ITV’s Core Catalogue in a Digital world

When people find out that I work at ITV they always ask what I do and sometimes it’s difficult to explain. To most people ITV is all about programmes, but behind the glitz and glamour technology plays a fundamental role getting our programmes to air, using ever evolving technology to improve our production and supply chain processes.

I’m in ITV Technology’s Catalogue Management Product Team, this sits in the Content Supply & Distribution division. We are responsible for the end to end supply chain, this includes: capturing content information, scheduling across linear and non linear platforms, ensuring content arrives and is delivered on time. My role as a Product Manager is to establish, communicate and deliver a vision for a product, I talk to business users and articulate to our development team what we should build and why.

Developing ITV’s new Core Catalogue

As part of ITV’s strategy and investment in data and technology, we’ve been transforming how we manage and distribute the content data for all our shows.

One part of that has been the development of ITVs new Core Catalogue — a product that holds the metadata for all of our shows. Teams across ITV will use the Core Catalogue for a variety of reasons, for example: enabling a show’s synopsis to be pulled onto the ITV Hub and BritBox so viewers can see what’s coming up; To create Unique Identifiers for all levels of our content, made available across our supply chain from scheduling, to sales and our finance teams.

What’s the vision?

We had a vision to create a new centralised repository of data for all content being produced, broadcast and distributed by ITV, making all our data accessible to teams at ITV and our third party partners. Previously, this was managed in a system that had been in operation at ITV for over 20 years.

Data would be captured at source and would be agnostic in who it serves. It would be identified and catalogued at the point of commission/acquisition and structured to facilitate multiple uses and allow for third party integration. An example of Catalogue Metadata would be the show title Love Island, then a synopsis for all levels such as high level Brand, episodic specific, contributors to the show, its genre and any awards won.

A key part of my role as Product Manager is also defining what the product is not. We developed a list to guide our work, we agreed it would not be:

• Reliant on rights data and/or contractual information — their life cycles would be independent of the Core Catalogue but it needs to work together to support the supply and distribution of content.
• A merchandising tool to facilitate single use metadata.
• A catch all for all data relating to a piece of content throughout its lifecycle.
• A manual system requiring significant overhead to re-key data.

How did we do it and what were the challenges?

Our main challenge was migrating and freeing 65 years of catalogue data from the existing legacy system, some of which had been previously migrated over to us from other companies, so it had many different identification schemas and structures. We are talking about more than 500,000 individual productions!

Delivery was more than just building a great product — we also had to transform our processes and the way we worked to ensure success.

We began by redefining the data model, the previous model was designed for a linear world so we looked to enhance that to cater for the ever changing landscape of digital content. We then went out and spoke to various consumers of the data, about what catalogue data they used and why.

We did lots of data crunching to ensure the wealth of content we hold was structured correctly and fit for consumption by downstream users. A happy coincidence was the development of the BritBox UK product at the same time as we were able to leverage that use case to help us understand their requirements.

The end result

We migrated all our data into the new Core Catalogue and started a journey between my product team and the Operations team who look after our Catalogue. We work together to help improve their workflows and eradicate re-keying of data by ensuring we capture it at source, curate it throughout and make it available to others.

For me the process has at times been challenging, inspiring and educational. But above all, a true indication of how we can use Technology and Product to improve processes and drive more efficient ways of working, collaborating with our business partners to deliver products that really help the business grow.