a media recommendation platform, said, “We think that’s really, really important – to start infusing more and more actionable metadata … into the content as it relates to search and discovery.” At CES this year, Nielsen-owned Gracenote announced plans to build more robust “video descriptors” leveraging machine-learning and editorial curation, saying “the early interest kind of confirms our idea that richer metadata is one of the things that’s been holding search and discovery back.”

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.

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Links for Further Reading: A Content Discovery Playlist

Publication

Wired Magazine

Politico

Cord Cutters News

WWD



M&E Daily

M&E Daily

NScreen Media



IET (Institute of Engineering & Technology)

Consumer Reports


NScreen Media

Article

What's On: Content Discovery in the Age of TV

The Bay & the Beltway Collide in Vegas at CES

HBO Max is Developing a New Content Discovery System

5 Takeaways from CES: Rise of Voice Search & Discoverability

Gracenote Reports Strong Early Interest in Descriptive Metadata Solution

Think Analytics Talks Metadata Viewer Behavior Solutions

Can Gracenote Make Universal Search a Reality?

AI & Metadata: No Magic Involved

How to Find Out Where Movies & TV Shows Are Streaming (Universal Search)

Gracenote's GNID Aims to Simplify Video Distribution, Discovery

Date

January 2013

January 2020

January 2020

January 2020

January 2020


January 2020

January 2020


March 2020

April 2020


September 2019