HITS

When it comes to errors regarding your content avails, you’d think the problems would be mostly isolated with your deep library. You’d think wrong, according to Erik Anderson, founder and president of Premiere Digital.

Speaking Oct. 18 at the HITS Fall: Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit, Anderson shared data showing that the error rate his company has found among client avails can range anywhere between 15% and 30%, and that’s not isolated just to deep libraries that “nobody’s paying attention to,” but problems have popped up even with $500 million box office hits, released just in last few years.

Finding and allowing content companies to fix those avails issues is the purpose behind Premiere Digital’s Storefront Management software, which tracks global availabilities across nearly 20 retailers worldwide every day, and has the capability of making as many as 50,000 availability changes in just a couple days (“Regardless of what it’s called, regardless of what language it’s in, regardless what retailer it’s on, we have it [covered],” Anderson added. “And we’re refreshing it every day, all assets [linked] to it”).

“There are a tremendous amount of avails being tracked, a tremendous amount of data points, and in order to be able to take action on it, you need to be able to parse it out correctly,” Anderson said. “The good news is, [our] system is able to immediately give you feedback on what was brought in, there are this many errors, breaks the errors up into type, and then you can download the report in order to update your system of record.”

Once the avails are in, and any errors are identified, the ones that are ready to go are made part of a report that shows how that content can be used, covering all the different formats, retailers and territories. The main error types Premiere Digital’s offering finds include when titles are supposed to be available, pricing mismatches, and incorrect ratings.

“The number of availabilities just keeps going up, and it’s not practical for people to track those availabilities across every territory to make sure they’re right,” he added. “People historically have been doing this on a one-off basis, around what they consider to be important content.”

Premiere’s system tracks everything associated with a title, from synopsis, to cast and crew, from production company to pricing, and one of its benefits is the ability to track historical changes on pricing, regional availability, and more. And, additionally, the ability to track the errors, and where they come from.

With so many avails, so many platforms, so many regions, and so many formats, errors are going to pop up. But with services like Storefront Management available today, content owners don’t have to live with them anymore. “Let’s do something about it,” Anderson said.

The 2017 edition of HITS Fall was presented by Cast & Crew, with sponsorship by Ooyala, Sohonet, Microsoft Azure, Premiere Digital, TiVo, LiveTiles and Veritone. Produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), the event’s association partners include the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Smart Content Council, Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH), the Los Angeles chapter of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA).