Digital Supply Chain Alliance updates specifications for TV and movie supply chain

A global supply chain alliance has updated its supply chain specifications designed to expand its support for the international distribution of television and movie content and facilitate sophisticated business engagement and improved automation in the digital supply chain.

DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group, the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) and Motion Pictures Laboratories (MovieLabs), together with studios, retailers and service providers, have all approved and released four updated supply chain specifications for the digital distribution of film and TV through the Digital Supply Chain Alliance.

The updated specifications combined two comprehensive specifications developed over many years and two more targeted specifications for “core” requirements and use cases. The core specs enable content owners and distributors to start small with a simpler initial deployment, then grow the implementation as needed to meet requirements.

“The Digital Supply Chain Alliance was created to allow us as an industry to move faster and more efficiently towards standards adoption industrywide,” said John Powers, Executive Director, DEG. “We are happy to demonstrate, with the release of these first specs, that this is successfully happening. This is a meaningful step in keeping up with the pace of change in digital distribution.”
 

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Craig Seidel, MovieLabs Vice President of Distribution Technology, said, “Working together with the DEG and EMA, we incorporated improvements into the specifications to make them complete enough and robust enough to handle a wide range of situations encountered by our members. We are very pleased to make these the first specs approved through the Digital Supply Chain Alliance.”

Key parts of the updated supply chain specifications include:

• Common Metadata 2.7 – Substantial new features have been added to the Common Metadata specification, including support for franchises and brands, related works, more sophisticated TV internationalization, and technical metadata improvements (e.g., dynamic metadata and additional encoding parameters).
• Media Entertainment Core 2.8 – The Media Entertainment Core Metadata spec defines the core requirements for transferring metadata from Publishers to Retailers.
• Media Manifest 1.8 – The Media Manifest spec has also been updated to follow Common Metadata 2.7, as well as adding data to support additional workflow use cases, ability to handle cards in playable sequence, and improved support for TV that reduces the need for territory-specific experiences.
• Media Manifest Core 2.0 – Media Manifest Core 2.0 is the targeted core specification based on Media Manifest 1.8 and Common Metadata 2.7. It includes all the improvements from those specifications and adds full support for episodic content (i.e., Television).