Video Metadata

Finding common ground for video management

The area of video is rich in standards for encoding the moving images and for embedding the encoded video/audio data plus metadata into files. Also several sets of metadata fields exist.

For many video businesses metadata describing what can be seen and heard in a video, sharing rights related information plus administrative data like dates and involved persons is essential. Such businesses suffer from this rich set of standards as they support the same use case by different and not interoperable technical means. And the user experience is confusing: metadata for the same purpose may have different names, one standard is supporting a property for a requested use, the next one not. This does not allow to set up identical workflows for different technical types of video resources, this raises the threat of losing metadata in a workflow.

The IPTC Video Metadata Hub aims at solving that by ...

• ... defining a set of metadata properties, each one with a specific name, clearly described semantics and a basic data type. 
  These properties are a selection of the currently most commonly used.
• ... defining how theses properties can be expressed in a machine readable way by different metadata technologies covering different purposes.

The advantages of this approach are:

• Having a single set of metadata properties regardless of the technology to save them.
  This allows to define a consistent workflow for the metadata management across technical boundaries.
• Support of different technical solutions for the key goal to store and exchange metadata in a safe and reliable way.

Have a look at more details of the Video Metadata Hub.

The Video Metadata Hub Recommendation 1.0 is available since 24 October 2016.