VSN's Ideas Portal
Do you have ideas to improve our products? Don't hesitate to let us know!
Do you have ideas to improve our products? Don't hesitate to let us know!
The ability to adjust mappings from metadata in VSN to metadata fields required by the listings companies and non-linear platforms.
(PRIORITY: HIGH in terms of business benefit, but medium in terms of meeting immediate requirements as we have a solution in place).
In recent years the number of non-linear publishing platforms we publish to has exploded. There is virtually no standardisation, including standardisation of genres / categories / subject headings. This means that to publish an asset to mutiple platforms, the genre categories have to be translated into those used by each individual platform. The mapping table below gives some idea of how complicated this is getting:-
Xperi Genre 1 |
Xperi Genre 2 |
Content type |
Operator |
Collection |
Target Audience |
Operator |
Subject |
Editorial Format |
||
Chidrens |
animated |
Kids: pre-school OR; |
Animated |
|||||||
Chidrens |
arts & literature |
Kids: pre-school OR; |
AND |
Arts, Culture and Drama |
OR |
Arts |
||||
Chidrens |
drama |
Kids: pre-school OR; |
AND |
Arts, Culture and Drama |
|
VSN Crea |
Gracenote genre |
Content type in ('Documentaries : series' ,'Documentaries : singles') |
documentary |
Target Audience in ('1 Children (2 - 11 years)' , '2 Children (6 - 12 years)' , '1 Preschool children (0 - 5 years)') |
educational |
Collection = 'History' |
history |
Content type = 'Films' |
other |
Content type in ('Current affairs : series' , 'Current affairs : singles') |
current affairs |
These examples are from just 3 TV listings providers. There are non-linear platforms such as YouTube, Omny and OTT platforms that all have their own genre categories and subject headings.
The way these mappings are handled currently in VSN is via hard-coded scripts. This is not very manageable because every time we need to change a mapping we need to crack open the Boo script and edit it.
What we envisage, and we appreciate this would be a long-term project, is some sort of tool that enables an end-user to adjust the mappings from TVO subject categories and genres to those of any platform or listings provider. At TVO we have a team of Digital Channel Specialists whose role is to maximise our online presence. They do this by making sure our content is published to the right platforms with good quality metadata that will surface the content to the right audience. Having a tool that they can use to update these mappings at a moment’s notice without having to call in a developer would be ideal.
One thought: wonder if the Thesaurus could be leveraged here - by using the “Related terms” function?
I would imagine other broadcasters would benefit from such a feature. I was speaking with someone from CBC recently who told me that in the past 3/4 years metadata for non-linear platforms has suddenly incredibly complex and hard to manage.
