Main problems of massive content aggregation

What should we watch? Shall we put a film on? Shall we start a new series? Shall we take a look at that documentary that the neighbour recommended?

These, and many others are the usual questions that come up to any  Netflix, HBO, Vodafone TV, Orange TV major viewer before sitting in front of their TVs.

The digital pay television offer has experienced an exponential growth these past years. Now, the challenge lies in presenting the content efficiently.

It has lately turned into a 24/7 task to deduce our users’ moods and needs and it’s essential to achieve an excellent viewing experience. Companies listen to their all their customers, and react consequently. This reaction is reflected in the diversity of content integrated into the offer, increasingly personalized.

The contents are no longer restricted to the classic genres of horror, thriller, action, humour and romance. Today, we have at our disposal content created for the little ones (and not that little) as Disney offers, recommendations based on your own likes like HBO, and even something as special as collections that inspired David Lynch or historical movies from the Nouvelle Vague, like Filmin. Our capacity of personalising offers is getting to its limit and users are getting hungry for more.

Main problems of massive content aggregation.

Taking a look at the trigger, we find a common problem. Companies that offer a TV service face the challenge of maintaining their content import, identification, classification and export of metadata flows untainted, without errors or information leaks. 

How to efficiently manage this massive aggregation of content without dying in the attempt?  You need to master your metadata.

The more contents in the catalogue, the more sources and providers we have to import and integrate the information from, to control times and processes, as well as to verify the right distribution of them. We are talking about importing content for linear TV, catch-up, for VoD and updating catalogs, such as cast and crew, subtitles, images, quality tags, etc … Not to mention the wide range of devices on which these contents must be displayed properly! 

Another issue is the duplication of content from different sources. This means that, when the end user makes a search for a specific title, the search engine provides him with one or several contents, which aren’t exactly what the customer was looking for.

On the other hand, due to the amount of information that the tool must process and the inefficiencies derived from the diversity of suppliers and metadata that must be consolidated, the rest of the daily end-to-end operations will be fully conditioned.

We must not forget that the right distribution, unification and configuration of all this information impacts the quality of the end-user experience.

What is the solution to the problems generated by content management for content providers?

MediaStream is a software tool that relies on 4 essential aspects to put a solution to the issues mentioned above.

1. Unique IDs.
2. Workflow automation.
3. Centralized metadata repository and quality image management.
4. Cloud-based scalability.

Unique IDs 

The fight against content duplication is already a victory with MediaStream, thanks to machine learning intelligence,as soon as the metadata from the provider comes in, our matcher automatically assigns an unique ID to each content. This way, the search engine will always identify exactly what the users were looking for, and give them their favorite contents.

Workflow automation

With such a torrent of daily information, Artificial Intelligence will help us to establish a multiple automatic process that minimizes human supervision.

MediaStream imports all the metadata available in your services from every source and provider in a simultaneous and automatic way. Also, it exports automatically all your content from linear to VoD or third-party catalogs and so you have it ready just in time.

Do you want to run your daily processes in a timely efficient way and still get spare time to enjoy? MediaStream helps you to optimize your teams’ work times, allowing cost savings.

Centralized metadata repository and quality image management.

Besides, who doesn’t like their work tool to be intuitive and versatile? MediaStream makes multitasking easy, so you can control and edit the programming info from a simple and intuitive interface, navigate massive content databases or monitor ready-to-publish checks such as content metadata, images, programming info and media assets. You can manage every issue from the same system and keep real-time-track of the complete state of your metadata.

Cloud-based scalability

Whichever way you look at it, scalability is key. That’s why MediaStream has been developed as a cloud-based solution, whose deployment allows for seamless dimensioning according to growing needs. 

As a final conclusion, we must say that, a metadata manager like MediaStream is an exceptional solution to optimize the performance of your import and export processes, to have overall control of the solution and to provide the expected quality results in terms of metadata consistency and end-user experience. Our recommendation to get rid of the headaches caused by metadata management is that you rely on a SaaS that fights for you and improves your TV service!

If you want to discover how Vodafone TV Spain and Orange TV have dealt with all their metadata issues, check our Case Studies, and follow their lead.