Exclusives

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — Data integration and personalization are important tools for content users, especially as over-the-top (OTT) services continue to gain in popularity, but challenges remain, according to executives from companies including MarkLogic, Avanade and SAS, who spoke May 25 at the HITS: Spring 2017 event.

In a session called “Getting to the Source and Preparing for the Future of Smart Content,” Matt Turner, CTO of media and entertainment at database company MarkLogic, noted that his company was “involved very early in the concept of smart content.” The goal of smart content is to make use of data throughout each part of the creative process to create better experiences for consumers and also streamline the supply chain, he said.

A takeaway from the segment was that, as all of the data comes together from a wide range of sources, there are now many tools to automate data enrichment and getting closer to source data in production could deliver even better experiences, prevent re-keying and improve data security.

Turner pointed to projects by companies including MarkLogic and Disney that have pioneered data integration from new cloud and digital production tools. Disney, for example, created a modular, and futureproof, descriptive metadata architecture while implementing machine learning and automation to avoid lock-in with any particular tool or platform as these processes evolve.

Smart content is continuing to evolve, Turner said, adding that as we prepare for the future, there will have to be flexibility in terms of “which kinds of data processes you’re going to be able to take advantage of and also maintaining at the core of the platform the data itself.”

There was an opportunity in late 2015-early 2016 to look at linking together data that had a common location, which was in the cloud, Turner said, pointing out that MarkLogic collaborated with Disney on a project around a film called “The Suitcase” that was designed to test how creating metadata during the making of a movie instead of just adding it during post-production could benefit viewers and makers of the content.

Data generated by that movie was stitched together and the companies were able to come up with a “real descriptive data set generated from the tools that were used in the production,” Turner said.

In the session “Put Your Metadata Into Focus,” Jukka Paajanen, regional technology innovation lead at business technology services company Avanade, said the “one thing I’ve really learned about metadata is it means different things to different people.” But there is wide agreement that “metadata is really important and it’s something we all need,” he said. For one thing, metadata makes it much easier and faster to find specific scenes. There are also always going to be scenes that don’t make it into a finished program that can conceivably be used again in another project, he pointed out.

But content creators typically generate, discard and recreate metadata multiple times during the script-to-distribution process, which results in wasted effort and data quality issues. There are benefits of applying a more streamlined and efficient approach to metadata capture, according to Paajanen.

Advanced technology now allows us to better facilitate manually entered metadata but also automate metadata creation, including object recognition from the video feed of the final cut or speech-to-text to extract context, he noted.

Automatic capture using artificial intelligence (AI) to capture data is one significant example and it’s starting to be used, he said. For one example, he said, facial recognition is used to automatically identify actors and actresses in a program automatically.

In the session “Personalizing Your Over The Top Service,” David Perona, director of customer intelligence at data management company SAS, discussed the importance of digital data collection, making content recommendations, lifecycle messaging, consumer engagement and monetization when it comes to OTT services.

In recent months, Perona had talked to people at a handful of studios who were in the middle of launching an OTT or streaming service, and he was “amazed” that they had consumer data in some cases — but not in an actual computer database, he said.

OTT service providers should be collecting and storing whatever data is possible from OTT service users, including when they tend to view that content, he said. All that data should then be used to “drive your digital personalization” for those users and companies should then track the results, he said, adding: “You want to leverage all of your consumer data” because those are “valuable assets”

Today, OTT service providers can also leverage machine learning to make recommendations, he stressed. Also important, he said, is to “test, test, test.”
Not all recommendations made to a service user will be valuable, after all. He told attendees: “Try different types of recommendations and then you always need to have some control groups, too.”

HITS: Spring is the largest gathering of the L.A. entertainment community’s most senior IT executives and technologists. More than 500 people attended HITS: Spring on May 25 at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles. Produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in partnership with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), and the Smart Content Council, HITS: Spring is presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Box, TiVo, Avanade, Amazon Web Services, Expert System, IBM, MarkLogic, MediaSilo, Microsoft Azure, Composite Apps, Deluxe, EIDR, HGST, SAS, Sohonet, Sony DADC NMS, Zaszou IT Consulting and Ooyala.

For more information visit HollywoodITSummit.com.