Exclusives

Michael Kadenacy, My Eye Media –

The concept behind content avails has always been simple: give digital retailers precise data regarding when a video is available to run, where it can publish, how it can be monetized (along with associated information, like languages and formats).

But the avails process has been anything but simple. Before recent work to standardize avails (especially by the Entertainment Merchants Association) most everyone — content companies and retailers alike — had looked to develop their own systems, their own internal infrastructures, to handle associated content data, with different workflows and disparate formats. If you’re tracking something that’s in a spreadsheet, manually altering it in order to be delivered to just one particular retailer can be problematic, to say the least.

The proliferation of digital outlets that a content owner can distribute its content to today — whether it be SVOD, VOD, or EST — has certainly opened up monetization opportunities that previously didn’t exist. But without standards — the collaboration of content owners and industry partners standardizing what’s required in avails— they can be unwieldy, and potentially problematic.

In this globally connected world, making sure your ratings are correct in each territory prevents a major consumer experience problem (although, that may be the least of your worries when it comes to inaccurate avails data).

Think about all your international release dates, and their release windows: if you have content that’s cleared for a certain release date, those first three to five days of availability are vital for generating revenue. Consider your legal and contractual obligations. If something’s not down when it’s supposed to be, it presents a potential contractual problem.

Why is the accuracy behind avails important? Because it means consumers have the best possible experience. If there’s something that hasn’t been availed properly, if there’s something not up when it’s supposed to be up, you lose your audience.

For companies like ourselves — supply chain supporters and developers — having a standardized avails format allows us to develop tools to help our clients make sure their content is accurate on their storefronts, that what’s supposed to be there is there, when it’s supposed to be available.

Avails over the years

Avails is a term that’s been around for years in the M&E space, and is simply a shortened version of Content Availability Metadata, the subset of data needed to help content owners communicate with retailers about when and where a piece of video will be made available online, along with the product’s title, run time, resolution, and distribution format (SVOD, EST, etc.).

Seeing avails delivered in everything from the body of an email to PDFs to JPEGs, the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) began creating a list of best practices and standards for the delivery of avails, releasing its first pass on standardizing avails in early 2013.

Over the years, EMA’s avails workgroup — which today includes representatives from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, MovieLabs, Netflix, Rovi, Sony and more — has tackled a host of issues surrounding avails. Among the first avails challenges that was tackled was developing around 40 standardized fields to cover every possible piece of information a retailer needed to schedule an online video for consumption. The avails working group also settled on two forms of avails delivery: Excel and XML, with the end goal being 100% adoption of the latter.

EMA reported almost instant results once retailers began incorporating the avails standard: what used to take days when it came to ingesting avails was now being done in less than an hour, with errors that previously haunted the process almost completely eliminated. First used exclusively for movies, the EMA Avails Template eventually became of use for TV titles as well.

But the explosion of new digital services in the last couple of years — namely in the over-the-top space — has kept EMA, and the industry at large, on its toes when it comes to the avails template, with new distributors and new ways of distribution opening up new avails issues that have needed to be addressed.

That’s resulted in the EMA tackling a host of issues in the avails space, including better addressing the multiple VOD and EST windows a title may have; how different distribution formats for a title need to be addressed in the same country; the inclusion of the Full Extract best practice, which includes both the current and future avails a content owner wants to communicate to any platform; the addressing of TV specific problems around avails to address both season and episode issues; and more.

Tools for avails accuracy

For us, it’s about the accuracy of the delivery of avails, and the standards behind it, because it allows us to offer more robust services and tools to content owners.

In March, we launched our Storefront Testing and Online Retail Monitoring (STORM) metadata-monitoring platform, geared toward both studios and content creators. It’s a highly scalable service that helps companies check the accuracy of listings across distribution platforms, using automated, cloud-based software, covering release dates, pricing, product placement and other basic metadata like titles and descriptions.

In the past it’s been challenging for studios to verify products are correctly displayed and marketed, managing hundreds of outlets and manually double-checking metadata. My Eye Media STORM helps them to instantly check online and see the status of their content in stores worldwide.

My Eye Media STORM has helped fulfill a real need in the industry. Because we’re a global business with a global workforce, we open access to territories that logistically wouldn’t otherwise be efficient for content owners to access.

We offer a centralized portal to see what their content looks like, internationally, across storefronts. Instead of having to call a colleague in Germany, they can just use our software to see how their content is displayed, and be much nimbler when it comes to addressing any potential issues. Before, it might have taken weeks before an international issue could be addressed. Now it can be done almost immediately.

My Eye Media STORM allows studios and other content owners to check the accuracy of digital storefront listings, covering numerous distribution platforms worldwide. And while adoption of avails standards across the supply chain has been inconsistent, progress has been made, thanks to the tools that have been made available.

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