Exclusive interview with Rob Delf, CEO of Fabric

For digital websites and other platforms, content metadata is very important as it provides the values which are entered into these fields, such as title, content description, topic, etc. Making a metadata model is a vital job and Fabric is a film and television content metadata platform that enables customers to store identification, editorial, technical, discovery, and AI-generated content metadata for media and entertainment catalogs. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Rob Delf, CEO of Fabric.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Fabric is a film and television content metadata platform that enables customers to store identification, editorial, technical, discovery, and AI-generated content metadata for media and entertainment catalogs. It also provides a unique front-end to media supply chains, making data from previously disparate systems accessible to business users through a beautiful single application for review, curation, and reporting. More: https://www.fabricdata.com

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Fabric, formerly known as Meta, was created to solve a problem in the entertainment industry. In the early part of this century, television broadcasters were still relying on satellite feeds or hand-delivered DigiBeta tapes to upload footage from live events, such as sporting events. It was a huge logistical problem. The answer was to encode the footage down in a way that could be delivered via the Internet.

Once we solved the technical problem of quickly transferring entertainment content, we began tackling the problem of managing it. As the bandwidth of the Internet increased, allowing for the first time a free flow transfer of film and TV programming, suddenly there was all this new data to manage — everything from subtitles to marketing collateral, and complicated even further by cultural differences and legal requirements between various countries. A typical studio might be delivering content to 200 linear channels in 80 languages. Thus, the company is known today as Fabric was born to manage this massive amount of data and make it accessible in real-time to all of a client's stakeholders.

3. Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of Big Data Analytics and its future.

It's the best and worst of times. The good news is that we have the AI technology and the unified data architecture for the media and entertainment industry to seamlessly manage their content catalogs. The problem is that the technology is not being adopted quickly enough. Opportunities to maximize content by, for example, enhancing the user's experience on streaming platforms, are being lost. Thus, as the Harvard Business Review recently pointed out, bad data in the U.S. alone is costing businesses $3 trillion annually.

If you've got bad data, you never really know where you are. It leads to bad analysis and bad business decisions, which get compounded over time. They have a material effect on how a business performs. In turn, that leads to further financial losses or at least unrealized income.

4. What are the key trends driving the growth in Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning?

Churn, or the loss of subscribers, is a huge problem at the moment among streaming platforms and Hollywood content providers. One of the leading factors is poor user experience. A lot of that is driven by bad metadata. People can't find it, it's not described correctly, or doesn't appear at all. The magic number for the industry is three. According to research, if a viewer interacts with your streaming service three times a month or more, the likelihood of churn drops to 20%. But if they watch one or two pieces of content a month, then the churn rate is at 80% or more. The streamers hate churn, but it's a big side effect of having bad metadata.    

5. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

The future of metadata revolves around hyper-personalization. Approximately 80% of all views on streaming platforms today come from recommendations, yet 7 out of 10 consumers think that streamers' recommendations are terrible.

After experiencing a meteoric rise in the two years leading up to COVID and then experiencing an even bigger spike at the beginning of the pandemic, streaming platforms including industry leader Netflix are experiencing slowing subscriber growth. Why? Pundits have suggested the answer is a combination of the saturation of its core audience and increasing competition. Let's accept that analysis as good as any — the harder question is, what to do next?

The answer to how Netflix, or any of its competitors, can maintain market share is to stop subscriber churn through hyper-personalization. Recent advances in A.I. and machine learning technology can be leveraged to create a profile of each subscriber's data to deliver content specific to them. The days of relying on segment demographics or 'types' to identify the content viewers want to see are over.

Rather, streamers should be focused on creating a unified data architecture to build true customer-centricity. It's not a lack of data. The amount of data collected by streamers and broadcasters on a daily basis is overwhelming. In fact, that's the problem. Too much data is going to waste because it's not being analyzed properly to provide useful, actionable information about customer behavior.

6. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

Fabric provides a categorical source of truth for title catalog data within an organization. It manages and enhances a title catalog with automated enrichment and an award-winning platform that streamlines the core localization processes. It provides unrivaled insights with supply chain reporting across titles, rights, schedules, assets, and languages to get ahead of delivery. Fabric's pioneering platform is already in use by some of the world's most prestigious studios and broadcasters, including WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, MGM, FOX, and HBO.