EIDR Universal ID Solution Expands In Europe

- British Film Institute, West10 Entertainment and BUFVC Join EIDR

LONDON, Dec. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- West10 Entertainment, the British Film Institute (BFI), and the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) are the latest European entities to join Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), the coalition promoting the use of a unique, global identifier of entertainment assets including films and television episodes. The EIDR coalition is organized as an industry non-profit, and is comprised of key stakeholders in the digital supply chain, including content owners, video post-production houses, content distributors, retailers, entertainment services and technology provider companies.

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"We are delighted to join EIDR and see it as a fundamental building block in our core infrastructure, improving digitisation efficiency and enabling wider access to our library," said Ruth Kelly Head of Archive for BFI. The BFI is a UK charity that combines cultural, creative and industrial roles, bringing together the BFI National Archive and BFI Reuben Library, film distribution, exhibition at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX, publishing and festivals. They award Lottery funding to film production, distribution, education, audience development and market intelligence and research. Kelly added, "We are excited by EIDR's potential to help drive collaboration with other film and TV collections both in the UK and across Europe."

West10 Entertainment is a leading provider of entertainment metadata, with many years' experience of providing bibliographic data to Anglo American Cataloguing Rules and the Library of Congress Resource Description and Access standards. West10 is keen to support its existing work with major studios by adding EIDR as the final link in tracking across the format chain from theatrical release, physical, physi-digital and pure digital. Barry Smith, SVP Business Development, Alliances & Strategy commented, "West10 is pleased to be joining a growing EIDR community and is excited at the prospect of being able to add unique digital asset identifiers into its extensive database. We believe EIDR is fundamental to future significant growth and new cooperative cross-industry European projects." 

Smith added, "EIDR provides a universal digital asset identifier for our extensive database.  EIDR will also enable West10 to link the rich data it holds for books, music and games to film and TV, as it develops innovative services of content syndication with integrated social data, analytics and recommendations ratings and reviews."  West10 aggregates data from many tens of thousands of prime source content providers such as film studios, music labels, publishers and game developers.  As such, West10 has long recognised the importance of asset identifiers for its work with leading online retailers, wholesalers, retail outlets, specialist sites, library systems, government bodies, trade organisations and public services.

Another new member of EIDR is the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).  BUFVC is an educational charity that promotes the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media in higher education and research. It provides UK academics with access to a large archive of broadcast TV and other audio-visual assets.  

BUFVC is making use of the EIDR numbering system as part of its Shared Services project, funded by Higher Education Funding Council for England, to create the richest source of broadcast data for higher and further education. The project involves working with major UK broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, C4 and Sky together with UK educational institutions to enhance the BUFVC databases and services. 

These new EIDR member companies join the roster of other European member companies, including Deluxe UK, Civolution, Ericsson and Red Bee Media.  "Better connected data sets that span multiple markets are the key to enabling the next generation of media apps and Content Discovery services," said Richard Kirk, Head of Metadata Development for Red Bee Media. "We are planning further integration of our data with the EIDR repository and look forward to helping our broadcaster, platform and other industry partners engage with EIDR and launch the exciting next generation of media based apps and services."

"We are excited to welcome our newest international members, who are key players in registering a broad array of European content within the EIDR data base," said Don Dulchinos, Executive Director of EIDR. "EIDR was designed from the beginning to scale internationally; we are also extending our outreach to Asia beginning with an event at the January Consumer Electronics Show."  EIDR has also established a European operations support office headed by Ben Schofield, a veteran of metadata work at Red Bee and the BBC.

About EIDR.  The Entertainment Identifier Registry Association (EIDR) is a not-for-profit industry association that was founded by Movielabs, CableLabs, all 6 major Hollywood studios plus many cable service providers to meet a crucial need across the entertainment supply chain for universal identifiers for a broad array of audio visual objects.  For more information please visit www.eidr.org.