Margaret Craig Joins GrayMeta to Discuss Metadata in M&E

“I think the biggest thing is that there’s just so much of it,” noted Margaret Craig, Signiant’s CEO, in a remark about just how much metadata is created today. Last week, Margaret spoke with Matt Eaton, managing director for EMEA at GrayMeta, on their Metadata Matters podcast. Together, they discussed the role of metadata in M&E, the challenges in working with massive amounts of metadata across distributed and disparate content repositories, and the opportunities to leverage metadata in new and powerful ways.

As Signiant is well-known across the industry for moving media assets, some might ask what Signiant has to do with metadata?

Actually, a lot. Signiant’s software moves petabytes of high-value content every day, but to do so, we need to generate, extract, manage, and take action based on metadata. The role Signiant plays in the modern media technology stack is increasingly weighted in this direction. 

“One of the interesting things, as customers have adopted our SaaS platform, is they start to think of Signiant not necessarily as moving files but more as a storage abstraction level for accessing files. The moving files value proposition is still really important, but customers started asking, ‘can you do some other things for us,’” Margaret explains.

During the 30-minute podcast, Margaret and Matt discussed how Signiant’s unique SaaS platform works with metadata in a variety of ways to help create efficiencies, including:

• How chain of custody metadata is captured in Signiant’s SaaS platform to provide a highly dependable source of truth about where and when assets are transferred

• How CloudSpeX uses metadata to determine the format compliance of a media asset before a file is transferred

• How Signiant’s intelligent transport architecture uses machine learning with current and historical anonymized file transfer metadata to optimize performance on any IP network

The podcast also included discussions about using anonymized usage data to better understand emerging trends across the industry; when taxonomies & schemas need to be strict and when they need to be flexible; and a discussion on the trade-off of human curation vs. automation.

The consensus, though, is there are massive amounts of metadata being generated, and it’s everywhere. 

“The importance of metadata just continues to grow,” Margaret emphasizes. “That’s how you find your assets; that’s how you monetize them. It is absolutely essential.” 

Read more about Signiant and metadata in our series, Metadata Everywhere. Other chapters explore, in more depth, the ways in which Signiant’s SDCX SaaS architecture works with the media essence and metadata across disparate and distributed storage environments. Learn about the many different ways media organizations can utilize the Signiant metadata framework to enhance productivity and optimize their technology stack.