Metadata is the structured information that describes content: title, synopsis, genre, cast and crew, release year, ratings, language and subtitle availability, artwork, and richer tags like mood, themes, and scene-level descriptors. It is the fuel for nearly every discovery feature.
Search relies on it, content-based recommendations are built from it, merchandising rows and the EPG draw on it, and rights and availability are tracked through it. Because discovery quality is capped by metadata quality, investing in clean, deep, consistent metadata - increasingly enriched automatically with AI - is one of the highest-leverage, least glamorous things an OTT platform can do for engagement.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
Metadata decides whether search and recommendations find the right title, and manual tagging rarely keeps up with a growing catalog. We wrote seven volumes covering the video stack; for metadata start with Volume 6 on computer vision, speech recognition, and search over a video archive, then Volume 7 on serving and cost, with encoding in Volume 1. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Catalog metadata too thin for search and recommendations to work?
We will review your catalog and metadata pipeline and send an enrichment plan using AI tagging, transcripts, and search. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
