Metadata and why you should care

Video metadata is the "extra information" available about the content such as genre (comedy, adventure, family...), average viewer rating (three stars, four and a half stars...), actors, director, content advisory (rated PG-13, R, X...) and so on. Showing this information to Zinc users and letting you find things to watch based on it (from many content sources) is one of the coolest features of Zinc.

We get this metadata several ways, but one of the best sources is from the content site's RSS feed. There is a standard (developed by Yahoo!) called Media RSS that defines how to encode some of the metadata.

The next release of Zinc is going to have some exciting enhancements made possible by this metadata. The theory is great, but in practice each site is different and the Media RSS standard is very flexible, so it's a challenge trying to glean this information from the feeds.
We're going to keep pushing the content providers to give us more while we continue to enhance Zinc to make the best use of what it gets.

So that's metadata and why Zinc users should care. When Zinc Beta 3 is released (real soon, we promise) let us know what you think of how we've used it.