Metagarbage

One of the major frustrations I experience working in the wonderful world of TV 2.0 is how little attention content owners and channel operators pay to metadata.

From my first job in the media business, where I was shown a basement full of the rushes for the Superman films and asked to sort them out, to working with some of the world's largest broadcasters today, the lack of attention paid to defining and indexing content is baffling.

Nowhere is the old adage, 'rubbish in, rubbish out' more true, and as the whole of the internet tv and IPTV industries start to adopt standards such as RSS and RMS, nothing is more important than the metadata related to video content - it's the only sensible way anyone will find a channel or a content item.

Comments

Anonymous said…
On TV the moment of emission is the most important/valuable, after that -usually- content looses all value. On the web it's the opposite, in many aspects content grows in value with time, as more people link to it, it gets indexed, etc. A post about a certain topic might keep getting new visits for years.

This type of functioning is completely outside the frame of reference of TV thinking, they are sitting on huge archives, archives that could continue generating income in long tailish ways for years if it was properly tagged and made available on the Web...
Iolo Jones said…
An announcement yesterday from the UK's ITV showed that they are beginning to think in this way. I have long spoken about 'content yeild', ie how to maximise revenues from an item of video content, so I wholeheartedly agree with your comments.