Metadata has finally found a publicist. Unfortunately, it’s a lawsuit.
Gracenote sued OpenAI in March over the alleged unauthorized use of its entertainment metadata for AI training. In June, Jamendo sued Nvidia over the alleged use of hundreds of thousands of audio files and related metadata. Both cases remain active.
The disputes highlight a larger issue for streaming. AI systems increasingly need structured knowledge about titles, episodes, performers, rights, territories, schedules, availability, and the relationships connecting them.
That is the same data layer streaming companies have spent years treating as back-office infrastructure.
The Streaming Wars' Guide to Metadata
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Next Week - Building a Future-Ready Streaming Platform
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Cineverse Launches New Tools to Repurpose Audio Ads for CTV
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Google TV Just Turned 10,000 Free Titles Into Home-Screen Leverage
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Paramount Denies Wanting to Sell CNN to Close WBD Merger
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Ampere: Ad tiers now dominate North American streaming revenue
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AI Exposed the Value of Streaming’s Most Ignored Asset
Metadata has finally found a publicist. Unfortunately, it’s a lawsuit.
Gracenote sued OpenAI in March over the alleged unauthorized use of its entertainment metadata for AI training. In June, Jamendo sued Nvidia over the alleged use of hundreds of thousands of audio files and related metadata. Both cases remain active.
The disputes highlight a larger issue for streaming. AI systems increasingly need structured knowledge about titles, episodes, performers, rights, territories, schedules, availability, and the relationships connecting them.
That is the same data layer streaming companies have spent years treating as back-office infrastructure.
The Take
AI is turning metadata into a strategic asset.
The quality of a company’s catalog will increasingly determine how accurately its content gets discovered, recommended, packaged, advertised, licensed, and described by AI. Weak identifiers and fragmented records will also carry existing operational problems into every new AI product built on top of them.
Media companies don’t need to build every piece of metadata themselves. They do need to control the rules that define what they own, how those assets connect, and which systems can be trusted as the source of truth.
AI may be forcing the industry to finally put a value on the catalog infrastructure it spent years ignoring.
Read the Full Analysis: The Streaming Wars
The Streaming Wars' Guide to Metadata
Content Has To Become Data Before It Can Become Revenue. This guide explains why metadata now sits directly in the path of discovery, advertising, rights, distribution, reporting, and AI. It also shows what happens when the catalog underneath those systems can’t be trusted.
Why This Guide Exists
Media companies are managing more titles, versions, partners, territories, windows, and distribution endpoints than ever.
The catalog has to keep up.
When metadata breaks, the cost shows up everywhere: manual cleanup, reporting delays, rights mistakes, weak discovery, generic ad inventory, and teams spending time reconciling systems that should already agree.
AI raises the stakes again.
A model can generate an answer. It still needs accurate titles, relationships, rights, availability, and context underneath it.
This report explains what strong metadata looks like in practice and how media companies can make it work across the business.
View the Complete Guide: The Streaming Wars
Next Week - Building a Future-Ready Streaming Platform
The streaming conversation is increasingly shifting from growth at all costs to building platforms that can scale efficiently and sustainably.
As services face greater pressure to control spending and improve profitability, infrastructure decisions that once lived primarily with technical teams are becoming business-critical. Cloud architecture, bandwidth, vendor strategy, operational ownership, and build-vs.-buy decisions can all have a significant impact on a platform’s long-term cost structure.
And many of those decisions are much easier to make early than they are to unwind later.
Join OTT.X on Wednesday, August 19, for Building a Future-Ready Streaming Platform, a practical conversation about building streaming infrastructure that can scale without creating unnecessary cost or complexity.
Explore questions including:
- Which early architecture decisions are the most difficult and expensive to reverse?
- What should an organization own internally, and what should it outsource?
- How can platforms scale efficiently without overbuilding?
- When does a cloud-first approach make sense, and when might another model work better?
- How can leaders avoid costly vendor dependencies and infrastructure limitations?
- What would experienced streaming leaders do differently if building a platform today?
Speakers
- Kyle Espinosa, Vice President, Global Channels Programming & Data Analytics, Fremantle
- Lukas Navickas, Senior Global Sales Executive – Streaming & SaaS, Servers.com
- Rishabh Jain, CTO, Enveu
- Jason Thibeault, CEO, Streaming Video Technology Alliance
- Haris Zukanovic, CTO, MoreScreens
The infrastructure choices made early can determine not only how well a platform performs, but how much it ultimately costs to operate, scale, and evolve.
Join next week to hear what experienced streaming leaders believe organizations should get right from the start.
Cineverse Launches New Tools to Repurpose Audio Ads for CTV
Cineverse has launched VAUDIO, a new ad tech offering that takes existing podcast, radio or streaming audio commercials and adds the visuals required for television.
This allows advertisers to launch campaigns across connected TV (CTV) inventory without requiring a traditional video shoot.
Advertising partners at launch include A24, Aura Entertainment, NEON, Signature Entertainment, and Well Go USA.
"VAUDIO brings immediate opportunities to brands looking for an easy way to get more out of their campaigns using CTV, and for our supply-side partners, including media owners, platforms and OEMs, who can now unlock new ad formats and creative that support a better viewer experience, increase ad inventory fill, and drive new revenue," said Cineverse president and chief strategy officer Erick Opeka. "The economics matter here too. At steady state, we believe VAUDIO can contribute up to $12 million in annual revenue at a 15 to 20 percent contribution margin, and we are targeting that run rate by the end of our fiscal year. Because VAUDIO is built on IndiCue's existing ad infrastructure and is developed and marketed by the same team, it required minimal incremental investment, and that contribution flows through to the bottom line."
Spearheaded by the executives that joined Cineverse with the acquisition of IndiCue, and built by the company's industry-leading Matchpoint team, Cineverse said that VAUDIO was created to help advertisers reach new audiences in a high-impact, lean-back environment without requiring traditional video production.
Read the Full Story: TV Technology
Google TV Just Turned 10,000 Free Titles Into Home-Screen Leverage
Google TV Freeplay has added more than 10,000 ad-supported movies and shows on demand, expanding beyond its lineup of more than 300 free live channels. The U.S. service now combines scheduled programming with a selectable library from suppliers including A24 and Lionsgate, giving Google an owned viewing destination inside the TV operating system and more opportunities to monetize the session before a viewer opens another app.
Freeplay’s live channels serve passive viewing. The new on-demand library serves viewers arriving with a title, genre or mood in mind. Google can now surface a movie such as Lady Bird, a series such as Hell’s Kitchen or a personalized collection and keep playback inside Freeplay.
VOD expands the number of home-screen decisions Google can convert into its own watch time. Live channels depend on the program airing at a given moment. Freeplay now has inventory for search results, recommendations, themed rows and promotional placements throughout the interface. Google plans to refresh the library throughout the year, which turns content procurement and merchandising into continuing operating requirements.
Freeplay can now hold live news viewers, reality binge viewers and movie viewers inside the same ad-supported product. Google gets more behavioral signals across those sessions and more control over which title appears next.
Read the Full Story: The Streaming Wars
Paramount Denies Wanting to Sell CNN to Close WBD Merger
Paramount is reportedly denying reports it is considering selling CNN in order to close its $110.8 billion acquistion of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“CNN is not for sale,” a source told The Wrap.
The concession, outlined earlier this week by Makan Delrahim, chief legal officer at Paramount, appeared to attempt to rescue the massive deal (and eliminate a daily $7 million penalty to Paramount should the deal does not close by Sept. 30), which is currently blocked by n antitrust lawsuit filed by 12 states, and led by the state of California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Speaking at Politico’s California Agenda conference in Sacramento, Delrahim, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the antitrust division under the first Trump administration, was asked if selling the Ted Turner-founded global news organization was an option.
“Everything is on the table,” he said.
Delrahim’s comments came after Paramount CEO David Ellison floated the possibility of relocating Paramount Pictures studios operations out of California and possibly to Georgia and Texas, if a settlement to the antitrust case was not reached this year.
While Delrahim expressed the possibility of selling CNN, President Trump, his former boss, has spent the past 10 years accusing, without evidence, CNN of reporting biased “fake news” about his presidency.
Despite the overtures, Bonta remains defiant, stating that selling CNN alone would not completely resolve Paramount of the states’ antitrust objections.
Read the Full Story: Media Play News
Ampere: Ad tiers now dominate North American streaming revenue
Ad-supported tiers are becoming the dominant business model for subscription streaming services in North America, according to new research from Ampere Analysis.
Ad tiers will account for 54 percent of total subscription streaming revenue in the region by the end of the year, part of a broader shift by some major streaming platforms like Disney, Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video to rely on advertising as a bigger growth driver of their overall streaming TV businesses, Ampere said.
Advertising revenue alone will exceed $18 billion in North America this year, representing more than one-fifth of total subscription streaming revenue for the first time, according to Ampere’s projections. The region now accounts for nearly 60 percent of global ad-supported subscription streaming revenue; Ampere attributed North America’s lead to higher subscription average revenue per user, stronger advertising rates, a more mature connected television ad market and greater consumer acceptance of ads.
Amazon Prime Video is expected to remain the largest ad-supported subscription streaming service in North America, with revenue forecast to exceed $14 billion in 2026. Amazon shifted most Prime Video users onto an ad-supported plan in 2023, requiring subscribers to pay more to avoid commercials.
Netflix and Disney Plus have taken a different approach by encouraging users to select lower-priced ad tiers with lighter ad loads. For Netflix, the strategy appears to be rooted in a determination to generate revenue off a single subscriber in two ways — first from the subscription that lowers the gate to accessing content, and the second from ad revenue that is becoming a bigger part of its business. Disney has adopted the same strategy in recent years.
Consumer goods and retail advertisers are helping drive the shift. Procter & Gamble, Amazon and Walmart have accounted for 22 percent of U.S. subscription streaming advertising impressions so far in 2026, according to Ampere’s data.
The move toward advertising is also changing programming strategies: Ampere said the six largest global streamers doubled first-run and renewal orders for unscripted content in North America between 2020 and 2025, increasing investment in shows that encourage regular, habitual viewing.
Read the Full Story: TheDesk.net
In Case You Missed It
- Tubi Is Testing Whether Better Metadata Can Make CTV Inventory More Valuable. The Streaming Wars
- AI Is Turning Metadata Into a Recurring Licensing Business. The Streaming Wars
- Why Metadata Is the Backbone of Streaming. The Streaming Wars
- Sony Is Getting Paid Three Times for the Same Seinfeld Reruns. The Streaming Wars
- Hollywood’s New Financiers Sell Cereal and Sneakers. The Streaming Wars
- Ask Skip: Are Advertisers Measuring the Wrong Thing?. The Streaming Wars
- Hollywood Made Failure Too Expensive to Learn From. The Streaming Wars
- David Ellison Is Threatening to Take Paramount’s Ball Out of California. The Streaming Wars
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