Gracenote buys rival Baseline for $50M to enhance its movie & TV data services

Providing the metadata for movies and TV shows (cast list, plot descriptions, thumbnails, etc.) is big business, and it’s one that Gracenote is serious about leading.

Putting its money where its mouth is, Tribune Media-owned Gracenote announced today that it is acquiring rival movie data service company Baseline in a deal worth $50 million. Baseline should fit in nicely with Gracenote’s other metadata services, which now include TMS (Tribune Media Services), which provides data to cable and satellite TV providers. It should also help establish Gracenote as a clear leader in movie and TV data. (Gracenote got its start providing metadata on music, specifically song tracks.)

Baseline’s library of metadata includes information on over 300,000 movies and TV series, bios on more than 1.5 million film professionals, and even box office stats for many markets across the globe. Baseline also goes pretty deep into the metadata of a film, listing things like production timelines, shooting locations, project financing, and much more. Some of its current clients include Hulu and Walmart-owned Vudu.

The move comes a week after Gracenote named John Batter as its new CEO, a position he is likely to do well in based on his background as former DreamWorks Animation and former M-Go CEO, as VentureBeat previously reported. It also really helps make the company more than just a source of metadata info for music, as it is most commonly known for.

“Baseline’s deep production data coupled with its existing relationships with the studio community will help us improve the depth and breadth of the data we offer to existing Gracenote customers … [and it gives] us a foundation to build products aimed squarely at serving the entertainment industry,” Batter said in a statement.

Some of those “products” Batter is referring to may mix metadata from different media (music/movies/books) and target specific international markets, as he mentioned in a previous interview.

Gracenote told VentureBeat that Baseline will continue to operate from its Los Angeles, Calif. office for now.