Metadata Landscape

Project Status:

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Completed

The project has been completed.

Start:

July 1, 2020

Estimated Completion:

September 1, 2020

Problem Statement

The metadata ingest landscape is complex with different definitions, standards, and actors. It is challenging to get an overview when first engaging with metadata. This project will create a metadata landscape document to help better understand the technical challenges.

Project Description

Metadata is a critical component of the streaming video experience. Not only does it provide crucial information about the video (such as title and actors) but it can also be instrumental in content discovery. But, there is little standardization around streaming video metadata. Studios, for example, may provide vastly different metadata to OTT streaming platforms requiring normalization before it can be used. Metadata from studios describing video assets, like movies and TV shows, can not only be different in structure, but also in terminology. What one studio terms “genre” may be called something else by another studio. This creates significant workflow-related issues for OTT streaming platforms when ingesting information. This project will attempt to map the landscape of those differences and identify the specific areas where the Streaming Video Alliance can provide guidance, best practices, and even specifications to help standardize this metadata. By doing so, the process of OTT streaming platforms ingesting content from studios can be greatly simplified and even expanded with streaming-specific metadata terms. The document produced by the group will strive to include the metadata terms and definitions commonly employed by studios, actors and users of metadata, production, aggregation, consumer operation, and current metadata frameworks/standardization.

Project Type

Document

Project Leads

Advisors

Published Documents

Version: 1.0

Date Plublished: 11/01/2021

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SVTA1023: Metadata Landscape

The evolution of content distribution models over the past decades has introduced a tremendous amount of flexibility for content processing and delivery. The availability of metadata, which provides information related to descriptive, business, and technical aspects of content, is needed to take advantage of advanced content streaming approaches. Commonly used metadata approaches primarily serve static distribution models. Additionally, there are a lack of solutions available that provide a consistent, user-friendly, and efficient approach to managing metadata. This document provides a starting point for understanding metadata usage and challenges and looks at organizations that have developed metadata-related standards.

Goals and Objectives

This project has the following goals and objectives:
  • To aggregate existing research within the group to create an “ingest metadata landscape” document that clearly identifies the challenges which need to be addressed.

Project Scope

This project WILL address the following:
  • A list of common metadata terms and definitions used when providing content to OTT streaming platforms
  • An identification of current metadata standards, formats, and ontologies
  • An analysis of those current efforts and where they succeed and fail in helping to standardize metadata ingest terminology
  • Any current technology solutions which can be applied to address this challenge
    This project WILL NOT address the following:
  • A recommendation of specific metadata terms or definitions
  • A recommendation of specific existing standards and/or technology solutions

Contributors

The following members have contributed to this project. Click on their name to visit their profile. If they have not published their profile, the link will redirect to their LinkedIn profile.

Additional References

There are no additional references or other required readings need to participate in this project.

Presentations

The following presentations delivered during Metadata working group sessions may provide additional information about this project.