The FINANCIAL — Ericsson has signed a global metadata distribution agreement with IMDb, the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content.
Ericsson will integrate IMDb’s metadata, including ratings and rankings, into its content discovery ecosystem and will become the reseller and integrator of these data sources to service providers worldwide.
Steve Nylund, Head of Broadcast and Media Services at Ericsson, says: “Finding content across multiple TV platforms and devices continues to be a major challenge for consumers and for the industry to resolve. 44% of US consumers say in an Ericsson ConsumerLab survey that they can’t find anything to watch on linear TV on a daily basis. That’s 22% more than last year. By integrating influential, globally representative data sets like IMDb’s ratings into our ecosystem, we can drive greater accuracy in our recommendation and discovery services, which in turn will drive greater consumer satisfaction.”
Ericsson’s content discovery ecosystem, which launched at NAB 2017, brings together a unique range of TV and movie data sources as well as a suite of cutting-edge software services that help to understand data and act on it. Broadcasters, content owners and service providers can access an extensive universe of rich data sets including images and poster art, clips and trailers, ratings, cast and crew information, series and episodic data and much more. The ecosystem also offers a package of applications including recommendations, universal search, deep linking, rights management and analytics to enable personalized viewing experiences, provide insight and intelligence to improve consumer loyalty, and drive targeted monetization opportunities – all delivered in real time and seamlessly through one API, according to Ericsson.
Ericsson’s semantic data hub sits at the heart of the ecosystem, which comprises best-in-class content discovery data and application partners. Partners’ data sources are pre-integrated within the ecosystem and linked across all TV platforms via unified IDs to enable universal search, thereby speeding up time to launch and reducing development costs. The ecosystem is also pre-integrated with the Ericsson MediaFirst solution suite and can also integrate easily with existing systems and infrastructure. IMDb joins Ericsson’s existing network of expert partners which includes Guidebox, IVA and XroadMedia.
Ericsson’s team of 300 editorial specialists aggregate, create, normalize, maintain, and deliver rich metadata, maintaining more than 14,000 sources globally. Ericsson’s global content discovery portfolio spans more than 10 million movies and program titles, covering over 25 languages and includes an image database covering over 90 percent of all programming available across traditional TV, VOD and SVOD. Globally, more than 200 million people interact with Ericsson’s rich metadata each week.
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