With the release of our new streaming platform at IBC 2022 in September this is the second in a series of blogs explaining its game changing approach. In the wake of our first post in this series on how the platform’s design features enable content owners to easily and seamlessly reconfigure the viewers’ experience of their streamed content, we now move on to the platform’s second “pillar”: metadata.
In this post, we take a look at why metadata is critical in connecting your business’s streaming content to audiences you may not even have known existed, and how the metadata in our platform enables you to drive exceptional business results through a direct relationship with consumers.
Metadata is defined quite simply as data that describes other data – essentially, information about information. It’s the hidden tags, text, and descriptors that sit behind web and streaming content and enable the all-important match between what the user or consumer wants to see, what they search for, and what is served up to them.
The smoother and slicker this match, the more effectively the content reaches the right audiences, and the more frictionlessly the audiences can engage with it – which tends to mean that they’ll come back for more.
But all too often, streaming metadata has been a blunt instrument, restricted in scope and subtlety, and potentially leaving entire universes of themes, topics, interests, characteristics, definitions, and descriptions undiscoverable.
This translates potentially into millions of missed opportunities for streaming content to hit home where it has the most effect and can drive commercial outcomes most readily - and this is the problem our new platform solves.
Let’s explore this further, and take a look at a few examples.
Fundamentally, what we’ve done with the new platform is made it easy for businesses who stream (or want to stream) content to create and define metadata in a much more detailed manner. This hugely increases the ways in which an accurate match can be found between content and its target consumers. It’s an audience magnet with greater reach, yet, also, greater precision.
We’ve done this by enabling metadata to encompass more terms relating to your industry, business, content, service, genre, and audience, and embedding these into comprehensive menus, collections, and categories. In this way, consumers’ need to navigate the content and your need to make more of it relevant and discoverable to them meet in the middle.
And to keep the metadata evergreen and minimise the manual management it requires, we’ve also enabled it to be automatically updated with relevant terms that appear in the editorial content you produce for the service.
With this platform, gone are the days when a consumer could only find streaming content by searching for a title, or who produced it, or some other basic term. Equally, gone are the days when content, that could acquire wider appeal as it evolves, remains undiscovered by new audiences because the metadata hadn’t kept step with it.
Instead, the subtlest and most varied facets of consumer interest can now connect viewers to compelling (and changing) content that can be used to drive commercial and transactional (e-commerce) outcomes.
Whether consumers are in search of magical beasts (fantasy content) or main ingredient (cookery), mood or metal (music), series, season, or session (the binge-watchers and connoisseurs – and any other theme or characteristic besides – on our new platform it has nowhere to hide.
In addition, expanding the metadata capability in the platform means it captures more granular information about what consumers prefer to watch – information that not only drives a more personalised content experience, but provides the data necessary to attract advertisers and supplement the service’s revenue.
Metadata and monetisation are now closer bedfellows than ever before. Good news for businesses trying to connect to consumers and consumers trying to connect to content alike!
Being able to define your own metadata and immediately apply it to your service opens up some extraordinary marketing opportunities, such as holding conversations with your audience on social media about how they would like to discover content, how it might be better organised, and then giving them what they want. For example, users of a football streaming service asking “for easy access to all football matches that had a red card in them”, and then being able to provide a new collection of content that does just this before next weekend’s matches get underway. It’s not just the rich functionality to instantly create new user journeys, it’s also the power to engage your audience knowing you can deliver on their ideas that will open up new and very powerful marketing opportunities for our Clients.
If metadata is what makes monetisable content discoverable, segmentation is what gives you critical insight into where and who your markets and audiences actually are, and what pushes their buttons. In our third post before the show which will be published in a couple of weeks, we’ll be showing you how our new platform enables you to tailor your service to meet multiple markets’ and individual audiences’ needs.
Check in with us again before it’s showtime!
To meet us at IBC 2022, just come along to stand 5.c44 at the RAI Amsterdam, 9 – 12 September, or if you’d like to schedule a meeting with us contact us here.
Easel TV
1 Waterhouse Square
London EC1N 2ST
T: +44 (0)20 3026 3605
.png)
