16 TVBEurope in association with


www.tvbeurope.com July 2014


so we’re starting to tie those two ends of the chain together.” There is some fl exibility in the ITV metadata scheme from programme to programme or genre to genre. Parameters specifi c to the content of an individual programme are left to the production staff, but the key core metadata set has been standardised.


Turner’s Steve Fish: “When you have a million titles to deal with, these are not trivial problems.”


going to have several hundred independent freelance producers or production houses how are you doing to get them to adhere to your standard of metadata? What are you going to do? Are you going to bring that content in to you fi rst?


That is going to add another layer of work within your


organisation, especially if you’ve got hundreds of hours of independently produced content.”


“Journos are quite


literate with the technology, if it suits them. And it suits them if it works” Paul Stevenson, ITV


Sky News got around the problem by controlling data entry with standardised drop- down fi elds, but how to keep metadata coherent when content may come in from diverse producers in diverse locations, is an ongoing challenge. Keeping metadata consistent within a controlled environment like a broadcast studio is diffi cult enough, but a company whose specialty is repurposing and distributing globally produced, often independent, content can be problematic


Steve Fish explained that, as Turner Broadcasting has moved away from tape, the role of librarian has transformed more into a content curation role, and one where looking after and managing the data around content has become a major job. Fish remarked that at Turner, the cost of managing the assets versus the actual storage of them is now approaching 10 to one – organising the fi le structure, managing the metadata and


curating the content costs ten times as much as the storage of the material. “Even simple metadata becomes a challenge when you upload an archive with a million assets in it, and have to make sure the metadata’s right, and the spelling, and have to answer questions like, is it ‘The Scooby Doo Show’ or ‘Scooby Doo Show, The’? When you have a million titles to deal with, these are not trivial problems.” It was agreed that the next generation of systems will have to be extensible. Production is changing so rapidly, with a new technology trialled every few months, that workfl ows and the software that support them will need to be expandable and adaptable.


The need for expandability was made clear by Fish: “We’re just going through a process with our workfl ow, and we’ve got about 400 different metadata points at the moment. There are


only about 100 that are really valuable, but over the past 25 years we’ve captured about 400. We’re migrating it into a new database. But soon 4K is going to become an issue — or 6K or 8K or High Dynamic Range, or who knows what. Systems are going to have to extend. They are going to have to be able to cope with changes, without having to rewrite the whole system. That I think is going to be the real trick with whatever the next generation of technology is.”


“The beauty of an old record report,” said Fish, illiciting laughs from the table, “was if there wasn’t a fi eld printed on it, you just scribbled it on there and anyone who picked it up knew what you meant.”


Forget your spreadsheet “We have started to address this”, said Suker about the new metadata methods at ITV, “We’ve put in a system where we capture the metadata right at the earliest stage that it’s generated. And I mean right at the earliest stage, with the conception of the idea, then we use that editorial specifi cation throughout the rest of the chain. And we’re mandating that. We’re saying ‘You will do it this way. Forget your spreadsheet, forget your Word document, forget your emails, it’s all going in one place.’ Some of that metadata that’s entered in the beginning will go into that DPP delivery format at the very end,


Educating the journos There was agreement that education of people coming into the industry was key, but just as much, industry veterans whose careers spanned many years of linear workfl ows, needed to be taught to think about workfl ows in new ways. Avid’s Craig Dwyer said that he has talked to many customers about managing metadata and was impressed by the solutions developed by a public broadcasting company in Finland, which had carried out an enormous cross-system integration, joining up their systems and creating a new connected media ecosystem.


“They were having real issues with metadata in the archive, because the journalists who had all the information just weren’t that worried about entering it. But as they were modernising their system, they noticed the video on-demand side of the business was growing. All of the journalists wanted their stories on the new on-demand platform. They could see there, much more easily than they could in the regular broadcast, how the playlists were working and how they were ranked by Most


Popular. But the journalists couldn’t publish them on the VOD platform unless they entered all the metadata and the synopsis. Suddenly, overnight, the journalists were quite happy spending all their time adding the metadata to get their material on the VOD. And obviously the metadata for the VOD platform linked right back into the MAM system and into the archive. You’ve got to try to tune into the cultural change as well and fi nd ways to motivate the staff.”


“Yes,” agreed Paul Stevenson of ITV News, “You’ve got to incentivise people to do it. Otherwise there’s always the question: ‘Why are there all these bloody fi elds I’ve got to populate?’”


Stevenson went on to say note that well-designed technology, combined in workfl ows that make sense, become easier to use. “Sometimes people retrench to some simpler processes. They go back to something that’s a little bit manual, but it gets around a lot of the complexity. It’s a diffi cult thing to resist. When we instituted fi le transfer desktop to desktop at ITV news, it took off exponentially. Journalists realised they could retrieve a clip straight to their desktop without going through a long process. There was a bit of learning they had to do to make it work, but that was fi ne because they were incentifi ed. Journos are quite literate with the technology, if it suits them. And it suits them if it works. People will respond and adapt well, if the solution actually works.”


Mark Wilson-Dunn, BT Media and Broadcast


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