Cable Television Laboratories has issued the VOD Metadata Content Specification 2.0. This specification improves upon version 1.1, which is in common use today, by aiding cable operators as they prepare for scaling up content offerings and customer usage in next generation VOD services.
The specification creates a video distribution specification for content providers and aggregators that reduces backend content transport and storage demands, increases the amount of standardized metadata available for use in searching and simplifies the user interface. Through use of standardized metadata, cable operators can also provide VOD customers with ways to find content, search for their scenes within the selected video, and discover video entertainment or promotions that target their interests.
The VOD Metadata Content Specification 2.0 is the first application to use the Asset Distribution Interface (ADI) 2.0 Platform Specifications as part of the next-generation of on-demand cable services. The document is the product of a collaborative group comprised of cable operators, hardware vendors and content providers.
CableLabs developed this specification working with cable operators, content providers, and hardware component developers operating under a royalty-free Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) pool. The VOD metadata project at CableLabs was formed to develop a common approach to content asset metadata that enables cost-effective VOD operations, content encoding, and bandwidth management services located at cable system headends.
The VOD metadata project already has issued several specifications, as well as revisions to those documents, to deal with current and next-generation VOD operations. They include:
- CableLabs ADI 2.0 Structures Specification
- Cablelabs ADI 2.0 Asset Inventory Messages Specification
- CableLabs ADI Specification 1.1
- CableLabs VOD Content Specification 1.1
- CableLabs VOD Content Encoding Profiles Specification
The VOD Metadata Content 2.0 specification document, as well as other CableLabs' specifications, is available at www.cablelabs.com.
