The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) has announced that the newest version of the EMA Avails schema has been approved by the EMA Avails Working Group and is now available. The EMA Avails schema is a standardised communication of data about content available for transactional online VoD. The update, Version 1.7.2, enhances the schema in a manner that will enable greater automation of the communication and reduce exception handling for both retailers and content providers in the digital supply chain and will allow the industry to soon transition from Excel-based communication to an XML format.

“EMA’s digital supply chain initiatives have a single purpose – to reduce friction points in the online video supply chain so that the supply chain is more efficient, more timely, more reliable, and less costly,” noted Mark Fisher, President & CEO of EMA. “The new version of EMA Avails we are announcing today is a significant enhancement in the communication of content availability metadata that should yield tremendous value for the industry.”

EMA Avails Version 1.7.2 was developed by the EMA Avails Working Group, which consists of supply chain professionals from some of the leading transactional online video on demand services. Technical support and expert guidance was provided to the working group by the Motion Picture Laboratories, Inc. (“MovieLabs”).     “Both retailers and content providers will benefit from this new EMA Avails schema, making the delivery of content across different screens, platforms and territories much smoother,” said Craig Seidel, VP at MovieLabs. “One of our core objectives is to help develop and implement new standards that drive concrete benefits for the online video industry. We look forward to the improvements this will make in the digital supply chain.”

Categories: Articles, Standards, VOD