The State of Metadata in 2011

Metadata Privacy Concerns Will Also Swell

The previous point leads to the last trend, in which privacy concerns about video metadata will also take on a more urgent tone in 2011. In fact, all three of the previous areas hold some form of privacy concern, from automated metadata being tied to public data records to the use of images to aid in search to real-time location awareness. 

As an industry, I don’t know if we yet have a way to address privacy concerns because the focus has been much more on gathering and verifying data. As the industry continues to mature, and as acquisitions and mergers consolidate the base of metadata power around a few key companies, the area of privacy will become even more critical. One only need look at Google’s public perception shift, in which the search engine giant’s ability to provide the general population with search engine “magic” morphed into a significant outcry against the company’s ability to ingest and categorize huge amounts of previously splintered or disaggregated data.

In conclusion, video-based metadata is a topic that will grow significantly in 2011. Even as it encounters growing pains, metadata will continue to grow in capability and necessity, with little chance of losing popularity in the 2012 “census” of streaming media topics.

This article originally ran in the 2011 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook as "Going Meta: the State of Metadata."

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