By Will Kreth, Executive Director, Entertainment ID Registry –
Since its first release in 2010, the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) — a widely adopted industry standard universal identifier registry, supporting the full range of asset types and relationships between assets — has been evolving …but its technology stack is now nine-plus years old.
That means it’s time for an upgrade
We’re now on a version of the registry we call “2.1.1” — which has benefited from considerable amounts of member feature requests being implemented, interesting use cases answered and documented, and bugs fixed. But the time has come to plan for the future of EIDR for the next five to 10 years. We want to see EIDR IDs registered as early as possible in the life-cycle of a new title – and carried all the way through development and production to play-out on a consumer device. Then, from a measurement perspective, we want to see EIDR IDs cycling back to key stakeholders in the supply chain who need that metadata.
Input from all
In terms of the technical requirements involved, last fall we approached the EIDR board of directors and got unanimous approval to move forward with plans for EIDR 3.0 (developing an outline with the help of the original architects and engineers). In December and January, we invited all our EIDR member companies to complete a survey for all their “wish list” items and the things they’d change about EIDR.
The feedback was tremendous, and we took all those learnings into a small, day-long member brainstorming retreat at Sony Pictures Entertainment in late January. Nothing can replace the power of a face-to-face approach to elevating the conversation about a future roadmap, and we captured all of that day’s insights into a plan for EIDR 3.0.
Who will benefit the most from the upgrade? The short answer: “Everyone.” The longer answer is all the member companies that have come to rely on EIDR in their title management systems and production metadata workflows. Across the media and entertainment supply chain, we see non-member companies acknowledging the value of EIDR by creating upgrades to their products that support EIDR IDs in their tools and interface fields. We hope some of these companies will become future EIDR members, as we’re the only open, nonproprietary, audio-visual title ID standard that has the advantage of a true ‘network effect’ now.
Demonstrating ‘EIDR Ready’ status
Our “EIDR Ready” initiative is designed to help amplify this message. The initiative — introduced at the 2018 NAB Show — is an awareness and branding campaign designed to highlight media and entertainment supply chain companies in the EIDR ecosystem, including initial qualifiers Allocine/Webedia, Aspect, Crown Media, FilmTrack, ITV plc, Mediamorph, My Eye Media, Orchestra Networks, Rightsline, The Title Registrar, V2 Solutions, Verance and Viaplay.
Covering the breadth of the supply chain — from workflow management, rights and avails and scheduling software companies, to media processing labs and subtitle and closed captioning firms, to audience measurement companies and more — the EIDR member companies qualified as being “EIDR Ready” demonstrate their active support of EIDR IDs in their toolsets, metadata feeds, and workflows.
And with the launch of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement’s (CIMM) “TAXI Complete” initiative, we’ll be in audiowater-marks of broadcast content for the first time. That’s huge. Both our existing member companies (and new companies we expect to join EIDR as a result of TAXI Complete) will be looking to see what our vision is for the dynamic growth of EIDR, optimized and at scale, and we want to let everyone know we’re on it with the plans for EIDR 3.0.
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