Gracenote Unveils First 'Advanced Discovery' Product

Nielsen-owned music, video and sports technology company Gracenote has launched metadata solution Video Descriptors, the first of a planned series of 'Advanced Discovery' products for pay TV providers, OTT services and connected device manufacturers.

The Emeryville, CA-based firm provides music, video and sports content and technologies to major entertainment products and brands, including music and video recognition technology supported by a database of descriptions of more than 200 million tracks, TV listings for 85+ countries and statistics from 4,500 sport leagues and competitions.

Gracenote says that in a market where TV providers dedicate increasingly large budgets to build sizable on-demand catalogs of both originally produced content and licensed TV shows and movies, they require 'sophisticated metadata that goes beyond traditional genre information, to fuel targeted recommendations and personalization'.

The new dataset taps expert data scientists, editorial teams and advanced machine learning technologies, and goes 'far beyond' traditional genres with analysis based on Mood, Theme, Scenario and Characters. It includes structured keyword sets for individual TV shows and movies, describing content in progressively more granular terms. Using Game of Thrones as an example, Themes might be 'Greed' or 'Betrayal', Scenarios 'Power Struggle' or 'Manipulation'; Mood elements include 'Dark' and 'Gripping'; and Characters are classified as anything from 'Royalty' to 'Dragons'.

Chief Product Officer Simon Adams comments: 'Major streaming providers average around 40,000 TV episodes and movies in their catalogs but put the onus on their viewers to sort through and find relevant programming. By diving deeper into storylines and characters and assigning much more granular metadata to content, Gracenote Video Descriptors give TV providers powerful datasets enabling fresher discovery, recommendation and voice experiences that satisfy the full spectrum of viewer tastes or moods'.

More 'Advanced Discovery' products will be rolled out this year by Gracenote, which is online at www.gracenote.com .