LOS ALAMOS, CALIF. — Does your radio station suffer from metadata holes in its audio streaming?
A new service from Northern California-based StreamGuys could provide the solution you’ve been looking for.
The newly released SmartMetadata service automatically fills in missing music-related metadata in radio broadcasters’ live streams, enabling them to provide “a more consistent and comprehensive user experience for their listeners” by improving their metadata display.
StreamGuys will showcase the new service at the upcoming 2020 NAB Show (April 19-22 in Las Vegas), where they will co-exhibit with technology partner ENCO in booth N2616.
Portions of broadcasters’ live streams may lack proper metadata for a variety of reasons: guest DJs bringing in their own music libraries; songs played from CD or vinyl records; content sourced over satellite; or inconsistent, improperly formatted or incomplete metadata in their own playout systems. These gaps detract from the consumer user experience, as today’s listeners expect to see information such as song, artist and album names in their media players.
The SmartMetadata service listens to the broadcaster’s live stream and uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify music within it. The service then sends corresponding metadata including song title, artist name, album name, marketing label and ISRC code back to StreamGuys’ streaming servers.
Future SmartMetadata features will leverage the underlying technology’s indexing capabilities to also enable identification of proprietary content such as PSAs, news, ads and original programming, which can be helpful for attribution of over-the-air broadcasts and internet streams. In addition to its primary cloud-based offering, SmartMetadata will optionally be available for on-premises deployment for organizations wanting to index such content within their studios.
StreamGuys also plans to integrate SmartMetadata with the AudioLogger functionality in the company’s SGrecast live stream repurposing and podcast management system. This will enable audio recordings to automatically have the metadata accessible in the logger, which is beneficial for auditing and analysis as well as indexing or searching through recorded content.
“We’ve received a lot of interest in metadata augmentation from radio broadcasters wanting to improve their information they display to their listeners,” said StreamGuys EVP Jason Osburn. “SmartMetadata lets them effortlessly do exactly that, and pairs with SGmetadata to deliver API access to the new metadata that customers can use with third-party services or their own internal management systems for any additional purposes they wish.”
— Additional reporting by Brian Galante
