Metadata what?

Have you ever wondered what metadata actually means? No? Well, I totally understand you. It's a niche field to work in and those of us who know to much about it would easily fall into the "nerdy" category.

But, it is quite simple actually and I will give you a quick practical example you can relate to . When you are looking for a movie to watch in your favourite online Video On Demand (VOD) store, you are basically browsing through all kinds of metadata about the movies. The actual content you want to consume is the movie, but in order to find the movie you need to navigate or search through metadata in order to find it. The metadata you see on the pages are in our world called "descriptive metadata". It is data that describe something about the content. The following are typical descriptive metadata fields:

Artwork: Movie poster and other images

Title: Rocky IV

Synopsis: Reluctantly retired from boxing Rocky takes on a new...

Genre: Action

Production year: 1990

Actor: Sylvester Stallone

Director: John G. Avildsen

Keywords: boxing, retired, fight, champion, competition, hero...

Moods: Feeling down, Inspiratonal

Prizes: Academy Award nominee for best female actress

Airing on channel: TV Norge

Broadcast time: 2019-10-11 10:00:00 CET

Duration: 85 minutes

... and so on. There are basically no end to what data that can describe or in any way be related to the actual content.

We gather, enrich and deliver descriptive metadata from hundreds of TV and Radio channels and 30'ish movie studios. If you want to dig even deeper into the mysterious world of metadata and find out what we can deliver, make sure you read through the VOD whitepaper that we just published.