Ad insertions that are geographically targeted or tailored to an individual listener’s tastes and habits are among the more promising opportunities in metadata. A few years back, we talked to our technology partners at Triton Digital about programmatic ad exchanges, a way for broadcasters to offer ad inventory to advertisers like Starbucks or Geico (you can read about it in our Wheat News interview Radio Needs More of This). More recently, our friends from StreamGuys, another important Wheatstone technology partner, joined our Studio Master Class webinar series to talk about streaming opportunities. You can view that webinar here: Streaming, Leveling Up.

To take advantage of these opportunities, precision timing of ad insertions down to the millisecond is required. There are no metadata standards to speak of, but we bring into the new year some effective techniques for transcoding a variety of metadata tags, types, and formats. Rick Bidlack’s white paper Metadata As A Second Language explains our use of Lua scripting language to seamlessly transcode song titles, ad insertion triggers, and other metadata from our streaming appliances out to the CDN and onto listener devices. In early 2025, we were able to introduce a new Linux streaming encoder that includes our metadata technology plus audio processing and provisioning for two program channels, yet costs not much more than a streaming computer (check out Wheatstream Duo Explained).

We’ve invested a lot of engineering and development into streaming and metadata because, well, we expect broadcasting to be around for some time.