Public broadcasting stations can learn a lot from the success of the experiment conducted by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in improving the discoverability of the Variety Studio: Actors on Actors program.
What PBS did to improve the viewership of each episode of Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, a program co-produced by PBS SoCal and Variety magazine was to tweak the metadata. This resulted in twin gains. Voice searches for the broadcasts showed accurate times in local markets and Google displayed more information about the program in its knowledge panel.
Metadata is extremely important to public broadcasting because search engines look for standardized terms and definitions, including series title, approximate length, release date, and talent. It is not easy for public media to improve metadata as they are asked to do as much as possible with fewer resources and the stations need infrastructure improvements. These challenges make pubcasters less able to leverage tools that are more standard within other companies, primarily streaming services.
Consequently, PBS is spearheading the efforts to help stations reach more viewers by improving their metadata through its Metadata for Content Discovery initiative. The goal of the initiative is to teach public media staffers about metadata and make local programs more discoverable by search engines.
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