M+E Europe

For Poonam Singh, product manager of media systems for PBS, the multiple challenges she’s noted around content IDs and data management probably sound familiar to most anyone in media and entertainment.


“We have a lot of different challenges: the technology is getting modernized day by day, [we’re dealing with] fragmented data management, how different titles are managed on different platforms, and we have products using different identifiers,” she said, speaking May 7 at the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting in Culver City, Calif. “And when we’re trying to find the data, it should be readable, accessible, a single source of truth.”

Meeting standards for metadata and its use across platforms required that “single source of truth” and EIDR has helped PBS deliver “a really discoverable experience,” Singh said (during the presentation “PBS’s Metadata Makeover: Harnessing EIDR for Quality Content Delivery”), by normalizing the collection of catalog metadata across titles. PBS uses EIDR’s required fields as a baseline to collect metadata for all licensed content, with EIDR IDs assigned and stored in PBS’s rights management system to identify assets correctly.

From the moment a show gets the green light, PBS makes sure every EIDR-required metadata field is properly filled out. That helps with downstream distribution to all the PBS national member stations (330 in total) that distribute content, with an EIDR Manifestation ID assigned and accompanying each media file to local station servers, enabling identification and disambiguation.

“Upstream systems and downstream systems, it’s all connected to one ID,” Singh said, sharing a selection of case studies highlighting EIDR’s impact on internal workflows, underscoring how EIDR has significantly enhanced the data quality of PBS shows.

“Six, seven years ago, everyone was doing their own thing [with metadata],” Singh said. “Now, everyone [adheres to] standards.” And EIDR is helping everyone do just that.

To access the audio of the PBS presentation at EIDR APM, click here.

To access the presentation slide deck, click here.