PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — Ampere Analysis tracks movie and TV titles across SVOD and AVOD catalogues, along with broadcast and FAST channels, in more than 50 markets, covering 1.6 million-plus unique titles.
And Ampere’s job is made that much easier thanks to the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), according to Fred Black, Ampere’s research director of the Americas, speaking at the recent EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (APM), hosted by Google.
“EIDR helps Ampere know what a piece of content in the U.S. is the same, or not, as one in the U.K.,” Black said during the presentation, “Key Trends in Content Distribution: Sharing is Caring?” “And this trusted ID allows us to do this at scale.”
Ampere tracks:
• How VOD catalogues and channel schedules compare across genre mix, content age, and country of origin, and how content strategies evolve.
• The trends that can be observed in content licensing and distribution strategies across platforms and channels.
• The content gaps in a platform’s library or a channel’s programming lineup.
• Which titles are performing best at regional and global levels, and how their popularity shifted over time.
• How titles from a specific production market are distributed internationally.
• Which platforms or channel owners held the first, second, and third window rights to
specific titles.
• Which titles might be available for acquisition?
The workflow to track all this is extremely complicated, Black said, and EIDR forms the backbone of several stages that keep the data accurate and timely. “Our relationship with EIDR, which has been ongoing for nearly 10 years now, is critical to two of these – our title matching, and our metadata reconciliation and output,” he said.
The matching process takes each unique input title ID and assigns it to a specific piece of content, and each unique movie, TV show, or season that’s tracked requires detailed metadata to be assigned, so Ampere users can search titles. Both require EIDR ID integrated into the workflow.
For matching, Ampere takes different pieces of content across different platforms, languages, and countries, and identifies each using EIDR. For metadata, EIDR is a primary source, particularly for alternate language titles. “Once the different sources of data have been reconciled and matched into unique movies and TV seasons, we need to ensure each has the relevant metadata that our clients require,” Black’s presentation said. “Metadata assignment is done on a sliding scale, with the most trusted sources given priority … EIDR is particularly strong on production company data and alternate title languages.”
Take “Game of Thrones”: in the U.S., you know it’s being distributed exclusively on HBO Max. But elsewhere, like the U.K. and Australia, it can be found on as many as three different streaming services. Having EIDR IDs allows Ampere to be sure nothing is duplicated and everything is tracked correctly, despite the different regional services it’s being distributed on.