Innovation and Growth: My Perspective on Two Transformative Years at MetaBroadcast

Jamie Mackinlay, CEO

They say hindsight is 20/20. When I joined MetaBroadcast as CEO two years ago, it was clear that the company had won and maintained strategic accounts with a small, talented team. However, industry awareness of the company’s capabilities was limited, and growth was UK-centric. This presented both a challenge and an opportunity.

The opportunity quickly became apparent. MetaBroadcast had vital capabilities important to our existing customers and prospects across the broader video delivery spectrum. The capabilities of the Atlas active data management platform to aggregate, normalise, and equivalate metadata from multiple sources were and continue to be our core competency.  In fact, the opportunity was to leverage our experience to target video service providers and audience measurement JICs internationally. There was a clear need for a cost-effecitve, cloud-based platform providing automated processes to ingest, assess, consolidate, and organise the metadata already owned or licensed by our customers into a unified metadata repository and publishing that cleansed metadata to customer platforms.

Note that while MetaBroadcast was founded when broadcast was still the primary distribution model for TV content, streaming services had just launched and were introducing new paradigms. Metadata was often taken for granted yet critical for content licensing, scheduling, marketing, measurement, and content discovery. The technology platforms enabling these functions were also evolving, presenting requirements for additional types of metadata. This dynamic landscape underscored the urgency and importance of our capabilities. 

As I began my journey with MetaBroadcast, industry recognition of metadata as the linchpin tying media supply chains together was beginning to escalate. This growing awareness validated our strategic focus and positioned us at the forefront of industry trends. It was now understood that metadata added valuable context to understanding the nuance of content portfolios influencing content development and licensing as well as content discovery by consumers. Several leading studios and broadcasters announced metadata-centric initiatives focused on driving operational efficiencies and reducing costs.

MetaBroadcast has significantly shifted in strategy, expanding its focus on international markets and emphasizing the importance of data quality and provenance. We have also solidified our relationship with our cloud service provider, AWS, to optimise the performance of our active metadata management platform. This partnership is a testament to our commitment to excellence and should reassure our stakeholders of our strategic alliances. We will soon be listed in the AWS Marketplace, providing a self-service option for relevant customers. We recognize the value of partnership and pursue joint go-to-market activities with leading metadata suppliers such as Gracenote and IMDb, where we add value through our ability to consolidate and normalise metadata aggregated from many platforms and sources. We collaborate with global metadata bodies like EIDR to automate and streamline the often arduous process of matching content IDs. In all cases, we focus on adding value to our customers’ metadata repositories by cost-effectively and efficiently ensuring their repositories contain high-quality metadata. We assist them in understanding their existing data and maximizing their data investments while identifying opportunities to enhance the quality of their data schema. 

We see how the landscape of metadata use cases is evolving, especially as artificial intelligence creates greater volumes of data. This has influenced our attention to data provenance  (aka, understanding where the metadata populating a data scheme comes from). Our active metadata platform exists to improve the overall trustworthiness of our customers’ metadata. This means assuring the quality of each specific attribute reflected in a content record. Due to our long-term relationship with Barb, the UK’s television audience measurement provider, we have been matching content IDs from their stakeholders. Our repository of 140 million MetaBroadcast IDs, enables us to trace metadata sources, identifying which sources fulfill which data fields. Understanding the provenance of data will continue to inform our strategy as we move forward.

In addition to its increased attention to metadata, our industry has also heightened its focus on the environmental sustainability of the media supply chain. As a participant in enabling the effective delivery and discovery of video programmes, we now continuously monitor, measure and assess our carbon emissions. Not only has this helped us to reduce our carbon footprint, but it has resulted in more efficient data management. 

It’s important for me to note that everything we do is a collective effort, driven by a dedicated team. MetaBroadcast benefits from specialist knowledge in data science techniques, cloud data operations, and a deep understanding of metadata. We understand the nuance of the different types of metadata necessary to market, license, schedule, measure, and discover favourite films, series, or live events. Investing in our employees’ development is key to our strategy for exceeding customer expectations and delivering outstanding results. Their hard work and dedication have brought us to where we are today.

Two years have passed quickly, and I’m proud of our progress in solidifying our position in the market, renewing contracts with key customers, identifying new market opportunities, and aligning our efforts to strategic initiatives such as environmental sustainability. I’m confident in a bright future for MetaBroadcast.