ed Bull Media House, the content arm of the soft drink brand, offers a 360-degree business from print to audio to TV and is described by
CTO Andreas Gall as a “media station.” It’s not a stretch to say that the brand is a media company which sells drinks instead of advertising and a phenomenally successful one at that, selling nearly 5 billion cans last year. The production division’s output encom- passes entertainment channel Red Bull TV, lifestyle channel Servus TV, magazines Speedweek and Red Bulletin, even a radio channel in New Zealand. It has 30 million Facebook followers, runs more than 900 domains in 36 languages, and with 300+ million views is one of the top five sports content producers on YouTube. “In the past brands were part of the advertising. In future they will be part of the content business,” says Gall. “You have to be really sensitive when you integrate a brand into content. In motorsport it is easier because the sponsor brands are important to the story but in other types of content we try to keep the brand in the background.”
Gall joined the company five years ago to spearhead efforts to create and manage the growing stock of Red Bull source material. At its heart is ContentPool, an asset management system that controls media from ingest to QC, playout to archive at its Salzburg, Austria HQ then offers finished programming for international distribution. Interestingly the whole system was developed in-house because there was nothing Gall could find off-the-shelf to achieve their ambition. That approach holds true for the way the division is now pushing boundaries with metadata.
It is testing the automated capture of biometric, GPS and telemetric data from mini camera systems which can be strapped to equipment or athletes competing in extreme sports like X-Fighters and kite surfing. The aim is to enrich the second screen experience and fuel new revenue opportunities. “We are looking to synchronise performance tracking data with the content and to develop the system in-house because we can influence metadata integration much better when it is under our own control,” he says. Speaking at IBC on the subject, Gall’s
recommendation to producers was to take as much care over metadata “as you do every day for your audio visual business. Metadata embedded with content can allow you to ex- plore new business models. It is becoming ex- ceptionally important to all media from apps and games to TV.”