2023-09-25 My First IBC

Metarex went to IBC 2023 as part of the IBC Accelerators , as a participant in the responsive narrative factory . The Responsive Narrative Factory (RNF) was set the task of creating personalised dynamic video streaming. The demo at IBC was culmination of five months work across multiple companies and technical disciplines.

In RNF the personalisation meant the stream is tailored to the user’s feedback and preferences, while preserving the narrative of the content. Ten people could watch the same stream, but with different content choices, such as predation, certain presenters, or watch time and have a different stream generated. The spring watch demo had up to approximately 4 million viewing combinations! The dynamic element meant segments of the stream can be changed on the fly, such as a user response to a segment causing a skip to the next segment without that tag e.g. nudity (useful when with the kids or parents, delete where applicable).

Metarex’s role was handling the metadata tagging of the videos to segment them up. We took metadata tagging of the videos, from multiple sources such as AI or Bruce Devlin , then used this to split up the video into segments based on their metadata with accompanying tags. These segments were used by the infuse video player to stream the video. To handle the different styles and types of metadata, we used a Metarex tool to take data from multiple sources and clean them into a generic database. All metadata could then be handled with the same workflow for video segmentation. This reduced the time for segmentation, as it removed the need to make custom handling of each metadata source. If you would like to see the tool, you can check it out here , please note it is a work in progress.

It was great to see so many people visit the RNF booth, engage with demo and to talk about the applications of RNF and Metarex. If you were unable to make IBC or didn’t get a chance to see the demo at the booth then please check it out here (this might get moved after NAB 2024).

IBC and RNF weren’t the only things I got to experience in Amsterdam, apart from sampling the famous capsule hotels and Dutch pancakes, I got to engage with you all about metadata experiences and how Metarex can be utilised. Discussions about metadata and how to get people to use the same formats also took centre stage, with efforts such as the EBU core plus to make metadata more translatable. One thing was clear no matter what your metadata is, there should still be a universal way of transporting it, something Metarex hopes to achieve with the mrx file.

In conclusion the RNF gave us a glimpse of what may come, and the future? As Mark Smith said, “the future will be personalised”. The usage and types of metadata will only grow with the rise of AI, live production and more innovative technology across the industry and Metarex will be there to ensure you can use it.