Gracenote eyes video data with DreamWorks Animation vet as its new CEO

Gracenote is ramping up plans to expand beyond its roots as a music metadata service, and as such has brought on a new head honcho.

Gracenote is best known for supplying metadata (artist info, albums, songs, etc.) to companies and services that can’t justify compiling and supplying such information for their own services. But Gracenote also offers metadata for video content, which is an area it would like to grow moving forward. And today, the Tribune Media-owned Gracenote announced that John Batter will become its new chief executive officer.

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Batter previously gained recognition as CEO of video rental service M-Go, where he helped get the company lucrative partnerships with Roku and helped the service grow. Prior to that, he was president of production at DreamWorks Animation and served as a general manager at games company EA. This background should make Batter a good addition to the team, considering his past work with video services and studios.

In his new role, Batter will be in charge of increasing Gracenote’s music and video metadata services, which includes providing music data about a specific song or song library (artist, genre, album title, origin/region, etc.) to add context to the music that’s being played as well as enable music services to collect meaningful information about listening behavior. It also offers a similar service for video (TV and movies). More recently, the company launched a white-label digital radio (as a) service, Gracenote Rhythm.

“I think there’s a big opportunity for Gracenote to use its metadata services in unique ways that cross or  between [different] media,” Batter said in an interview with VentureBeat. Some examples for areas Batter things the company can target include sports, games, books, and short video content.

He also mentioned that Gracenote has an opportunity to expand as the number of international markets start launching digital media services. This is especially true when it comes to music, as rival service The Echo Nest scared off some of its clients after Spotify purchased it earlier this year.