EBU and egta (Association of television and Radio Sale Houses) have co-published version 1.0 of the Metadata Schema for business-to-business file-based exchange of advertising material.

At a time of dematerialisation from file-based production to file exchange (tapeless, using e.g. file transfer protocols over the wire), accurate information on the editorial and technical nature of the material is vital.  The technical answer to this requirement is called “metadata”.

Metadata is another name for “information”, which can be represented according to a commonly agreed and machine interpretable format (metadata schema and associated language such as XML used in this specification).

The metadata schema detailed in the Tech 3340 is based on EBUCore (tech 3293). It has been defined and validated by EBU and egta experts.

egtaMETA can be summarised as follows: It is primarily a set of semantically defined attributes considered to sufficiently describe advertising material and clustered as follows:

* descriptive information (e.g. the title of the advertising spot);

* exploitation information (e.g. what is the period during which it shall be used);

* credits (inc. keys persons and companies involved in the creation, post-production and release of the advertising spot);

*  technical information (about the file format and its audio, video and data components).

It is also a common representation format in the form of a standardised  XML schema. 

egatMETA is implemented by the FP7 NoTube project.