Exploring Buy vs Build Strategies for Metadata Management

Optimising your metadata investment is crucial as budgets tighten and pressure mounts for improved operating margins. Metadata management is a pragmatic approach to controlling the metadata dispersed throughout media organisations. Metadata management platforms provide a centralized system for organizing, storing, and managing metadata. This streamlines content management processes, reduces redundancies, and ensures consistency across different platforms and distribution channels.

Media organisations often consider developing and managing required metadata management capabilities in-house. However, the talent shortage and limited IT-related expertise across the media and entertainment industry represent a real challenge. Without the specialist expertise and resources to manage development and ongoing maintenance and support, pursuing in-house development of the necessary metadata management capabilities may take longer than expected to deploy and cost more than anticipated. 

With over 10 years of experience developing and managing a cloud-based platform focused on ingesting, consolidating, cleansing, and matching metadata from multiple sources, we feel the following factors must be considered when making a buy vs. build decision: expertise, resource availability, time to market, and cost. 

Expertise

Using metadata and managing metadata is not the same. Working with metadata requires specialist knowledge. Metadata touches many parts of various media workflows. Understanding the breadth, scale, and complexity of data sources and types impacts the development and use of any meaningful metadata management platform.  

The platform must adapt to a wide range of use cases, such as aggregating metadata to support the delivery of hybrid linear and on-demand services, consolidating and cleansing metadata to improve content discovery via text or voice, or integrating social listening data. Finding, acquiring, onboarding, developing, and retaining talent takes time and can distract your team from other operational initiatives. It may be possible to pull key resources away from other initiatives. However, this creates a real opportunity cost. 

We recommend working with a team that already has that specialist talent available can be far simpler. Established metadata management services provide a comprehensive set of features, including data lineage tracking, metadata discovery, data cataloging, and integration with various data sources. Building such features in-house may require significant effort and ongoing maintenance.

Our expertise has guided the development of a platform that processes and consolidates high-integrity metadata for integration into multiple internal workflows at broadcasters, studios, operators, and streaming platforms.  We continuously advance the capabilities of our platform while providing high levels of support to our customers. 

Time to Market

Implementing a metadata management system from scratch can be time-consuming.  We have anecdotal evidence of companies planning to build platforms in a 12+ month timeframe. Using a platform with existing integrations to relevant metadata sources and experience publishing cleansed and consolidated data to customer platforms significantly reduces the time-to-market, allowing organizations to start managing metadata more quickly and efficiently.

In addition to efficient time-to-market, MetaBroadcast also improves ongoing operational efficiency through a user interface, giving content management or research teams immediate access to content records. Users can quickly review records, suggest edits, and visualise equivalence. 

Total Cost of Ownership

Developing a bespoke solution takes time and money, as does retaining staff with the specialised knowledge to maintain and continuously advance the platform’s functionality.  Building an in-house metadata management system can incur high development costs, including hiring skilled personnel, ongoing feature development and maintenance (typically 20% of the original build costs), and infrastructure expenses. Incremental challenges arise when considering the siloed nature of many businesses in this sector. Would one central team own the development, or would efforts be pursued by individual business units, thus limiting the scope of development or benefit to the wider organisation?

Leveraging a cloud-based platform specifically designed to address metadata management requirements provides pricing predictability. It lets you focus on your core business while quickly accessing metadata ingested, consolidated, and cleansed from your defined sources. Our responsibility is to ensure that your metadata-dependent platforms have access to high-quality, high-integrity data. Your responsibility is to balance metadata and technology investments against your strategic goals.

Your Bottom Line

Building your own metadata management platform might be perceived as more affordable. As a media organisation, metadata supports platforms that enable content monetisation through licensing or distribution, content discovery by internal sales teams or subscribers, and content repurposing for marketing. As a media business, staying focused on these priorities and weighing the costs of developing a platform from the ground up or taking advantage of a mature platform and metadata specialist knowledge is important.

Whether you choose to buy or build, we recommend a platform that allows you to:

1. Constantly update your metadata
2. Differentiate between similar content (e.g., content with similar titles)
3. Incorporate synopsis, trailers, deep links, posters, ratings, reviews and other data providing context
4. Include data related to localisation, regional availability, entitlements, languages and production locale

We continue to evolve our platform’s capabilities based on evolving client requirements. Atlas’ functionality reflects customer requirements based on many edge use cases requiring unique workflow integrations, support for multiple data types, and alignment of data schemas to metadata usage. 

Contact us if you would like to discuss these considerations in more detail with a trusted metadata specialist.