IMDb and Fabric Inc. team up to enrich media and entertainment catalogs with an integrated solution

Over the last decade, the media and entertainment (M&E) industry experienced an unprecedented acceleration in the volume of content being created and the consolidation of multiple media and entertainment companies. As a result, the industry faced increased challenges around disorganization of proprietary title catalogs as well as the duplication and inconsistency of associated marketing assets and title metadata.

Overcoming these challenges isn’t always easy, and companies often lack the complete information needed to power their entertainment experiences and make informed business decisions. To enrich title catalogs with authoritative detail, M&E companies are required to obtain commercial licenses to integrate metadata—for example, synopses, user ratings, and genres.

Fabric Inc. (Fabric) is a film and television content metadata company that helps customers to store identification, editorial, technical, discovery, and AI-generated content metadata for media and entertainment catalogs. Fabric provides a categorical source of truth for title catalog data within an organization. Fabric Studio, its software-as-a-service powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), helps M&E companies author, edit, and maintain rich metadata for their film and television catalogs.

IMDb, an AWS Partner and Amazon company, is the world’s most popular and authoritative source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities. Products and services to help fans discover and decide what and where to watch include the IMDb website for desktop and mobile devices, apps for iOS and Android, and X-Ray on Prime Video. For entertainment industry professionals, IMDb provides IMDbPro and Box Office Mojo. Data licensed from IMDb powers entertainment worldwide, including major studios, global streamers, consumer brands, and social networks.

Fabric and IMDb recognized an opportunity to combine expertise and integrate offerings. Together, the companies developed a solution to seamlessly connect proprietary catalogs to authoritative IMDb data.

Streamlining metadata management

Media distributors must acquire and maintain metadata for the enrichment of their catalogs. Historically, this requirement meant that media companies needed to have commercial licenses with multiple data providers and build a proprietary catalog management system. Fabric recognized these customer pain points and developed software that offers an intuitive user interface and one-click metadata enrichment that identifies and organizes metadata, making it ready for distribution to third-party entertainment services.

In addition to simple integration, Fabric’s customers also depend on licensed data being robust and accurate. IMDb is known across the M&E industry as an authoritative source for entertainment metadata. “We offer tens of millions of licensable data items,” says Natasha Bishop, head of business development at IMDb. “Our focus is to verify that the metadata our customers consume is accurate, timely, and complete.”

The integrated solution makes it possible for Fabric’s customers to search for titles and access relevant information to enrich their catalogs with IMDb data. From there, the data can be used internally or externally. “The API calls are simple and straightforward,” says Rob Delf, CEO at Fabric. “It works great, and it’s all done in near real time.”

Creating the complete integrated service empowered Fabric and IMDb to provide their customers with a turnkey solution for data enrichment. Fabric licenses IMDb data through AWS Data Exchange, which helps partners find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. AWS Data Exchange removes the need to build and maintain data delivery or entitlement infrastructure. Instead, Fabric uses AWS Data Exchange for Data APIs—a service that helps to streamline API management for third-party data—to manage access to the IMDb dataset by handling authentication and subscription entitles. All data subscriptions are managed in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog where customers can find, subscribe to, deploy, and govern software, data, and professional services on AWS so that Fabric can consolidate billing and optimize costs.

Improving the end-customer experience

As a result of the solution, Fabric’s M&E customers—for example, Sinclair Broadcast Group (Sinclair)—can procure IMDb licensed data directly through their existing relationship with Fabric. M&E customers will have one agreement and one fee directly with Fabric; this setup provides cost and resource efficiencies compared to maintaining multiple agreements and payments. The solution also provides customers with the freedom to start using the data quickly and with ease.

The integration provides cost savings for employees, distributors, and M&E companies as well by streamlining the procurement and implementation processes involved in maintaining catalog management software. Data entry clerks no longer need to type in information about every TV episode. Instead, they can click a button to quickly get verified data. “Employee time is much better spent elsewhere,” says Delf. “Our solution turns a routine data entry job into a fun ‘click and you’re done’ job. It really makes a big difference.”

Ben Lister, head of programming at Sinclair, confirms the value of the IMDb-Fabric solution to Sinclair Broadcast Group. “Sinclair has been using the Fabric solution to enrich programming metadata for almost a year. Though we use a variety of data sources as part of the solution, IMDb is an example of a rich data source that is being improved upon regularly. Most recently, we have seen keywords and tags being expanded upon from IMDb and its vast community of contributors, which has proved to be useful in our efforts to acquire programming across our networks to build out themed events for our audiences. During this period, not only have we successfully streamlined operations because of these solutions, but our network ratings have also increased across the board on Comet (+17 percent), Charge (+37 percent), and TBD (+10 percent) year over year.”

In addition, the M&E industry has gained supply chain efficiency from this solution. Though the industry has spent a lot of time and money on distributing asset files, far fewer resources have gone toward the metadata pertaining to those assets. Through enriched metadata, assets gain an extra layer of visibility. This is beneficial for many processes, such as rights management, scheduling, asset delivery, and orchestration on content delivery networks.

Customers also benefit from the reliability and brand recognition of IMDb data. “IMDb is one of the most trusted sources of entertainment data, so our customers have virtually no quality assurance problems,” says Delf.

Continuing to increase value

Working together, Fabric and IMDb achieved a joint goal of offering a seamless and simple solution for M&E customers to enrich their proprietary catalogs. With simple and fast access to trusted IMDb data, M&E companies can improve their catalogs while saving time and optimizing costs.

“Together, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Bishop. “IMDb is hyper-focused on providing complete, timely, and accurate entertainment data, and Fabric has the tools to solve the challenges of our mutual customers. That’s the value we offer M&E customers with this integration.”

Attending the 2024 NAB Show? Join Fabric, IMDb, and Sinclair in person on April 16, 2024, at 11:30 a.m. in the AWS Partner Village Theater as they discuss this solution and key outcomes in more detail.