M+E Daily

Related Content Database Changes Company Name to Watchwith, Announces New Platform-as-a-Service

Related Content Database, Inc. (RCDb) announced its corporate name change to Watchwith on March 20, in a move that sharpens the company’s focus on enabling second-screen and other syndicated content experiences for consumers around films, television programs, and advertising.

In addition to launching the Watchwith platform-as-a-service product offering, the company is also unveiling a new website at watchwith.com, and opening a beta developer program for the Watchwith Platform.

“Watchwith better represents the company’s focus on providing Hollywood studios and broadcast programmers with a platform to create, control and syndicate metadata around their film, TV, and advertising content,” chief executive Zane Vella tells M&E Daily. “The name ‘RCDb’ served us well over the past 6 years, reminding us of our mission to build a definitive database of value-added metadata around premium content, but now it is about the consumer experience made possible by our data and services.”

The Watchwith Platform adds a layer of time-based metadata to programming, enabling content owners to deliver syndicated, related content to consumers across devices such as smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs. According to the company, such related content properties can grow to become profit generators as licensed products for entertainment companies.

Components of the Watchwith Platform include:

• Watchwith Console: Web-based tools to create, manage and control time-based events;

• Watchwith Showrunner: A Mac OSX desktop application for creating and programming related content experiences;

• Related Content Database: An enterprise-grade database that stores content owner created time-based events and second-by-second metadata for thousands of films and television shows;

• Watchwith API: A scalable interface for multi-platform metadata distribution, supporting various file, syndication and delivery formats;

• Watchwith Sync Service: Client and server software that enables synchronization with IP-delivered content and also leverages EBIF to provide content synchronization in legacy set-top box environments; and

• Watchwith Tester Apps and SDKs: Accelerating the development of time-based metadata driven apps, with preintegrated support for Gracenote Entourage, Zeitera, and Audible Magic automatic content recognition (ACR) solutions.

App developers are invited to participate in the Watchwith Platform beta program by requesting access at watchwith.com/developers.