Connections

In mid-2021, I was deeply honored to be offered the opportunity to lead EIDR as its executive director. I’ve always respected EIDR as an institution and as a platform, with it being recognized as the gold standard for media identifiers.

Taking over the reins, I found myself faced with the challenge of building on what has already been done, with the understanding that nothing about EIDR is not broken, that nothing about the organization needs to be replaced or reimagined.

What do you get for the registry that has everything?

I thought of a scene in my favorite movie, Apollo 13, the 1995 masterpiece from Universal Pictures.

Spoiler alert: In one of many pivotal scenes, the team on the ground is tasked with making a square oxygen filter fit into the round opening of a different air filtration system, using only what is available on the disabled spacecraft. The astronauts will succumb to carbon dioxide poisoning should the NASA team fail. The task was clear. The stakes were high. Tension mounted. The pieces were all on the table. Just add creativity and determination. The problem was solved in the nick of time and Apollo 13 averted catastrophe.

EIDR isn’t an oxygen filter, and we probably can’t suffocate without it. But it is a vital building block for our industry. EIDR was created by the industry for the industry.

It works, and some of the biggest supply chains in the media and entertainment world have been built using it as a cornerstone.

Yet, despite EIDR’s clear and well-established benefits, some in our industry still haven’t embraced it. We have all the pieces.

They fit. We’re creative and determined. So what’s missing? It turns out, it’s information. I made some calls and asked a single question: Can you tell me why your company has not embraced EIDR as its unique identifier?

Three themes emerged in the answers I heard:

* EIDR’s registration process is too manual.
* Organizations have merged with another company (or two) and now have multiple systems that do the same thing. They’re waiting until they consolidate systems.
* The terminology needs updating to better support streaming and OTT use cases.

That third insight is just the type of feedback EIDR needs, providing us a clear opportunity to improve. Some of EIDR’s power users are now working together to identify missing terms, terms that will be added once consensus is reached. Regarding the first two items: EIDR has APIs and a software development kit that can be leveraged to automate the interactions between registering systems and the EIDR registry.

There’s nothing preventing EIDR registration from being done by more than one system. Your system can read, write, edit records with us regardless. In fact, existing EIDR APIs are shared between 70 companies and their many systems, with no collisions. If we can share, so can you!

And there are several ways to prevent collisions within your ecosystems as well. You can create a landing table to hold all the requests for a new EIDR ID, which you can deduplicate before sending the data to EIDR. You can build in logic to check for duplicates before your system submits the data.

You can even have one (or 10) system set up the title and others that update the metadata.

The best part is that you can build it in a way so that the business users who are tracking the title, version, and metadata have no idea that they are contributing to the registry!

Over the next few months, we will be publishing articles and hosting events in which we discuss all the ways you can automate your EIDR feeds. We hope that you will join us, bringing your architects, your engineers, your business team and more into the discussion.

So, I did end up finding the answer to my original question, on what do you get the registry that has everything: the answer is you. EIDR is a solution that grows and improves for everyone when more organizations adopt it.

We’re thrilled to work with anyone who’s interested in getting the most out of their EIDR membership. And we look forward to some amazing square filter/round hole conversations going forward.

** By Hollie Choi, Executive Director, Entertainment ID Registry **

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