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Think Tank Hits on the Future of Digital Content

June 19, 2013 · Posted in M&E Exclusive · Comments Off 

By Lyndsey Schaefer

More than 100 thought leaders gathered at last night’s HITS Think Tank in Burbank to discuss the progress of file-based workflows and how they are influencing Hollywood.

The event was anchored by the panel discussion, “From Frame to Finish: What’s Your Digital Content Management Strategy?” featuring experts representing the many links of the digital supply chain: John Crosier, Senior Vice President, Digital Architecture & Delivery, Cinram; Steven Anastasi, Vice President of Media Archives, Warner Bros., Ed Durst, Principal Solutions Consultant – Digital Media Group, Open Text, Stan Scoggins, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Digital Asset Management, Universal Pictures, and JR Yasgur, Vice President, Aggregated Metadata Management & Operations, Sony Pictures Entertainment. The panel was moderated by Mary Yurkovic, Digital Asset Management Community Builder and M&E Industry Consultant.

Yurkovic took the panel through the many steps in the digital supply chain and asked the panelists to provide their respective thoughts on how they are adapting to changes in the evolution of physical and digital formats.

There are challenges with the myriad ways to capture content, as well as finding the optimum ways to deliver that content to different platforms, says Cinram’s Crosier.  According to Sony’s Yasgur, what is defined as “content” is also changing due to the business landscape to include the final cut, but also the added value material (electronic press kits, trailers, bonus material and all of the supporting metadata). It’s also necessary to make the assets useable for other languages, aspect ratios and different windows, says Universal’s Scoggins.

“We have to be able to track content throughout the lifecycle,” Yasgur says. “We have a responsibility to interact with that content, even if it isn’t in its final form. We’re also now competing with what consumers are putting out there.”

All of the panelists stressed the importance of metadata, which plays a valuable role throughout the entire ecosystem.

“We’re trying to push standards on required metadata as one of the models to try to have success; standardizing 33 fields of metadata so you must always supply the metadata before it goes into the archives,” Anastasi says.” If it doesn’t have it, it will be rejected and sent back to them.”

In addition to capturing accurate metadata, another ongoing challenge is the sheer volume of content that is being handled, due to production embracing digital, and thus, never turning the camera off. This results in hundreds of hours of additional content that becomes costly to store.

“Digital storage is never going to be free. So we have to determine what does and doesn’t have long-term value,” Anastasi explains.

As 4K content becomes more prominent, the ecosystem will have to adapt to be able to handle files of that size as well, Yasgur says.

It will be interesting to see how the digital supply chain evolves to meet these new challenges. Hear more about the digital side of the business at the Digital Marketing & Analytics Summit, set for September 27 at the Four Seasons Los Angeles, produced by HITS, MESA and Variety. For more information, click here.

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