The Invisible Engine of Streaming? Metadata

How Media Press Group helps 50K channels & streaming catalogs turn metadata into attention and attention into revenue.

Choice fatigue has become the (not so) silent churn engine of the streaming era. A December 2024 global survey put hard numbers on the pain: the average subscriber spends 110 hours a year just deciding what to watch. Discovery isn’t a UX nicety, it’s a profit lever and right now it’s broken.

How Discovery went off the rails:

→ Multiplication of entry points to access catalogues: Non exclusive licensing means a single program can live on four different services.

→ Shallow tagging: Genre + release year no longer cuts it. Today’s recommendation engines need mood, theme, dialect and moment metadata to make sense of a title.

→ Engagement‑first algorithms: If you liked “Downtown Abbey” once, your home screen fills with genteel period dramas and stately manor intrigue. Great for short‑term watch hours, terrible for widening horizons.

→ UX and UI have grown dull: Endless rows of near-identical rail of themed sections and thumbnails.

→ Gatekeeper data hoarding: Cross‑service metadata sharing is still minimal.

This is an industry-wide challenge and it will take a village of innovators to find the fix. I went looking for one and spoke to Gijs Davelaar, Chief Revenue Officer, Media  Press Group:

“Discovery has become the bottleneck. Audiences are overwhelmed by choice and underwhelmed by navigation.”

His company, Media Press Group, supplies enriched metadata feeds to more than 50,000 TV channels and streaming catalogues. In other words, they live inside the plumbing most viewers never see.

Gijs’ take is simple: good metadata is “precision tagging.” Cast lists, episode synopses and genre labels are table stakes; the money is in tone, emotion and context markers that let an engine surface exactly the right title at the right moment. Do that and churn drops before you even touch pricing.

The next growth spurt in streaming will not come from adding bigger libraries or cutting prices. It will come from making the existing library findable. Discovery is where subscriber sentiment, ad yield and brand perception collide. Fix it or keep paying the cancellation tax every month.

Gijs Davelaar will be speaking at Streaming Made Easy Live in Amsterdam on September 11th. Until then, watch our interview together 👇🏻

Why attend Streaming Made Easy Live? No panels, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

1st companies attending include: Channel 4, Britbox, Premier League, SkyShowtime, Xite, Proximus, Media Distillery, Liberty Global, BBC, Netflix, Media press group, Proximus, Liberty Global, FX Digital, Bango, Sling, A1, Whale TV, Orange, All3Media, Vodafone, SVT, tivù, ATP Media, Irdeto, TiVo, The Trade Desk/Ventura, OKAST, Zattoo, Kokowa, Rakuten, Ziggo, TF1, France 24, Euronews, Webedia, Telenet, NPO, Endemol and many more.

Here’s what the day will look like: