BAYSIDE, CALIFORNIA February 25, 2020 – StreamGuys today announced an innovative new problem-solving tool in its end-to-end suite of SaaS solutions for producing, managing, monetizing and delivering live and on-demand streaming media. The new 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.
The full power of SmartMetadata is further unlocked when combined with StreamGuys’ established SGmetadata service, which provides API or web socket access to the metadata in the live stream. Through SGmetadata, both the SmartMetadata-supplemented and broadcasters’ original metadata can be made available to connected media players (such as StreamGuys’ recently-upgraded, HTML5-based SGplayer, mobile apps and third-party applications.
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 cloudbased 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 Jason Osburn, executive vice president, StreamGuys. “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.”
StreamGuys’ SmartMetadata, SGmetadata and SGplayer 3.0 are all available immediately.