Gracenote Launches Metadata Products for Video, Music, Sports

Gracenote, the metadata company recently acquired by Nielsen from Tribune Media, said it is launching new products that will enable voice search and personalized media recommendations across video, music and sports.

Gracenote says its new entertainment databases provide the deep descriptive information needed to power cross-media entertainment experiences spanning all devices.

The databases—Gracenote Global Video Data, Gracenote Global Music Data and Gracenote Global Sports Data—include TV schedules for more than 85 countries, live scores and statistics in sports, and information about nearly every song ever recorded. The company expects that information to be the backbone of new entertainment experiences.

“The lines that once delineated providers of TV, movies, music and other forms of digital media are blurring. When we set out three years ago to create the world’s largest entertainment data company, our goal was to deliver a single dataset with persistent IDs to drive entirely new cross-media experiences,” said Rich Cusick, chief product officer for Gracenote. “These new metadata products represent the biggest evolution in the history of our business and will help our customers dream up and deliver innovative entertainment experiences and establish new business models—all powered by Gracenote data.”

Gracenote’s standardized IDs link musical artists to discographies, actors to TV shows and schedules, episodes to seasons and athletes to live games across linear TV, video on-demand and over-the-top services.

For example, using Gracenote data and IDs, a search for Beyoncé would deliver results across her music, TV and movie career spanning her latest tracks and collaborations with other artists, her visual album on HBO, Lemonade, and her movie appearance in Epic. A search for LeBron James would bring up relevant career statistics, the upcoming Cleveland Cavaliers NBA schedule on TV, recent game highlights, a previous interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and spotlight his role in the 2015 movie Trainwreck.

Gracenote Global Video Data brings together TV and movie metadata from more than 85 countries into a single API. The company says it provides a global solution for cable and satellite TV providers, smart device manufacturers and OTT services that seek to expand internationally and require regionally relevant data.

Jon Lafayette

Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.