Technology & Operations

Technology & Operations

The Technology and Operations Committee led by Co-Chairs Willie Gillespie, NBCUniversal and Lena Wasikowski, Warner Bros. is focused on creating efficiency and promoting collaboration across the physical and digital supply chains. Its priority is to establish standards to adopt for digital content identification, availability and formatting.

The group provides leadership to the Digital Supply Chain Task Forces focused on developing, recommending and implementing both standards and best practices in the digital space. The Committee has identified multiple opportunities to align workflows between content owners and digital distribution platforms.

The current focus is work on feature and episodic avails, localization, common metadata, common media manifest, EIDR and reporting standardization. In addition, it is looking at newer supply chain initiatives and the inclusion of next generation content extras.

2018 marked the beginning of a new, closer alignment between DEG, the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) and Movielabs, which in July formed the Digital Supply Chain Alliance (DSCA) with the goal of bringing the members of all three groups together to strengthen the links in the Digital Supply Chain.

DSCA represents a close alignment of the three groups within a new framework designed to improve efficiency, standards adoption and sharing of best practices for the digital supply chain. A Digital Supply Chain Steering Committee was also established – under the stewardship of DEG’s John Powers, EMA’s Eric Hanson and Movielabs’ Craig Seidel – to provide oversight, guidance and direction for the combined efforts.

The DSCA accomplishes its objectives through the efforts of working groups that meet on a regular basis to develop standards and best practices for content providers and service providers. DSCA currently oversees seven working groups: Avails; Metadata; Asset Ordering; QC Nomenclature; Ratings; SVOD Rights Communication and Education. In addition, DSCA holds bi-annual conferences to update the broader community on progress and new developments in the supply chain.

Click here for more information about DEG’s Technology and Operations Committee.

Photo captions (at left, top to bottom)

1. DEG TechOps Committee Co-Chair Willie Gillespie, of NBCUniversal (l.), presents with MovieLabs’ Craig Seidel during DEG’s 2019 European Road Show.

2. Amazon Studios’ Erol Kalafat in a working group discussion at the April 25, 2019 DSCA Bi-Annual Meeting at Showtime in New York.

3. Working groups are at the core of the Bi-Annual Meeting.  Sony’s Kacy Boccumini (standing, center) addresses a group.

4. Google’s Bill Kotzman at the Bi-Annual Meeting.