HITS

An investment in descriptive, time-based metadata has helped Sony Pictures to better understand its content library, and the studio is doing it with the help of enterprise NoSQL database firm MarkLogic.

Matt Turner, CTO of media and manufacturing for MarkLogic, and Jason Lambert, executive director of content licensing and metadata for Sony Pictures Entertainment, will be on hand at the May 23 HITS Spring event at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, to show how a data-driven mindset is helping Sony drive content discovery and re-use, in the presentation “How Sony is Leveraging Curated Descriptive Metadata for Competitive Business Value.”

“It’s not just that you’re investing in data, you’re doing it for a purpose, solving a lot of internal issues, and improving the marketplace,” Turner said. “We’ll show what data can do.”

Lambert will discuss how the studio’s investment in data has helped it exploit Sony’s archives for clip licensing and more. Instead of just pre-defining a bunch of clips that Sony might have thought would be marketable, the studio created time-based metadata across titles to understand what was happening all the way down to each frame in some instances.

So far, the studio has done this metadata work with approximately 500 key property titles, identifying where actors show up on screen, lines of dialogue, and more, creating layers of searchability across the titles. It creates a data-rich feedback loop that offers Sony incredible insights into its properties.

“We’re going to take the idea of a project, and give an actual demo that drives through the data, and we’re doing that by putting all this data in a hub,” Turner said. “The data, and the use of the data in, especially in that feedback loop, really delivers on common challenges using and finding content, and eliminating duplicate efforts.”

HITS Spring is presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by LiveTiles, 5th Kind, Amazon Web Services, Birlasoft, Expert System, MarkLogic, Microsoft Azure, Richey May Technology Solutions, SoftServe, Spark Digital, Avanade, CDSA, Cinelytic, EIDR, MicroStrategy, Signiant, the Trusted Partner Network, human-I-T, and Zaszou IT Consulting.

The event is produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA); and the Smart Content Council.

For more information visit HollywoodITSummit.com. To become a sponsor and participate in the event, contact Christian Calson at [email protected] or 310-945-6284.