Media Tech Bites: Importance of Metadata

Here’s my short take on a piece of media technology. This week I look at why metadata is the most important part of media tech. Do you agree? [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

Broadcast is in the middle of a technology revolution. 20 years ago, I was cabling routers to encoders, making sure that the labels were correct. Now I’m working with engineers to ensure the virtual routing through our AWS services is working as it should, and feeding iOS and Android apps properly.

Not everything is changing. Then and now, we use metadata to describe the services being delivered. In the world of DVB then, the metadata was in the main the System Information tables that told the Set Top Boxes where to find the broadcast services in the frequency spectrum. Now, as then, the metadata drives content search and discovery. However now, unlike then, metadata drives a far richer discovery experience; we can see trailers where we used to see thumbnails, we can link to IMDB articles where before we had a character-limited synopsis, and we can select the next programme based on what we’ve just watched or even what mood we’re in.

More fundamentally, metadata is starting to drive how the services are created. The cabling and labels are abstracted from the creation of services by software drivers. Middleware orchestrates those drivers into services. Those services can be orchestrated together in very visual “low code” ways. They can be defined in terms of metadata alone. This means UI and UX designers can put together interesting app experiences without needing to know Kotlin or Swift. It will mean that experiences can be put together programmatically, such as a UI that is reactive to the content that you’re watching, or the context that you’re watching it in.

If this all seems familiar, it’s because the enterprise IT sector went through this change last decade. It’s experience is that metadata drives the creation of the service, the consumption of the service, and the quality assurance of the service. To stay relevant, it’ll be necessary for all of us to be metadata-literate.