Streaming Media 2009 Red Carpet - Tim Siglin, Braintrust Digital on Making Metadata More Meaningful

Tim Siglin admits that drop off rate for readers his very high when you mention metadata. But in his recent Streamingmedia.com article, Metadata: What You Need to Know (And Why You Need to Know It), he pointed out two very important reasons we should care about metadata, that is, money and future growth. In this Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet interview, Peter Cervieri helps bring out the inner geek in Tim Siglin, to discuss the current state of metdata and how to make it sexy. Tim Siglin is a contributing editor for StreamingMedia.com. He serves as Chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company, and is a co-founder of the go-to-market consulting firm, Transitions, Inc. He has been involved full-time with strategic consulting and integration in the visual communications and digital media fields for over fifteen years. Tim also moderated two Online Video Platform Summit panel sessions, SEO Panel - Optimizing Video Search and Discoverability and the Interactive Video Panel - Building Value With Real Interactivity.

Tim noted that one of the inherent problems that we've had within the video industry, is the loss of metadata throughout the production process. Camera equipment and editing systems create metadata, which is in an "island" unto itself and doesn't transfer to the master tape or DVD. The industry is well aware of this issue but has yet to address it in full, but that's changing slowly. Tim's article does a deep dive into the space to see how the problem is being addressed. Online video offers a greater opportunity to retain rich metadata, which helps with search and discovery. Publishers are seeing the value of metadata because it makes their content more searchable and monetizable.


In this interview, Tim provides an industry snapshot on current end-to-end solutions like Adobe Story, offered as an online service, which Tim says,

"Adobe Story takes a holistic view on script development as one of the keys to production and postproduction, using the act of script creation as a way to mask a powerful underlying metadata repository."

He identified three basic markets for metadata:

1. The overall market for making search more easier - which limited to search companies
2. Entertainment - bringing search capabilities to broadband enabled devices like XBOX 360 and others
3. Corporate training and lectures - long form and highly unscripted content, speech detection and OCR software to detect Powerpoint slides with synchronized presentations

He says that we're on the cusp of innovation with metadata and we should see some big changes within the next few years that will make metadata more meaningful.