CDSA

HITS Fall: EIDR Identification Can Help M&E Companies Boost Efficiency

Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) identification and the automation made possible by it can significantly help media and entertainment companies increase efficiency by integrating titles into their existing workflows and supply chains, according to Richard Kroon, its engineering director.

“Our belief is that automation is not a differentiator,” he said during the deep-dive workshop presentation “EIDR Member Q&A – Stories from the Front Lines of Workflow Optimization” at the Oct. 4 Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit (HITS) Fall event.

Manual title matching and manual workflows “should not be where you’re making your money,” he said, adding: “We want everyone doing these things” to boost efficiency, he said.

“EIDR identification and the resulting automation should be a given across the industry,” he explained to the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) after the presentation. He added: “There will be first mover advantage for early adopters, but ultimately everyone should be doing it – because if you’re not, you won’t stay around for much longer. Use of EIDR should not be a proprietary advantage, so it should not represent a competitive differentiator. Instead, companies should compete based on their unique products and services.”

The HITS panel presentation took a peek at EIDR use cases that have helped companies increase efficiency and integrate titles into existing workflows and supply chains. Attendees were told how to take their asset and title management to a new level with tips and tricks from real use cases designed to help them utilize the registry to enable a seamless experience.



Introducing the panel, Kroon told attendees: “We intentionally have a mixed group” of industry players at the event that was designed to provide “some broad perspective” and “show that EIDR isn’t just a one-trick pony” and that its shared identification-based automation system is “really used in a variety of ways [across] different industry segments.”

One example was provided by Bruce Nash, founder and president of L.A.-based Nash Information Services, who said his research-based company runs a website, The Numbers, that “built up this big database – of 30,000 movies now – with various levels of data on it.” It’s at the point now where a studio might conceivably come to it and ask for all the data Nash Information Services has on that studio’s own movies and may then want to integrate Nash’s data in with what the studio itself is doing, he explained. That’s why Nash turned to the EIDR identification system and his company recently completed the first round of integration with EIDR, he said.

Jennifer Morales, avails team manager at Rightsline, an L.A.-based company that specializes in catalog, contract, inventory and royalty management, noted that he company’s system is based on titles. “One of the intriguing things is one of the services you provide is EIDR service,” Kroon said of Rightsline, adding: “So, you’re not producing content yourself, but you are providing EIDR services to other people.”

Morales explained that her company “might receive avails from different studios …but everything lives under that single title” for each piece of content. She added: “In order to keep it clean, we utilize the EIDR IDs in order to match titles…. The title matching is the big thing for us with EIDR because I want a clean library. I don’t want to spend my time matching everything.”

With her company’s title matching system, she went on to say: “When we ingest the avails from the studio, the EIDR ID is provided. It will then make a call to [the] web site to verify” that the match is correct. “If the title comes in again and the EIDR is changed,” there is an indication that it needs to be checked, she said, adding her company is processing avails for Google Play now.

Other panelists that pointed how the EIDR ID system has helped their companies boost efficiency included Aaron Sloman, CTO of L.A.-based video supply chain technology company Ownzones Entertainment Technologies.

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 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).