Gracenote, a metadata and automatic content recognition technology company owned by Nielsen, is debuting a new unified programming guide for streaming video services.
Gracenote’s guide will support services and content from North America, Europe, Latin America and APAC and is built to offer parental controls, universal search and similar discovery features while accounting for different proprietary feeds and ID systems.
"While much of the focus in the 'Streaming Wars' conversation has been on the largest catalogs and original content, the winners will also understand how to successfully integrate with a diverse set of video platforms," said Simon Adams, chief product officer at Gracenote, in a statement. "As this new generation of Video providers emerges, Gracenote is playing to its long-standing role providing the critical metadata, unique IDs and rich imagery that power killer user experiences and drive tune-in and engagement."
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Gracenote IDs and metadata provide common links between TV series, seasons and episodes, as well as related TV and movie genres, celebrities, and other descriptive information. The company also uses Advanced Video Descriptors criteria such as mood, theme, setting and character attributes to provide deeper metadata for content navigation and recommendations. The company is also promising custom content imagery within OTT guide interfaces and carousels along with the linking, audio/video quality, content availability and a data structure need to integrate a streaming service into mobile, set-top boxes and smart TVs.
Around this same time last year, Gracenote introduced enhanced metadata for content discovery and recommendations.
“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,” said Adams. “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.”