Welcome to the ETC Metadata Discussion Group

[KC Blake]

Welcome to the ETC's Metadata Discussion Group.

The purpose of this group is to provide a place to broaden the
industry discussion around content metadata creation and distribution.

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. As an extension of the efforts of this group, the ETC has
created the ETC Distribution Metadata Reflector in order to expand the
dialog to a broader set of industry professionals.

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.
Some forward-looking groups have sought to simplify the process;
MovieLabs and the Entertainment Merchant's Association (EMA), for
example, recently released Version 1.0 of the EMA Metadata
specification, covering information delivered from publishers to
retailers (http://www.entmerch.org/ema_metadata_.html).

What is typically missing from the various public metadata documents/
specifications are details on how content providers should actually
construct metadata. The Entertainment Technology Center recently
published ETC Marketing Metadata 1.0 in order to scratch the surface
on that topic -- tackling first and foremost, descriptive metadata
(much of what the EMA specification calls "Basic Metadata"). Our goal
in writing this document was to provide 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. This
document is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing dialogue
-- people learning from each other in this rapidly evolving
marketplace. Our hope is to expand this set of best practices as time
goes on so that, whether people are preparing content for iTunes,
Amazon, Hulu or a future distributor who has perhaps adopted the EMA
Metadata specification, they can learn from each other, can provide
consistent and meaningful metadata that will make it that much easier
for the distributor to accept and market the content and for the
consumer to find, purchase, and/or enjoy it.

We hope that you will find this group to be a useful resource for
you and your company and we look forward to your participation.

Regards,
KC Blake
Metadata Working Group Co-Chair
Entertainment Technology Center @ USC

[Wangyin@MediacorpSingapore]

Thanks KC. The metadata standards are very well documented. I will
post copy of SMMCore (Singapore Multimedia Metadata Core) shortly.
SMMCore is a working result of metadata sub-workgroup and was
contributed mostly by MediaCorp, Ascent media and Disney.


Let's see whether the two documents can complement each other.