2/9/2016 Smart Content Panel Tackle Content Mining : Media & Entertainment Services Alliance

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Smart Content Panel Tackle Content Mining : Media &Entertainment Services Alliance

By Chris Tribbey

Before coming over to Universal Music Group last year as its new VP of advanced media planning andmanagement, JR Yasgur spent more than a decade with Sony Pictures Entertainment. And whether it’s thefilm or the music side of the entertainment business, one thing’s the same: justifying a return on investmentwhen it comes to adopting new ways to tackle data isn’t easy.

“We can talk about what type of data we need to capture from an operational perspective, to ingest ourcontent, to preserve it, archive it, store it, remonetize it, that’s different data than what we’re talking aboutwhen it comes to enriching the consumer experience, monetizing it and the social data that accompaniesit,” Yasgur said, speaking at the second annual Smart Content Summit. “On the studio and music side,there is a bit of a challenge for us to justify the ROI, because each of these initiatives, they certainly arecostly, require structure, resources … initially it’s often driven by the marketing group, with how we’re goingto re-exploit the content.”

She was speaking during a panel on how entertainment companies today are going about managing theirhuge libraries of content, and doing it beyond simple text-based search by creating taxonomies andontologies to help find the relationships between assets. And the more content you’re dealing with, themore complex the job of mapping those relationships, panelists agreed.

Aaron Edell, VP of operations and professional services for GrayMeta, said media and entertainmentcompanies must strive for normalization when dealing with multiple data sets, to make sure data issearchable across multiple data aggregators and multiple data providers. He and others continued to usean analogy offered up by Eric Iverson, SVP and divisional CIO for Sony Pictures Television, that your datacan’t just be thrown haphazardly into a garage, but must be organized neatly in the garage. The cleanerthat garage becomes, the easier it is to find — and monetize — content.

“We can now look into the boxes, and see what everything is, programmatically, and we don’t have to tageverything manually,” Edell said. “I think we approach it backwards some times: we start with theorganization and the taxonomy, and then use that to attack the data, rather than use the data to attack theorganization.

“The big upside to semantic metadata is that before it was a very manual process, and now you can get amuch greater economy of scale through automation, and the point of having all this data — big data — isyou’re starting to make the connections, that you’re finances have relevance to what kind of money you’respending on storage, or what kind of cameras you’re renting, what kind of data is coming in from other

2/9/2016 Smart Content Panel Tackle Content Mining : Media & Entertainment Services Alliance

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locations, and you have to be able to sit in a place where you can logically see all of that.”

Matt Turner, CTO of media and publishing for MarkLogic, extended the analogy further: the intelligence inthe data — and your taxonomies, ontologies and semantics —are the bins, the shelves you put in placebefore you put your data in. And to Yasgur’s point, he does see a shift happening in the ways companiesare investing in how they tackle their data.

“Instead of just throwing everything into the garage, it’s not just organizing it neatly, it’s organizing it for aspecific purpose,” he said. “Semantic data is flexible. If you use these [more recent] approaches, you’rebuilding a base of information that isn’t thrown away, it isn’t just for one purpose. And that’s a big differencein how you make an investment in the data. It’s going to pay off in other areas later.”

For Matthew Wildrick, senior manager of product management for Rovi Corp., he believes it’s all well andgood that companies are thinking about how to organize their garages of data, but maybe they should alsospend some time looking at how that data got there in the first place, and learning from that. “If you don’thave the data in the first place, if you can’t think about all of this stuff in the context of billions of files —because really, we’re not talking about a few boxes in the garage, we’re talking about billions of them —you need to be able to account for them, and that whatever semantics you do come up with, it’s going to bereliant on humans entering metadata,” he said.

Yasgur said getting your garage in order is worth the headaches: finding new ways to identify and retrievedata opens up all sorts of new avenues of monetization, data areas you may not have previously thoughtabout capturing around content. “How do you we go about identifying it? How do we implement a workflowfor capturing it going forward? And how do we go back to the existing library of content and capture thatinformation in an efficient, cost effective, operationally viable manner?” she said.

The Feb. 4 Smart Content Summit, presented by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA)brought together more than 300 top data, operations and research executives from TV, film and homeentertainment.

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