Metadata management best practices for streaming platforms

In the dynamic world of digital content consumption, video streaming platforms are the go-to destination for entertainment. As the demand for seamless and immersive streaming experiences continues to rise, the importance of metadata management cannot be overstated.

In this blog, let’s delve into the realm of metadata management for video streaming solutions, exploring its importance, challenges, and the top 4 best practices. Join us to unlock the true potential of metadata and revolutionize your streaming platform.

#The significance of metadata management

Metadata, or the “data behind your data”, acts as the backbone of streaming platforms. It goes beyond basic information like titles and descriptions; it encompasses everything from genre, cast and crew information to video formats, access controls and data sharing rules. Here is what an effective metadata strategy makes possible:

• Seamless content discovery: Well-managed metadata structures provide internal users with easy access to specific content, while enhancing the customer experience by enabling external users to quickly locate relevant videos. Additionally, metadata is what allows your videos to be SEO-optimized for improved visibility on search engines through better ranking.

• Ensuring data governance: Metadata management becomes crucial in meeting regulatory and compliance demands, allowing only authorized personnel to locate and responsibly utilize their data assets.

• Optimizing usability: Properly labeled and categorized data enables organizations to leverage it to its fullest potential, supporting informed business decisions and delivering valuable insights.

Metadata management is specifically vital for streaming platforms due to its pivotal role in providing accurate, relevant, and comprehensive information about the content library.

With the sheer volume of video content available, effective metadata management ensures seamless navigation and personalized recommendations for users. It enables platforms to categorize content, create dynamic playlists, and deliver tailored content recommendations, enhancing the overall streaming experience.

Suffice to say, metadata directly impacts your overall data quality, with the cost of bad data accounting for an astonishing 15% to 25% of revenue for most companies. This emphasizes the significance of successful metadata management implementation in unleashing the full potential of your organizational data, driving operational efficiency, informed decision-making, and a superior digital customer experience.

#Challenges in metadata management for streaming platforms

As streaming platforms strive to meet the evolving demands of viewers, they encounter several challenges in metadata management. Let's explore some of these challenges

Managing high volumes of metadata

Streaming platforms are increasingly dealing with a massive amount of metadata, making it challenging to organize, update, and synchronize across various sources. This growth is directly linked to the ever-expanding content libraries and the need for content localization for various media based on the countries in which it is streamed.

Complex interrelationships between data

In the streaming world, content interrelationships play a crucial role in delivering a cohesive user experience. Managing the intricate web of connections between genres, cast and crew, related content, and user preferences requires sophisticated metadata management systems capable of accurately capturing and displaying the interlinked information without any glitches.

Data consistency and accuracy

Ensuring consistent and accurate metadata across the platform is crucial for delivering a seamless user experience. However, maintaining data consistency becomes challenging when metadata is sourced from multiple providers, each with their own formatting and quality standards.

2U, a global edtech company, faced challenges with their custom headless CMS as it became inadequate for their growing and diverse projects. They needed a more efficient solution to consolidate content pieces and streamline workflows, leveraging GraphQL for improved content aggregation.

Hygraph's headless CMS fulfilled all their requirements by providing 2U with a powerful solution to programmatically consolidate metadata from 500+ ed-tech offerings, seamlessly distributing up-to-date information to a global student audience of over 300,000, elevating their learning experience to new heights.

Modernizing the streaming experience with metadata

By leveraging metadata, streaming platforms can enhance search capabilities, enable personalized recommendations, and provide users with rich content details. However, achieving all this is only possible if your platform can scale alongside the growing audience demands.

Telenor’s video streaming service for the Nordics hit a similar roadblock of not being able to scale up as needed to deliver a high-quality experience while accommodating the increasing content volume. Hygraph empowered the Telenor team to deliver an immersive streaming experience to millions of viewers across the Nordics by federating metadata from external APIs seamlessly through a unified content abstraction layer. The platform also facilitated native localization and offered a schema builder, simplifying content aggregation from various sources and streamlining the workflow for content editors.

#Top 4 metadata management best practices for video streaming platforms

To harness the full potential of metadata, streaming platforms should adopt best practices tailored to their specific needs. Here are some key recommendations:

1. Define a metadata strategy

Develop a comprehensive metadata strategy aligned with your business goals and audience preferences. The strategy must ensure the delivery of accurate and relevant metadata, including detailed descriptions, genre classifications, and tags, that enhance searchability and content discoverability. The ultimate goal is for your platform to keep your audience engaged and satisfied, delivering them the content they were in search of.

2. Metadata-driven personalization

Leverage metadata to categorize content based on genre, cast, release date, language, and more. This categorization facilitates personalized recommendations, curated playlists, and dynamic content grouping through metadata-driven analytics, offering users a tailored streaming experience based on their viewing habits.

3. Get the right tools

Invest in the right tools for your video streaming architecture to achieve the desired outcomes. Opt for a robust solution like Hygraph, an optimized metadata management tool tailored for the video streaming industry. This unified platform enables you to efficiently organize, update, and synchronize metadata from various sources, ensuring consistency and accuracy throughout your entire streaming infrastructure.

4. Consolidate isolated metadata in a central layer

Streamline your metadata management process by consolidating diverse metadata from different sources into a central layer. Leverage Hygraph's capabilities to consolidate metadata from various API-driven services and vendor partnerships into a single, accessible abstraction layer. This consolidation simplifies metadata management, reduces duplication, and ensures data integrity by providing a single source of truth throughout your streaming platform.

#Federating metadata with next-generation content management

Hygraph's next-generation content management platform unlocks the true potential of metadata for streaming service platforms. With its user-friendly interface, it empowers streaming platforms to unify and structure large volumes of programmatic content sourced from APIs or collected from vendors and partners, ensuring scalability and efficiency.

Above all else, Hygraph's optimized solution understands the intricate web of relationships between different pieces of content, enabling platforms to deliver accurate recommendations and related content suggestions, enhancing viewer engagement and retention.

In the words of the team at Statistic Finland, a satisfied Hygraph customer:

To top it all off, Hygraph goes beyond metadata management by providing content editors with the flexibility to source and edit content from other APIs. You can then proceed to efficiently distribute metadata to any frontend and even associate assets with relevant metadata, such as image captions, for further content enrichment.

#Wrapping up

By embracing the given best practices and leveraging advanced tools like Hygraph, streaming platforms can utilize metadata management to stay ahead of the competition. Don't let your metadata remain an untapped potential—unleash its power and revolutionize your streaming platform today with the next-generation CMS.