Connections

LOS ANGELES — Bill Isbell, director of sales for Gracenote, received an odd request one day from one of the clients using the company’s Studio System enterprise-level collaboration platform, regarding accessing the project assets that can be folded into the system.

“I want to see it while driving down the freeway,” Isbell quoted the client as saying, earning some laughs during a morning presentation at the Oct. 4 Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit (HITS) Fall event.

While that may not be safest use of Gracenote’s Studio System, Gracenote’s goal developing the platform sure does allow for it. The latest iteration of the platform — dubbed Studio System Projects — allows customers (and content creation teams specifically) to better manage the creation of both films and episodic content, with the ability to create a central repository that can store everything associated with a project (storyboards, casting videos, script drafts, etc.).

“Before the Studio System Projects product was scoped and developed, we consulted with several Studio System customers,” Simon Adams, Gracenote GM of video, told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) when the upgrade was announced. “We asked them what tools they regularly used and what features and functionality would be most useful in a third-party solution. Their feedback was critical in shaping Studio System Projects as it exists today.”

The upgrade builds on the data-driven backbone that’s already made Studio System one of the most-used tools in the industry, according to Grant Cover, head of media for Gracenote. He said that the sheer amount of content being created today requires solutions that aid in every step of the creation process, by not only offering up as much related data as possible, but also by making it simple to make sense of that data (and make better decisions because of it).

“There’s just so much content being created, the amount of chaos, the amount of dissidence that’s creating [is daunting],” Cover said. “We help make sense of that, using the data that’s out there.”

Gracenote touts its Studio System services as offering the industry’s most accurate data on TV, movie and digital projects alike, with information covering development, finances, talent, representative contact information, and more.

“We’ll support big media companies and small teams, production companies,” Isbell said. “It’s designed to do both.”

HITS Fall was sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Box, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, TiVo, Cognizant, DXC Technology, Gracenote, LiveTiles, ThinkAnalytics, Wasabi, Aspera, EIDR, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, human-I-T, Zaszou IT Consulting, OnPrem Solution Partners, and Bob Gold & Associates, and was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Smart Content Council and Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).