Telestream: “What’s Going to Happen if the AI Gets an Answer Wrong?”

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AI enhancements and a Cloud platform build out are the twin developments majored by Telestream heading into IBC. This includes the unveiling of a comprehensive Cloud platform which will eventually house all of its products and a focus on AI to streamline user operations.

Giving details to the press ahead of the event next month, Simon Clarke, Telestream CTO talked through the company’s general perspectives on AI and ML noting the capabilities and promises of AI are riding high on a wave of hype.

“There’s an inflation of capabilities,” noted Clarke. “Our view at Telestream is that AI functions should be an enabler for everyone that uses our products. One of the ways we're going to get that collectively is through a really ethical approach to how we look at AI.”

Clarke insists that humans are always going to be involved working with Telestream products for the reason that AI can make errors.

“What's going to happen if the AI gets an answer wrong?” he posed. “What is the jeopardy and the consequences of that decision? That's hugely important as we define products at Telestream. The other very important pillar for us and in the industry at large is how to ensure content provenance. Where did content come from that the viewer is seeing as it makes its way through the media supply chain.”

This, he said, is going to be an intense area of focus for the company over the next year or two. Telestream wants to create tools to help content creators track where their media comes from right across the supply chain.

Clarke also spoke of respecting intellectual property. “We process huge amounts of the world's media and we handle that in a very ethical way,” he explained. “We don't use that data to train models. We're very respectful of where the content is coming from.”

When it comes to integrating AI in product, Telestream begun the journey a year ago, equipping its captioning tool Stanza with the ability to automatically produce captions from media. It has now expanded this capability to include unique machine learning capabilities where Stanza can take a automatically generate speech to text and create captions in multiple different languages.

Crucially, from a content protection point of view, this processing is run locally with no data sent to the cloud. Clarke said its models produced “very, very high quality results” but left room for fine tuning by the user.

The company’s QC product Qualify is able to check files at scale running in the cloud using a ML model to detect the languages found in the audio track.

“This is hugely important for classification of content that moves through a media supply chain pipeline,” Clarke said. “It can automate content filtering, for example for profanity checking.”

It is also adding AI tools to Vantage to make it easier for newcomers and experts alike to work with it. This is based on feedback from clients telling the company that Vantage was “really hard to learn for folks who are new to it,” according to product manager Blake Parrish, and even those who are skilled found it “very difficult to build complex workloads.”

“Even though they know what they're doing, it takes them hours if not days to get what they need done,” Parrish said of the old version of Vantage. “It is really complicated so we're going to combat that by building in AI features to make this application more approachable.”

The next generation of Vantage being demoed at IBC2024 will have a number of AI tools to ease workflow design.

“Rather than manually building a workflow with a keyboard and mouse, they can go to a panel and type into the application what they'd like you to build and it'll go off and create the workflow for them,” Clarke explained. “If it matches what the customer is expecting, they click ‘Accept’ and they move on. It’s a hugely powerful feature.”

Typically, a Vantage customer would have hundreds of supply chain workflows doing various business critical functions. So for them to really understand what some of those workflows do at a glance can be fairly challenging. Another AI tool will enable an automatic summarization of each workflow and description of what it does to help users.

Enter Telestream Cloud platform

Parrish is the VP of product management at Telestream responsible for the firm’s Cloud portfolio. As a prelude to announcements, he outlined the challenges that its clients say they are trying to solve.   One of them is tapping the advantage of the Cloud’s scalability and flexibility in the cloud, which is clearly important for remote production scenarios and for cost control.

“I'm sure we've all heard the horror stories about folks migrating their content and their services to the Cloud and the moment when they received their first invoice, which was much higher than they expected,” said Parrish. “The beauty of Cloud is that it lets you pay for exactly what you use and not pay for things that are sitting there but only if your solutions are Cloud native.”

He pointed to global collaboration as “a huge trend” since more teams are performing remotely today than four years ago. The key here he said was the ability to access content and to collaborate in real time.

“I wouldn't say it’s rapid but the industry is transitioning out of the period where it makes sense to be buying a bunch of hardware which quickly becomes out of date,” Parrish said. “Things are evolving from where you needed a very large capital expenditure to get started.”

When it comes to content accessibility then most enterprise customers will have content stored across multiple locations, different Cloud regions and different Cloud providers mixed with on-prem.

“People need to access that content from anywhere at any time. The integration of services helps with this. Integrations need to be executed on and then maintained and that can be really expensive. and time consuming. It’s also very complex. Even keeping up to date with changes in codecs and formats can but very difficult and expensive to do.”

Telestream’s response to these core issues is the Telestream Cloud platform. Yes, Telestream offers cloud services today, but company execs are now painting Cloud as the future of the company.

“What we are doing is embarking on a journey to rewrite all of the services that are part of the Telestream portfolio,” Parrish said. “We are rewriting them to be Cloud native so that they are improved on their original versions.”

The Cloud platform is designed to streamline the process from “ingest, enhance and deliver” said Barrish by close integration of its products. Up to eight will be ported across in the next couple of years with four talked about today as being the first to be made available.

“There will be comprehensive first party integrations between every product that we're putting on this new platform,” he underlined.

The platform is said to be agnostic for deployment on any of the major public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and it will be integrated with all leading MAM systems.

Parrish said, “It's going to provide end-to-down workflow management. It will be very scalable and secure. What's important is that we are going to be spinning up workers when they're needed, in a SaaS environment and a multi-tenant Cloud platform which will result in reduced costs for our clients.”

He added, “Eventually we're going to take that even further and actually allow for our Cloud interface and our Cloud API layer to become the single command and control point for all instances of the platform that clients may wish to deploy. They will be able to orchestrate jobs running on-prem from our Cloud instance.”

Of products rewritten for cloud native application on the Telestream Cloud then first out of the bag is its flagship processing tool Vantage.

“We are rewriting the entire interface in a way that's never been done before,” he said. “The workflow designer, which allows you to build out and eventually execute these workflows, is going to be accessible in a SaaS multi-tenant environment for the first time.”

Telestream’s Live Capture service is also now a cloud native app. It is described as “one of the most important pieces of many production workloads,” by Parrish, “because if this fails you aren't actually capturing the content as being filmed or recorded or delivered to you. It's essential but this is a robust and sturdy application.”

Deployment on the TS Cloud platform will enable users to scale up or down individual channels on demand.

“There's not a solution with similar performance to Live Capture available,” he claimed. “We're going to be delivering the ability to really granulate control over exactly how many compute resources are being allocated to the production of your content.”

Additionally, for Live Capture, Telestream is adding the ability control encoders from the Cloud and the ability to integrate some of the probing technology in its IQ product line directly into the Live Capture interface to check the health of the streams being received.

Also announced as being written cloud natively is GLIM, a tool which allows users to view hi-res media remotely in a web-browser, without generating a proxy file.