Exclusives

Metadata Solutions Front and Center Feb. 27 at Smart Content Summit West

When the industry’s best and brightest descend on the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel Feb. 27 for the fifth annual Smart Content West Summit, they’ll get a primer on the best practices, industry data initiatives and tools that studios, broadcasters and their business partners are using to make content more identifiable, accessible and useable.

And among the more crucial topics on the minds of industry execs today is how metadata figures into today’s content business. Here’s a quick primer on the metadata topics Smart Content West attendees will encounter:

• The Metadata Madness luncheon will have attendees hearing updates from trade groups and others regarding current industry metadata needs, and the standards and best practices being formed or already in place. Harold Geller, executive director of Ad-ID, Erik Hansen, digital media industry evangelist with the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), Seth Levenson, project director of the cloud for the Entertainment and Technology Center @ USC (ETC), and Christopher Stefanidis, co-chair of the technology and operations committee for the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) and VP of digital distribution operations and strategy for The Walt Disney Company, will be on hand.

• In the presentation “I Want My Talent ID,” Eric Iverson, chief information officer for the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), will look at the industry’s plan to protect the privacy of talent, and whether there are benefits for automation and analytics that require a unique, digital identifier, with actors, screenwriters and directors often working across many companies.

• Tom Roach, SVP of technology for Warner Bros. Studios, will tackle the benefits of building a program at companies that expands diversity programs to include autistic individuals, who may have a unique methodology for problem solving or excel at repetitive tasks, in the presentation “Smart Minds: Neurodiversity in the Workplace.”

Other Smart Content West presentations and panels will include:

• “Smart Production Technologies at Work,” with Angel Stone, director of production IT for Warner Bros. Technology, and Amie Tornincasa, manager of production technology for Netflix, with an introduction by Shawn Przybilla, M&E solutions architect for Amazon Web Services.

• “Practical Applications of Machine Learning for Image and Video in the Cloud” with AWS’s Przybilla.

• An “Innovation Across the Entertainment Industry; the MoviePass Effect” keynote by MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, chairman and CEO of MoviePass parent company Helios & Matheson Analytics.

• “How Direct to Consumer is Changing the Rules for M&E” by Richard Whittington, SVP and GM of media and entertainment industry cloud solutions for SAP.

• The panel “Data, Marketing and Analytics – A New Paradigm” with Jason Lambert, executive director of content licensing and metadata for Sony Pictures Entertainment, Greg Eansor, senior director of account success and acquisition for MicroStrategy, and Avi Swerdlow, manager of research and development for Disney/ABC Television Group.

• “Using Consumer ‘Watch Data’ to Grow Your OTT Service” with Jim Clements, director of business development for NeuLion.

• The session “Interactive Media: By The Numbers”with John Canning, chair of the Producers Guild of America’s (PGA) New Media Council and Mike Bloxham, SVP of global media and entertainment for Magid.

• Ad-ID’s Geller will moderate the panel “Smart Advertising: Advancing the Medium (for the Message)” with Mark London, VP of advanced ad products for FOX Networks Group and Chris Pizzurro, head of sales and marketing for Canoe.

Produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council, Smart Content West is sponsored by Amazon Web Services, MicroStrategy, NeuLion, MarkLogic, SAP, Bob Gold & Associates, Ad-ID, DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group, and the Entertainment Merchants Association.

To become a Smart Content Summit sponsor contact: Christian Calson at [email protected].

To register or find out more visit SmartContentSummit.com.