Frequently Asked Questions

The minimum required metadata for any registration includes: Title, Title Language, Original Language,  Release Date, Country of Origin, Status, Approximate Length, Registrant/Administrators, Mode (Audio Visual, Audio, etc.), and Referent Type (Movie, TV, etc.)  Additional fields are conditionally required depending on the entries made in the required fields. For example, if you are creating a Edit record, the Parent (Movie or Episode) would be required as well. See EIDR Best Practices for all the details.

No. An EIDR ID is purely functional without any implication of ownership, making it persistent enough to remain the same despite any change in control or ownership of the underlying asset. The metadata associated with an EIDR ID is functional in nature, serving to identify the asset without aggregating a wider variety of commercially valuable metadata about the asset.

No – it is inexpensive for most companies, especially if you’re making the most of your membership. EIDR membership is offered with scaled pricing, depending on the annual income of the member company.  All paid memberships come with the following benefits:

  1. Unlimited API Access to register IDs, look up, and edit
  2. Unlimited ID creation
  3. Unlimited sharing of EIDR ID and corresponding metadata
  4. Free training
  5. Free technical support
  6. Free integration support
  7. Inclusion in EIDR working groups
  8. Unlimited use of EIDR documentation and case studies
  9. Offline registry copy (1 copy per organization)
  10. MESA organizational membership (Valued at $7,500/yr)
  11. Free admission to EIDR events
  12. Display your company logo on EIDR website

Check out our Pricing page for more information

The registry is curated by industry experts who have  been vetted to ensure that they are providing high quality data. EIDR does not have the concept of record ownership. However, if your organization is the best source of  up-to-date metadata for a record, you can request the role of Metadata Authority. This allows the experts in your organization to maintain the record.

You can – for some things. However, nobody works alone and your distribution partners don’t use your IDs. Many of your partners are already EIDR members. EIDR enables automation and drives efficiency, especially when shared between members. EIDR behaves as the Rosetta Stone of media assets. If a content creator registers all of it’s assets with EIDR, they can then share the EIDR ID with all of their distribution partners. The distribution partner can automate, using the EIDR as a definitive way to obtain essential information for the asset’s identification.

EIDR is not an outside entity, unrelated to the M&E industry. EIDR is an independent non-profit which was established by and is still governed by the major studios and M&E vendors. The EIDR registry holds essential metadata about media assets, which makes identification and distribution more efficient and allows for automation between separate companies. EIDR is to media assets as ISBN is to books.

Why should you use EIDR? Automation and content delivery at scale. Nobody works in a vacuum. If you are a content creator or distributor, you are almost certainly working with industry partners. You don’t, however, allow your partners free and open access to your internal systems. EIDR serves as the disinterested third party which keeps records of publicly available title, edit, and manifestation records so that you can automate delivery, distribution, discoverability, and monetization of your licensed and licensable assets.

EIDR terminology was set up to be universal to support as many use cases as possible. We offer support to help you find what you need, register your assets via best practices, and to map to the appropriate terminology in the registry. However, participants are encouraged to request new terminology if a use case truly is not supported by the registry.

The metadata collected is intentionally limited to the values needed to de-duplicate records. EIDR is intended to be a registry only, so our bylaws prevent us from competing with members who supply rich metadata as a service. No single metadata provider will be the source of everything for everyone. Think of EIDR as the ISBN of media and entertainment.

EIDR is a public registry. If a record is introduced, it becomes a publicly available record.

There is one limited exception. ‘In Development’ status is used by companies who temporarily need to keep a record under wraps, but still require an ID. In this case, the company would create the record, marking the status as ‘In Development.’  When the title is announced to the public, the company should change the status to ‘Valid’, making it part of the public registry.

If you choose to use the ‘In Development‘ (confidential) status, you will need to be aware that your process and internal controls are absolutely vital to ensuring your records stay confidential until you are ready for them to be shared. 

There are at least two important things to remember. First, if your record is ‘Valid’ and then changes to ‘In Development‘ (this is not recommended,) the record was publicly available and there are many organizations that could have seen it or made a copy of it. Once a record is public (‘Valid’,) it is available to the public, so be careful to only share records which are cleared by your organization. Secondly, ‘In Development’ records are held so confidentially that they are even excluded from the de-duplication system. This means that if someone else knows about the title and registers it, the system will not de-duplicate the confidential title and this could result in a duplicate entry, which would then be merged/aliased to the public title.

Contact EIDR Support  if you need information about using the ‘In Development’ and ‘Valid‘ statuses.

The Registry provides free access to lookup a record using its EIDR. More extensive query and search capability including programmatic interface to the Registry is available at a nominal annual fee. To facilitate widespread adoption of this critical service, EIDR offers very favorable terms of use including the ability to take complete snapshots of the Registry and freely re-use data obtained from the Registry.

EIDR is not in and of itself an ISO standard, but it is a member of The DOI Foundation, which is the governance and management body for the federation of Registration Agencies. They provide Digital Object Identifier (DOI) services and registration, and are the registration authority for the ISO standard (ISO 26324). The DOI system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on digital networks. Because EIDR is a member of The DOI Foundation, it is governed by ISO 26324.

EIDR  is run by a coalition of leaders in the movie and television industry. It is run as an independent non-profit business association, committed to providing an essential service that benefits the whole industry.