Convergence Forcing a Focus on Data

FAST. AVOD. SVOD. MVPD. vMVPD. OTA. These services represent the options available to content owners or aggregators to deliver entertainment, sports and news content from centralized hubs to individual consumers. Their goal is simple – expose and monetize their content libraries to as many consumers as possible. However, that doesn’t mean the consumer is top of mind when it comes to facilitating their journey to their content of choice.

 There is nothing innovative when it comes to revenue models. While the technology continues to evolve, enabling a plethora of service models, business models reflect a simple choice between subscriptions and ads. And, as much as the delivery technology advances, the user interface remains relatively constant. Consumers continue to navigate familiar grids and rails to select their desired content.  However, a recent VideoNet webinar, “Winning the Aggregation Battle”, shared survey results indicating that 58% of respondents indicated that Content Discovery is the most valuable value add beyond actual carriage for content aggregators.

This reinforces the importance of the technology and data that enable the grids and rails that consumers see upon arrival in their video service of choice. Ongoing innovation and adoption of technologies such as Clouds, Data Lakes, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are critical to presenting the right data at the right time -  and for addressing the elusive nature of consumer intent. Just as streaming is displacing linear broadcast, gaming, social networks and the evolving metaverse will gain bigger shares of the consumer’s available entertainment time.

User Interfaces will evolve to reflect a convergence of multiple types of services – all available from one service provider. This requires content management systems to aggregate data from more sources. It will not be enough to present textual data. Metadata must include visual images and deep links to more detailed data. It will not be enough to only present data about video content as service aggregation expands beyond audio and video to include gaming, social video and augmented reality.

The path to successfully delivering converged services will be dependent upon metadata. Metadata is already the source for guides designed to help viewers find something to watch every day. It is also the foundation for content discovery. Recommendations reveal content that is new or aligned to a subscriber’s past viewing history. The metadata challenge is to provide a contextual perspective of available content.

Whether service providers are aggregating, curating or recommending content, they and their subscribers require metadata providing synopses, cast & crew details, visual images, ratings, reviews, language spoken, deep links and more. Unfortunately, this level of detail is not all available from one source - especially when local content is included in the service. Additional challenges arise when popular programs are made available internationally, in different languages or called by a different name to appeal to local audiences.

MetaBroadcast helps video service providers overcome these hurdles. We aggregate and normalise metadata from multiple sources for your VOD, broadcast, FAST or pop-up media platforms. With over 50 existing integrations to popular data sources, we are familiar with the challenges of consolidating, organising and delivering data to service providers in the format and character sets they require. If we aren’t already ingesting data from the source required, we have the tools and processes required to acquire, transform, enrich and deliver it, with monitoring and reporting to de-risk any issues that often occur when provisioning a data pipeline.

With 15 years of experience Atlas our SaaS active data platform, provides rich tools, a data lake, and a mature ETL process for metadata that has been developed based on the requirements of some of the biggest broadcasters in the world.  Yet our platform also serves the needs of smaller organisations and those expanding their content libraries. With over 99% of UK media asset metadata collected into Atlas’ data lake we meet some of the most demanding SLAs in the industry. This has all been built natively in the industry's number one cloud provider, since day one.  

MetaBroadcast provides more than just a metadata pipeline. Atlas is designed to achieve operational efficiencies via automated processes. Effective metadata workflow orchestration combined with metadata expertise allows MetaBroadcast to help customers expedite service launch or expansion by providing knowledge on how to scale metadata acquisition to align with customer growth and content delivery strategies. 

As broadcasters, streaming services, Pay TV providers and other service providers capitalise on the consumer’s appetite for converged entertainment services, metadata will be critical for optimising the consumer experience, simplifying navigation of increasingly complex service offerings and achieving monetisation goals.