The leading
standards governing body of media engineering, Society of Motion and Television
Engineers (SMPTE), has joined forces with the Media & Entertainment
Services Alliance (MESA) to co-develop a Language Metadata Table (LMT)
standard. This is the first project that SMPTE has undertaken to
electronically publish machine-readable metadata as a standard that is expected
to be in common use operationally.
As more
metadata content emerges with the new waves of technologies, the LMT codes
would provide the needed codes for 200-plus spoken and written languages
such as audio, written and timed text like closed-captions and subtitles,
accessibility for the visually and hearing impaired, licensing and localising international
content, and distributing non-English content.
Conceived by WarnerMedia, MESA supports the LMT Working
Group as one of its communities of practice. LMT, based on IETF BCP 47
(Internet Engineering Task Force Best Common Practices) guidelines, is the
first list of language codes vetted and approved as an industry standard for
media and entertainment.
It seeks to benefit media companies, content owners, video
service providers, and others who need standardised distinctions between
spoken and written language and consistent codes.Other
international standards bodies have created controlled vocabularies; however,
they are broadly used for many purposes. The constraints of the LMT provide a
controlled vocabulary for what is needed in the professional media industry.
Therefore, it will significantly streamline media asset
management around the globe.
“Having an authorised system of consistent codes reduces the
Tower of Babel and simplifies development work by enabling all parties to work
off the same table,” said Yonah Levenson, Manager, Metadata Strategy and
Terminology Governance at WarnerMedia and founder of LMT.
“SMPTE’s publication of LMT will help everyone manage their
media assets by removing cumbersome processes like maintaining mapping tables
and having different payloads for different distributors.”