Sunday, December 30, 2012

EIDR

October 31, 2010
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment 


The Grosvenor Cinema in Glasgow hit the headlines in mid-October when a tradesman broke through a partition wall in the projection room and discovered a dusty and unlabelled can of film. Joiner Ross McMillan told the Glasgow Evening Times, “I didn’t know what it was at first, I hoped it was hidden treasure but when I realised it wasn’t I was about to throw it in the skip.”

The cinema staff opened the unlabelled can and discovered a print of the 1933 hit “King Kong”, which had been missing from the RKO vaults for years. Perhaps fortunately for McMillan, the print is not on highly flammable nitrate stock but is a re-released celluloid version from the 1950s.

Anyone who has walked through a well-run film archive will have been impressed by the multitude of cans stacked from floor to ceiling, each one labelled around the edge using a magic marker on camera tape. The guardians of this treasure trove once presided over an impenetrable card index and protected the cans with their lives, only releasing them to archivists furnished with permission signed in triplicate.

Today, the cans will be bar-coded and the information stored in a sophisticated digital database. There is, however, a flaw in the system that can bedevil even the best run archives. Human beings don’t put film prints back in the right can!

Even if the can found at the Grosvenor had “King Kong” written on the outside, it might have contained trimmings and damaged film, there could be no guarantee that it contained the entire feature.

Once the identity of the contents was established, questions remained about the version within. Did it have the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) certificate at the head (and is it still valid?). Might it just be the trailer, or maybe only the second reel? A projectionist’s life was never an easy one, especially with a full house on the opening night.

It would be a mistake to thing that the era of digital cinema and YouTube means that screening the wrong version will never again be a problem. With so many different languages, sub-titles and national legislative requirements, identifying which version is which has never been so complex or important.

For example the BBFC, now charged with classifying instead of censoring what we watch in the UK, can advise content distributors to make minor changes to the DVD or Blu-ray Disc version of a film in order to ensure a “U”, “PG” or “15” rating. In doing so, they initiate a new version; maybe only slightly different from the Australian Classification Board and perhaps identical to the Irish Film Censor’s Office version in every aspect aside from the opening card. Yet another version might well be produced for TV, satellite and cable, and the airlines will request a sanitised version that will offend nobody.

For the production and distribution community, this plethora of alternative versions has become a growing nightmare, with millions of different copies of film and TV assets created each year. The problem has been compounded by the multitude of technical standards used for encoding digital media data and the blossoming of mobile handsets and smartphones.

It is little wonder that content producers, led by the Hollywood studios, broadcasters and leading cable companies, have been looking for a solution to this problem for a number of years. Until quite recently, there were too many vested interests, each demanding proprietary systems or customised additions to basic “standards” that could render them all but useless.

Other industries have done a much better job in identifying different unique versions. Nearly 100% of the book publishing industry adheres to the International Standard Book Numbering (ISBN) system and UPC codes are widely used. Yet the equivalent International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) has made little headway, despite determined efforts by its promoters.

Now, a coalition of industry leaders in the entertainment supply chain has taken another look at the problem aiming to increase the speed and reduce the cost of registering content. Rovi, MovieLabs (a joint venture by the major studios), Comcast (the largest cable and home internet provider in the US) and CableLabs (a consortium of US cable operators) are the founding members.

Rovi Standards and Emerging Technology Director Adam Powers tells Cue Supply Chain that the universal adoption of a version identification system was the key to its success. To achieve that it has merged several independent development strands into a single non-profit entity: the Entertainment Identifier Registry or EIDR.

Powers says, “Being able to identify what is identical between each asset and what is different is very important, as well as establishing the relationships between each one of them.”

The concept is much more complex than that faced by the book publishing industry with multimedia assets consisting of different series, episodes, cuts and languages, as well as multiple encoding formats, aspect ratios and definitions, he says: “Instead of just one identifier for one asset, you end up with perhaps hundreds of identifiers per asset. We will now be able to provide a separate identifier for each of the many professional video assets that exist for each work.”

If EIDR is adopted as widely as organisers hope there should be advantages in every area of media creation and distribution. Revenues increase when the right product reaches the right consumer at the right time and with the reduced need for content tracking that EIDR promises, the resulting workflow improvement should mean efficiencies and savings.

In addition, Powers says that new opportunities will arise from the provision of value-added services such as universal search and discovery, residuals tracking, rights management and consumption metrics: “EIDR is a centralised registry that automatically assigns a unique identifier for every new asset, and anyone can look up the asset using that identifier. The idea is to make EIDR easy to join, quick to access and inexpensive to use.”

Powers says that the partners have learned from some of the previous schemes tested by the music industry: “They charge ‘pennies per track’ and with millions of tracks, they end up being far too expensive. It’s just too cumbersome to track payment on a track-by-track basis. Members of EIDR simply pay a fee to join on a yearly basis and it’s ‘all you can eat’ from there on.”

For EIDR to succeed, it will have to achieve acceptance beyond North America and support from leading media industry organisations elsewhere in the world will be crucial. Having the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) on board is therefore an important step.

New members are needed to help the process along and he believes that once the fruits of the work that has been done so far become known to the wider community, there will be an incentive to exploit its advantages. Unlike 35mm film, there is no need to play an entire reel before certain identification can be madesince the EIDR code is embedded throughout.

“EIDR will make it possible to provide functionality that includes advanced advertising, interactivity and the Keychest and UltraViolet digital locker initiatives. This is a key piece of infrastructure in the supply chain that will drive consumer applications of digital video,” Powers says.

Back in the Grosvenor in Glasgow, RKO’s successor Universal Pictures told the manager that the late return fees for King Kong have mounted up over the years and that £43,000 is now due.

The print is in good condition and before the reel’s return to the archive on November 8, it will be given one last season of screenings to celebrate the opening of the refurbished venue, now equipped with digital projection facilities and renamed the Grosvenor Café and Cinema.

In the circumstances, Universal Pictures has agreed to waive the late charges.

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