Exclusives

EIDR, LMT Tout the Importance of Standards at ITS Localisation

Two of the top voices in entertainment intelligence took the stage Feb. 28, during the conference session “Languages, LMT, and the “EID”R of the beholder,” at the Innovation and Transformation Summit (ITS): Localisation event in London, to discuss the importance of standardization when it comes to localization, metadata and other parts of the content distribution system.

Discoverability and localization are all about standards and metadata, and that is where the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) and the Language Metadata Table (LMT) come into play.

EIDR is the industry-curated public registry of unique media assets with a universal identifier, which has become the DNA of intelligent automation in entertainment.

LMT, meanwhile, provides a single-source solution for language codes and was selected as the language code standard of choice for the Cloud Localization Blueprint (CLB) presented in Amsterdam at the 2022 IBC Accelerator.

Hollie Choi, EIDR managing director, and Yonah Levenson, LMT founder and co-chair, used the ITS session to discuss the critical role and importance that global, unified, field-level standards play as the localization industry continues to evolve.

Noting that she has been with EIDR for about 18 months, Choi said her organization’s “entire mission is to identify individual content and give an identifier that anyone can use.” EIDR is a public registry and, “if you go to EIDR.org, you can search for any content and see the registration that was done,” she said. Those numbers are “non-proprietary, so you can use them in your systems, you can share them with anybody you like.”

She added: “There’s a minimal amount of metadata that goes with it – just enough for us to “de-duplicate.”

LMT, meanwhile, has “270 languages so far” and that number continues to grow, said Levenson. “There are a lot” of languages out there “but we make sure that there’s a use case for each language” with LMT, she said, adding “this past year we’ve added 25 new ones.”

As one example, LMT is “adding indigenous languages,” which are coming from Disney, she said. LMT is also “participating in the Cloud Localization Blueprint because they needed some kind of standard set of codes that would really work at the level that was needed,” she noted.

To underscore the importance of LMT standardization, she pointed out that, when she was with HBO, several people asked what the code was for Latin American Spanish and they learned there were 3-4 different versions. If one were to go by the BCP 47 standard, “you can have over 40,000 combinations” and the 270-plus they get with LMT “that are vetted” makes things “just a lot easier to work with,” she said.

One of the companies that “we work with is Google,” which she said was “in the process of working with us to augment the Google search.”

The Innovation and Transformation Summit: Localisation was sponsored by AppTek, Signiant, EIDR, Iyuno, LinQ Media Group, Vubiquity, OOONA, XL8, and Collot Baca, and was produced by MESA, in association with the Content Localisation Council.