The FAST metadata challenge

Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) channels have grown in numbers significantly over the past few years. While this is great news for price sensitive or time rich viewers, the challenge of finding what to watch amongst all of the available content is now bigger than ever.

Can FAST channels solve the Content Discovery conundrum?

Metadata is the program and channel associated data that accompanies the EPG and video file format delivered as part of a FAST channel. The DTG FAST Forum’s “Essential FAST TV Industry Handbook” (Nov 2023) outlined that high quality metadata is key to driving engagement, discovery, and monetisation of FAST channels.

If we consider that in the UK there are around 130 free-to-air channels via Freeview or Freesat, plus tens of streaming apps, then the addition of just one FAST platform - Samsung TV Plus which adds another 130 channels (at the time of writing), that's an unmanageable amount of content for a viewer to navigate.

High-Quality Metadata is key, But it's often missing

While the DTG FAST Forum's "Essential FAST TV Industry Handbook" (Nov 2023) rightly emphasises the importance of high-quality metadata for FAST channel success, current practices fall short. This lack of robust metadata creates significant challenges that can lead to:

1. Poor viewer experiences: Inadequate metadata hinders content discovery and user engagement.

2. Increased churn: Frustrated viewers will abandon FAST channels if they can't easily find what they're looking for.

3. Unnecessary costs: Inefficient metadata workflows lead to higher operational costs for FAST content providers and platforms.

Enrichment Challenges

Gracenote performed an analysis on 1000+ Global FAST channels shows where major data gaps exist between channel metadata that received from various partners and the ultimate enriched data that is delivered to platforms. To highlight this, below is a description of some key metadata categories along with Table 1 which shows the delta between the number of data points in content when Gracenote receives it from partners and the number of data points in content when Gracenote delivers the content to platforms (%). This highlights the amount of enrichment that is needed across different program types in order to meet today’s platform requirements.

This is primarily an indication of data presence (any images) rather than data quality (number, quality, types of images) or normalisation or correction to underlying data, important topics not considered here.

• Genre - A primary attribution for discovery and ad serving

• Images - The most essential component of content merchandising

• Age Rating - Relevant for ensuring content and ads are appropriate 

• Original Air Date/Release year - Used for thematic bucketing and merchandising new content

• Production Country - Relevant for localisation

Metadata category	All Program Types	Feature Films	Serial Content
Genre	31%	13%	32%
Images	10%	44%	7%
Age Rating	25%	25%	25%
Release Year/Air Date	56%	93%	57%
Production Country	66%	84%	73%

What's the impact of this missing metadata

This metadata enrichment gap clearly shows that many FAST channel providers simply do not have full coverage of even the most basic metadata such as genre. Imagine that you use a simple filter in the UI to show all movies or news. These programs with no genre simply won't appear in any category - they'll effectively disappear from the UI.

Similarly, no recommendation can be readily made between a programme you're watching and one with no genre. What about search? "Show me all movies on TV tonight" is a typical voice utterance from which programmes with no genre will not be included.

A similar negative impact on the UX will be caused by other missing metadata such as images or age ratings.

Why does this happen?

Let's get one thing clear - metadata is not sexy! It's data about content, not the actual content and as such it's often an afterthought. But how many companies would not make any attempt to optimise their website for SEO or fail to perform any marketing to promote their products or services? Metadata is comparable to SEO in one sense, in that providing good quality, accruate, consistent metadata across all of the content make the content more discoverable. But there's a downside which has a much deeper negative impact than wiht SEO. Failure to provide a minimum set of metadata can mean that the content actually becomes invisible to viewers. Even if you don't optimise your website for SEO it's almost impossible that yoru site will be completely invisible as people can find it by its URL.

Well established content producers such as broadcasters who've been in the TV industry for a while have learned this lesson years ago. New entrants may not fully understand the impact until they've moved through the maturity curve and need to go beyond just getting FAST channels launched.

Summary

OK, that's a quick overview of how metadata impacts FAST channels. I've focused more on the negative side because new entrants are the ones who're being negatively impacted the most. Other articles cover the upsides of investing in metadata.