Facebook Video – Why Did The GRD Fail

Howdy!

Incredible amounts of work are taking place right now in the Exploration spider hole. [Reader scratches head…spider hole?] The spider hole is what us engineers like to call our happy place, where ambient electronic music softly emanates from comfy headphones, good coffee is plentiful, and being disturbed is absolutely forbidden…the spider hole is where women and men who build software go to make massive progress in wrangling code to make robots (computers) do our (humans) bidding.

If you’re keen to learn a bit more, read on.

Facebook Video

Facebook will become a very important destination for the owners of media. While the opportunities abound for monetization and collection of analytics, Facebook will be faced with many of the same rights management challenges that YouTube and others have.

Here’s an article reporting some of the massive social network’s video statistics: http://fortune.com/2015/06/03/facebook-video-traffic/

AudibleMagic is the audio fingerprinting technology used by Facebook, in addition to SoundCloud, Daily Motion, Vimeo and more. It works in a similar fashion to YouTube’s Content ID and Shazam. A rights holder uploads a musical work to Audible Magic, along with applicable metadata, and when that same media appears on any of the networks utilizing the service, it is flagged as being owned by the party that originally uploaded the reference file, as it were.

This is all well and good for known master recordings, but as we are aware, user generated content networks (Facebook) contain LOTS of derivative works. Identifying and appropriately attributing those titles has proven to be a very tall order.

We believe that owners of media, especially publishers, will be able to start benefiting from the fruits of their labor on Facebook within a year and we are poised to help.

Why Did The GRD Fail?

Speaking of Facebook, and the rights challenges they have, wouldn’t it be nice if they had the GRD (Global Repertoire Database) to access?

Organizing the world’s music metadata into a single authoritative database is no trivial task. However, it may be less difficult than current successful efforts underway by humans, like landing a satellite on a comet.

Many, many people and organizations stand to gain from a database of this nature. Still more may have lots to lose.

My question is rhetorical of sorts: Why did the GRD fail? Who would have been the winners, had it succeeded? Who would have been the losers?

Please reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts.

What Is Code?

Software engineers are often looked upon with disdain, perhaps for their disheveled way and lack of pleasantries. And they can be viewed with elation, perhaps for their ability to make our lives easier or more efficient via a script in the cloud. Hairdos aside, the work that they do is often a complete mystery or so abstract that we are lost as soon as they report that open source is the way to go…that their entire code library can be viewed, unhindered on Github. What in tarnation is a shell script or Python or Apache? Why does latency matter to my Mom and who, for the love of all things holy, is tasked with making sure that the thing the gal in Santa Monica will jive with the thing the fellow in London is hacking on?

Code is very important in 2015, as I am sure you’re aware. It is embedded in everything – the traffic lights, the water meter, your watch…my dog has a dang chip in his behind! Of course, it powers the entertainment industry more than ever. Metadata. METADATA!!!

Code: what it is, how it works, & who writes it – for better or worse, is critical information needed to making sound business decisions.

This article is recommended reading for anyone who should know more than how to make a Genius Bar appointment:

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/

We share this article because code and software dictate so much of what we do each and every day. Nerds shouldn’t have all the fun. You should be able to peak under the kimono if you like.

Heads up – this article is just a hair more than 100,000 words. It’s worth it! Of course, if you have questions about any of it’s contents, feel free to reach out.

Stay close,

Aaron