IMDb, said to be the world’s most popular and authoritative source for film, TV and celebrity content, has struck a global metadata distribution agreement with broadcast technology firm Ericsson.
Under the terms of the deal, Ericsson will integrate IMDb’s metadata, including ratings and rankings, into its content discovery ecosystem and will become the reseller and integrator of these data sources to service providers worldwide.
Ericsson boasts a team of 300 editorial specialists aggregating, creating, normalising, maintaining and delivering metadata from more than 14,000 sources globally. The content discovery portfolio spans over ten million films and programme titles, covering over 25 languages, and includes an image database covering over 90% of all programming available across traditional TV, video-on-demand (VOD) and subscription VOD (SVOD). Its content discovery ecosystem launched at NAB 2017 and brings together a range of TV and movie data sources as well as a suite of software services that help to understand data and act on it.
“Finding content across multiple TV platforms and devices continues to be a major challenge for consumers and for the industry to resolve,” explained Ericsson head of broadcast and media services Steve Nylund. “44% of US consumers say in an Ericsson ConsumerLab survey that they can’t find anything to watch on linear TV on a daily basis. That’s 22% more than last year. By integrating influential, globally representative data sets like IMDb’s ratings into our ecosystem, we can drive greater accuracy in our recommendation and discovery services, which in turn will drive greater consumer satisfaction.”
