ODH in Media and Entertainment

We’ve covered many topics regarding ODH, but what about how it works in a specific industry? How it solves a particular company’s data integration challenges?

Let’s see what ODH has done “in real life.”

Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has been upended, as online and digital delivery of content has radically changed how consumers get their entertainment content.

Streaming and download services in the late 2000s contributed to an explosion of options for delivery. The number of distribution partners went from hundreds to thousands almost overnight, while the number of formats and versions of the content also exploded as release windows narrowed or in some cases, disappeared altogether.

As a result, media organizations have had to reinvent nearly every aspect of how they manage and deliver their content.

A Major Studio Leads the Way

Starting in the early 2000s, a major Hollywood studio took the plunge to reinvent its content distribution to take advantage of the new digital and online distribution opportunities. The first step was the digitization of the assets themselves. This not only resulted in every asset in one of the largest libraries in Hollywood being instantly accessible, it also highlighted another problem: It was difficult to find the assets. The information that was required to select assets was much more than just the technical metadata of the digital library. Studio personnel looking to find assets and teams creating distribution feeds needed to access descriptive metadata as well as title, product and rights data.

All of this data resided in separate systems, and as a result, internal teams who were looking to re-use assets would have to call up experts who had access to these separate systems and enlist them to help find the right clips. In addition, teams creating automated feeds had to connect to these different data sources and execute custom logic to select the correct assets. Creating a new feed would take 2-3 weeks per feed on top of the additional time required to update existing feeds as specifications changed.

What the studio needed was an ODH to address this critical issue of access to the asset data and data distribution.

The system was able to integrate critical data from multiple source systems and then make that data available to internal users, teams who were creating distribution and other feeds, and even external partners to enable self-service. The system greatly reduced the manual and technical effort needed to find the right assets and get them to partners. Making this data easily accessible is also a key factor in the studio’s success in taking advantage of the many new opportunities that the new online and digital entertainment marketplace has created.

Other ODH Implementations in Media

This studio was at the vanguard of taking a new approach to managing the metadata that is critical to digital distribution. Other entertainment organizations have used the ODH pattern to:

• Create the platform to power the online presence for the host country’s Olympics, including distribution feeds to partners and custom views of athletes
• Power a popular online application that leverages not just the asset metadata, but also data that describes the characters and eras of the show as well as the fans’ interactions with the content
• Create an authoritative view of descriptive metadata for shows across a broadcaster, including detailed tagging of scene and character interaction to enable better re-use and content placement

ODH implementations at media companies are helping customers stay ahead of the many more changes to the industry, most notably connecting directly to customers and getting content to new platforms and markets at any time. The changes in how people consume and pay for content are continuing to evolve, and MarkLogic® ODH solutions are allowing our customers to stay ahead of the changes by making sure critical data is integrated and available.

Up Next

We will be posting more “ODH in Real Life” blogs, featuring other industries such as healthcare, financial services and the public sector.

Want to LEARN more? Check out our ODH ebook, Introducing the Operational Data Hub.