Executive summary

Purpose. This report provides an evidence-based roadmap for adopting data standards that raise the effectiveness and competitiveness of Europe’s film industries. It focuses on standards that reduce friction across production, distribution, and cross-border collaboration, with special attention to ease of uptake for SMEs and small-country markets. The recommendations align with the EU’s data policy direction – Data Governance Act, European data spaces, eIDAS 2 – and with the CresCine objective to turn Europe’s cultural diversity into a market advantage.

Problem. Too many European workflows still run on bespoke spreadsheets and siloed databases; rights data are opaque, identifiers are fragmented and deliverables vary by counterparty – slowing licensing, inflating costs and limiting circulation.

What standards could deliver. When adopted end-to-end, a small set of mature standards enables automation, lowers error rates, and opens markets:

• More efficient production and post-production. Common technical standards help teams keep picture, sound and creative decisions aligned across tools and partners. This reduces errors, avoids costly rework, and makes it possible to adapt films for different languages and markets without repeatedly recreating files.

• Faster and more reliable distribution. Shared data standards make it easier for films to move from producers to cinemas, broadcasters and online platforms without delays or rejections. They reduce manual handling, speed up catalogue updates, and support smoother cross-border releases.

• Clear identification of creative professionals. Standard identifiers for people working on films make it easier to recognise who did what, ensure correct payments, and analyse careers and skills. This is especially important for freelancers, small companies and public funding bodies seeking transparency and fairness.

• Better discovery across languages and borders. Structured metadata allows films to be found, understood and promoted in multiple languages. This helps smaller-market and minority-language works reach wider audiences and travel more easily across Europe.

• Greater transparency about rights. Shared rights-data frameworks make it clearer who controls which rights, in which territories and under what conditions. This reduces uncertainty, supports lawful reuse, and lowers the cost and risk of licensing for both buyers and sellers.

Why this matters for competitiveness. These standards shrink time-to-market, curb versioning and quality control overhead, make avails machine-actionable, and enable consistent analytics. For SMEs, the pay-off is the ability to participate in pan-EU releases without bespoke rework and to demonstrate availability and compliance quickly to buyers and platforms. For small countries, multilingual linked-data practices increase discoverability and reduce the cost of operating across languages.

Key findings

1. Standards adoption strengthens European competitiveness. Widespread uptake of interoperable data standards and identifiers lowers transaction costs, speeds cross-border circulation, and improves visibility and monetisation of European works and talent. By reducing reliance on proprietary platforms, standards enable European film industries – especially SMEs and small-language markets – to compete more effectively in integrated digital markets.

2. Rights opacity is the biggest brake. Buyers cannot reliably verify availability across territories and windows. A neutral, standards-based rights-data layer is required to lower transaction costs and speed up deals.

3. Identifiers are the hinge. EIDR has become the default spine in digital supply chains; ISAN remains embedded in some broadcast and CMO contexts. Europe gains most by treating EIDR as the anchor for OTT and automation while maintaining bridges to ISAN where required.

4. Version-aware mastering is a quick win. IMF and AS-11/DPP cut duplicated renders and reduce ingest rejections. Aligning deliverables to these profiles is one of the fastest ways to lower operational expenditure per title.

5. Linked data is the scalability play. Publishing core descriptive metadata as RDF with stable URIs unlocks multilingual discovery and simpler cross-ID reconciliation – especially valuable in small-language markets.

6. Adoption barriers are organisational, not technical. Legacy systems assume a single ID that reduces interoperability, skills in RDF/JSON-LD are uneven, and SMEs face up-front mapping costs. Standards adoption assumes guidance from public funding bodies, working examples, and modest funding for pilots.
   

Recommendations

Make interoperable identifiers a condition of public support.
Require that publicly funded films and catalogues use standard open identifiers for works and versions – notably EIDR and, where relevant, ISAN – and ensure these identifiers travel with content across production, distribution, and reporting. This provides a shared reference point that reduces errors, speeds circulation, and improves accountability.

Support simple, standardised delivery profiles across the value chain.
Publish and maintain a small set of clearly documented “good-practice” profiles for key hand-off points: production and mastering (e.g. IMF), broadcast delivery (e.g. AS-11/DPP with EBUCore), and online distribution (e.g. MovieLabs Common Metadata and EMA Avails). Profiles should be stable, predictable and easy to implement, particularly for SMEs.

Lower adoption costs for SMEs and small markets.
Provide targeted onboarding support, including practical guidance, validation tools and example files. National film bodies and public broadcasters should be enabled to offer shared services that help smaller companies integrate identifiers, delivery profiles and basic rights metadata into existing workflows.

Strengthen transparency around rights data through neutral infrastructure.
Support the development and piloting of standards-based rights-data infrastructures, such as ORDE, aligned with ODRL and European data-governance principles. Focus on enabling stakeholders to declare and query who controls which rights, in which territories and under what conditions, without centralising control or exposing confidential contracts.

Adopt standard identifiers for creative professionals.
Encourage or require the use of persistent identifiers for people working on films, using ISNI as a baseline public identifier and, where appropriate, sector-specific professional identifiers such as HAND. This improves attribution, supports fair and timely remuneration, and enables better evidence for skills, labour-market and diversity policies.

Invest in linked, reusable public-value data.
Help archives, film institutes and public broadcasters publish structured, multilingual metadata using shared models such as EBUCore-RDF, CCDM, Schema.org and Wikidata. This strengthens discoverability of European works, supports research and innovation, and reduces dependence on proprietary platforms.

Measure progress and adjust policy accordingly.
Track a small set of indicators – such as time to catalogue, delivery rejection rates, rights-clearance delays and payment timelines – to assess whether adoption of standards and identifiers is delivering tangible benefits, especially for SMEs and small-language markets.