Metadata Matters Podcast GrayMeta

This week we speak to Carl Jones, Senior Director at FTI Consulting about some of the key trends he's seeing in terms of metadata management in the Media & Entertainment industry.

Carl shares his perspectives based on his work in the Media & Entertainment industry providing advisory services around OTT technology, metadata management and digital supply chain.

FTI Consulting is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organisations manage change, mitigate risk and resolve disputes. In the TMT space, FTI Consulting provide a combination of corporate strategy, business transformation and digital transformation, as well as evaluating M&A decisions.

During our discussion with Carl, we discuss:
- the key trends he's seeing relating to metadata management, like the consolidation of data systems
- challenges faced by customers around metadata, such as the organizational and process complexities when consolidating systems
- navigating a complex vendor landscape when selecting a new system or making a build, buy or acquire decision
- using time-specific metadata to drive contextual advertising, targeted e-commerce, a more personalised recommendations
- the role metadata plays internally within an organization like FTI Consulting

Florian Bauer, Chief Solutions Officer at Semantic Web is our guest this week and he helps us explore the topic of metadata and knowledge graphs.
Semantic Web has a knowledge graph product called Pool Party, which helps companies structure their metadata and understand their content better.
During this episode, Florian discusses:
How knowledge graphs help make better decision making, improving content discovery, and increase end-customer satisfaction through personalisation.The challenges faced by many content companies - such as the lack of a controlled media vocabularySome great practical advice to start creating a control vocabulary.
If you are interested in reading the whitepaper series that Florian mentioned, here's the link: https://www.poolparty.biz/upcoming-white-paper-on-product-360

This week, we talk to Rob Tucker, Founder & CEO at Meta about how their film & broadcast content metadata platform is helping customers manage their data. We discuss a range of topics including:
- the impact of bad data to a media organisations
- how metadata drives viewer engagement and reduces churn
- and some exciting example of how using different types of metadata could improve content personalisation

We speak to Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant this week about how Signiant is helping meet their customer's metadata challenges. Signiant is a trusted broker in the exchange of media files across the content supply chain and Margaret discusses a range of topics including:

- chain of custody metadata allowing content owners to know where the content has been and where it is going
- How products like CloudSpex are helping checking expected metadata is present before moving files
- using machine learning to optimizing movement of content based on the package being sent
- using usage data to better understand trends and emerging needs of the industry
- taxonomies & schemas - when they need to be strict and when they need to be flexible
- the trade off of human curation vs automation
- and corporate memory

This week we're looking at how metadata can be used as part of knowledge management platform and industry research. To help me explore this topic, I talk to Ben Dales, Head of Digital & Lorenzo Zanni, Head of Knowledge at the IABM.
The IABM's use of GrayMeta's Curio platform is a great example of how the same machine learning metadata can be used by different functions within a company. Lorenzo and Ben also share some practical advice on adopting machine learning technology.
To find out more about the IABM, their website is: https://theiabm.org/

Chris Lennon, Office of CTO, Director of Standards Strategy at Ross Video talks about metadata and his new book, co-written by Clyde Smith, "The Media Workflow Puzzle: How it all fits together".

We discuss a wide range of topics including:
- the role metadata plays in interoperability and standards
- editorial metadata and driving discoverability
- how capturing metadata within production is key to drive usage downstream
- IMF format as a key enabler for repurposing and versioning content based on metadata
- globalisation and consolidation of the media industry
- how our approach to building standards needs to change with the pace of innovation happening in the industry