ContentWise launches advanced metadata processing engine Knowledge Factory as stand-alone product

• Maturity of the add-on to ContentWise Personalization System combined with customer demand inform decision to release metadata blending, enriching and management tool as a separate product

August, 19, 2015, Milan – ContentWise™, the personalization, discovery and recommendations solution for digital TV content, today announces the release of the latest version of its metadata management solution, ContentWise Knowledge Factory, and its launch as a standalone product offering. The ContentWise Knowledge Factory is an integrated set of metadata management software and tools that help operators source, enrich, integrate and maintain better content metadata.

In today’s OTT and digital TV landscape, catalog complexity and metadata quality are still proving to be major challenges for operators and content providers. Viewers have the option to watch content across linear TV, catch-up, DVR, TVOD and SVOD, and as a result, operators are struggling to understand metadata coming from several different sources. In order for service providers to deliver a seamless TV experience, content cannot live in these silos and metadata must be cleaned and harmonized in order to provide the most value.

The ContentWise Knowledge Factory blends, reconciles, de-duplicates and enriches data from different sources, eliminating metadata silos to deliver personalized TV experiences. While improving content-based personalization, it also extracts maximum value from metadata licenses with third-party data providers, creating non-obvious links between data. It also includes live feeds of dynamic data such as trending shows and sports events.

“Delivering true personalization and a superior user experience is only possible if the underlying data is rich, deep and understood by the personalization system. Operators and content providers face enormous challenges today in handling even the simplest of metadata management tasks – and today’s technologies do not have the functionality to support them,” said Pancrazio Auteri, CTO of ContentWise. “To support operators, technologies must automate metadata processing, validate enriched data before it goes live, consolidate workflows and export clean and richer metadata to existing content management systems. Our Knowledge Factory is built precisely to help operators make the most of their metadata, delivering innovative user experiences and smart content discovery.”

Unique features of the new ContentWise Knowledge Factory release include:

•  Data Source Adapter, Data Export Adapter and Scripting – enables data import from external systems and export and sync with external repositories or systems e.g. CMS or MAM. Scripting extends the data processing capabilities of Knowledge Factory through Javascript and Groovy scripting.
• Item Reconciliation – delivers a non-trivial connection among different versions of the same asset across different catalogs (e.g. EPG, catch-up, VOD, OTT, etc.)
• Data Enrichment – finds the best metadata match across different internal, external and public sources and merges metadata according to defined policies and set quality standards.
• Data Normalization and Data Deduplication – defines metadata standardization, cleaning and transformation rules e.g. replace synonyms of comedy such as “Comedies”, “Sit-Com”, “Pantomime” with “Comedy”, and identifies and merges duplicate instances of the same item according to smart match detection logic.
• Extensible Data Model – creates any data type in addition to out-of-the-box data types to support each service and catalog-specific entity description needs.
• Editorial Tools for Metadata:
  • Workflow Manager – supports the definition, scheduling and sequencing of automatic and manual metadata processing tasks.
  • Task Lists – provides the editorial team an at-a-glance view of metadata processing issues and pending manual tasks.
  • Data Console – is designed to enable human verification, approval, editing and/or manipulation of automatically processed metadata.
  • Data Source built-in support for major data sources, such as Gracenote/TMS, Rovi, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, IMDB, Cinoche

“Quite simply, having better quality metadata and the tools to support this provides a number of benefits to operators and viewers in today’s TV landscape,” said Paolo Bozzola, CEO of ContentWise. “Not only does it enable a better UX and better personalization results, but the automation of complex and repetitive tasks also produces business benefits, reducing costs, accelerating time to market, eliminating errors. Ultimately, video service providers need their metadata in one place if they want to deliver seamless and compelling TV experiences – and our Knowledge Factory does just that.”

Knowledge Factory will be available in 2 versions, Knowledge Factory Lite and Knowledge Factory SaaS. Knowledge Factory Lite is included in the ContentWise Personalization System and includes metadata ingestion and internal reconciliation. Knowledge Factory SaaS is a separate product that includes metadata ingestion, enrichment, normalization, blending and editorial tools for metadata management.