EIDR APM: Growing EIDR Everywhere

PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — “Growing EIDR Together” was the theme of this year’s EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (APM), hosted by Google. And speaker after speaker, presentation after presentation, showed the media and entertainment industry is fully behind doing just that.

“[The theme] reflects how I'm working with the board of directors: ‘How can we make either bigger, more pervasive?’” said EIDR managing director Hollie Choi.

Whether it’s been adding more international players, bringing in live event and sports data companies, redoing its front-facing web portal, or modernizing its rules-based deduplication technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning that evolves and improves on its own, EIDR has been doing its part to grow, and grow fast.

By the sounds of it at APM, so has everyone else.

“Treat EIDR as your universal key to better map your content across the Google ecosystem,” said Eric Moro, senior strategic partnerships development manager for Google. “Using EIDR is one of the best ways a partner can make sure content is discoverable. If our systems try to recognize data just using ‘Star Wars,’ it results in massive ambiguity. EIDR eliminates the guesswork.”

Google is deeply invested in the health of the media supply chain, Moro said. But the millions of TV and movie content queries Google handles daily are “only as good as the authoritative data” around that content. “[The way] EIDR is built helps to understand that a specific episode belongs to a specific season of a specific show. It prevents an unorganized mess,” he added.

“Growth isn’t just about the sheer number of titles It’s about the types of content we’re cataloging,” Moro said. That includes international content, unscripted TV, live sports, and more.

For PBS, meeting standards for metadata and its use across platforms required a single source of truth, and that meant EIDR, according to Rachelle Byars-Sargent, VP of enterprise metadata management for PBS. PBS uses EIDR’s required fields as a baseline to collect metadata for all licensed content, with EIDR IDs assigned and stored in PBS’s rights management system to identify assets correctly.

“It became very obvious we needed to have our own data quality in PBS,” she said. “To help EIDR is to embrace data quality inside your organization.”

MediaDataTV, which specializes in streaming entertainment metadata for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking markets, helped register approximately 72,000 of the 107,000 titles with an EIDR ID in Brazil, covering roughly 70 percent of the market for regional content, according to MediadataTV GM Carles Farrando. And it’s made content tracking and discovery immensely easier.

The common challenges facing the industry with poor metadata, he said, include duplicate titles, ambiguous entries, inconsistent content, and messy series structures. But with a strong ID solutions approach, content industry players can see faster, low-cost data ingestion, quickly fix catalog errors, and ease deduplication efforts across both VOD and live TV.

“We have to differentiate as much as possible in the database,” Carles said. “Having their own EIDR ID [does that].”

Fred Black, principal analyst and research director of the Americas for Ampere Analysis, said his firm tracks movie and TV titles available across SVOD and AVOD catalogues and broadcast and FAST channels, across more than 50 markets, covering more than 1.6 million unique titles.

What Ampere does is made immensely easier thanks to EIDR, with Ampere using EIDR for both title matching and metadata reconciliation. “EIDR helps Ampere know what a piece of content in the U.S. is the same, or not, as one in the U.K.,” he said. “And this trusted ID allows us to do this at scale.”

And EIDR’s involvement in identifying content is going beyond films, TV, and podcasts.

Dustin Sullivan, president of SportsDataIO, which provides real-time sports data APIs, shared with EIDR APM attendees insights into the Sports Data Exchange (SDX), an open standard for global sports data, which aims to have every major league, game, team, venue, and more updated every day throughout the year. Currently, approximately 50,000 teams across 30 sports are covered.

As a member of EIDR, SportsDataIO will begin pre-seeding a new “Event” entity type for the organization.

Meanwhile, Marc Gray, CEO of media authenticity standard firm SonicOrigin, argued that EIDR can be the verification layer needed so consumers are confident about the origin and authenticity of the media they consume.

By using EIDR, content can be verified at scale, with every piece of content having its provenance, rights, and AI disclosure attached as credentials.

And Steve Harnsberger, co-founder and CEO of the Universal Search streaming discovery platform, said the expanded use of EIDR in search discovery can vastly improve how consumers find what they’re looking for, everywhere they look.

“Organic identification of content is the name of the game,” he said.