As the entertainment industry has grown and globalized, it has become more difficult to accurately indicate a specific work in workflows, distribution, and metadata management. Title alone has become inadequate, as titles are reused, remakes issued, and sundry versions of a work are promulgated.
On top of that, digital distribution has become the norm. This lowers the costs of distribution, but removes the element of human judgement. So, if a licensing agreement is struck between two parties for "Gone With the Wind," for example, it has to be made clear which version: the 1939 version? The restored edition? The one with a commentary track? In English, Spanish, or German?
So, like physical retail works have a UPC code, creative works now have an EIDR ID. Separate EIDR IDs may be issued for the abstract work (i.e. independent of version, language, media, or edit), for specific versions (in EIDR nomenclature referred to as an "edit," or specific distribution item (including, potential, encoding, soundtracks(s), etc.).
These levels of detail can each receive their own EIDR ID, but the way the EIDR registry has been designed, the relationship between them is implicit: so if you specify the EIDR ID for a particular Blu-Ray release, the edit it derives from, and the abstract record are automatically related.
There are a number of ways in which EIDR can be useful in workflow, licensing, accounting, metadata management, and distribution:
- Licensing, pre-production, and distribution agreements can be tied to a specific item, or a family of related items by obtaining and specifying an EIDR ID in agreements.
- Matching to external catalogs can by simplified (and, potentially, automated) if both catalogs use the EIDR ID as a key for specific works.
- Big data analytics of revenue and audience data can support roll-up and drill-down capabilities by taking advantage of EIDR's embedded relationships. So the contribution of viewership and cash coming from specific versions of a work can be recorded, and--by accessing EIDR's structural characteristics--rolled up to the edits and base work (and, where appropriate the series and season).
- Because EIDR itself is a not-for-profit organization, founded by and supporting the entertainment industry, your company will not have to rely upon some proprietary third-party identification scheme. EIDR's sole responsibility is to the industry at large, and is standard's based (ANSI, DOI), so does not take special software or licensing to use.
- Some distributors are now requiring that represented works have EIDR IDs in order to obtain distribution. It has proven fundamental to being able to automate, and accurately manage and report their own internal workflows.