Tech Focus: Sports Music, Part 3 — DDEX Teams With EIDR To Streamline Metadata Standards

The goal is efficiency in optimizing universal identification/tracking across music and film/TV

The music libraries that supply broadcast sports with their underscores, themes, background music, and specialty pieces will have access to significantly enhanced metadata, thanks to a partnership announced this month between key standards bodies in that technology.

Click here for Tech Focus: Sports Music, Part 1 — Controversy Over Rights Shakes the Sector
Click here for Tech Focus: Sports Music, Part 2 — Music Libraries Offer More Options Than Ever

EIDR’s Will Kreth (left) and DDEX’s Mark Isherwood see cooperation between their respective organizations as coordinating use of music in film and tv.

DDEX, the international standards-setting organization dedicated to improving the exchange of data and information across the music industry, and the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), the global, non-proprietary source of universal unique identifiers for digital distribution of movies and television assets, have announced a partnership aimed at streamlining the use of metadata standards in the music and film/TV industries.

The organizations will work together to help increase supply-chain efficiencies and enable value-added services in the film and TV industries by agreeing on a variety of universal identification and tracking issues, such as cue-sheet standards, finding common language to express relationships between visual media and sound recordings, and ensuring that metadata about music in films and broadcast is sufficiently robust for the various business interactions between the two industries.

EIDR’s unique identifiers can be embedded as metadata within audio-visual objects across a wide variety of content, including film, SVOD and OTT, digital content, and broadcast content. The accompanying metadata includes titles, primary credits, edit details, and technical details. It will, says the joint press release, enable users “to positively and precisely ID content, thus mitigating legacy inefficiencies within cross-platform media workflows, such as time-consuming title matching and identification.”

Follow the Money
Sports broadcasts are using more music than ever, split between recordings made by popular artists — MLB batter walk-on music, for example — and commercial-library music, which provides a lot of themes and underscores. Every instance offers a monetization opportunity for many of the parties involved. Asked how this collaboration can help with that, DDEX Secretariat Mark Isherwood explains that the point of the venture is to create best practices that can help sports broadcasters and others increase both creativity and efficiency around the music they use.

“What this will be about is trying to align practices in different industries that are not currently aligned,” he says. “Use of different terminology is the obvious issue, so finding common terminology which would allow more automation between the sectors to take place within the supply chains does offer efficiency and reduce cost. As more and more digital consumer offerings cover all media types, there is a real need for cooperation across those media industries around the operational elements of getting the media and the data about them to [professional users]. I see the cooperation with EiDR as one major step towards achieving these goals.”

Adds EIDR Executive Director Will Kreth, “It’s early in the new partnership, but we think cooperation between EIDR and DDEX can only help in use cases where music is synched with sports video content.”