Streaming Media
article here
It was hard to keep AI out of the headlines at IBC Show
2024, not because there was anything groundbreaking in terms of news or product
but because the technology is now part and parcel of every media tech
conversation.
“This is a watershed moment for artificial intelligence,”
Andy Hood, VP Emerging Technologies at advertising group WPP told the
IBC Conference. “Because AI enables enable people at every level of our
organisation do what they need to do.”
Messaging about the practical and positive application of AI
– in which humans remain in the loop – contrasts with the feverish
scare-mongering about the impact of Generative AI and fallout from the
Hollywood strikes.
“AI is a buzzword but it is also a technology that can be
used to create exciting new products,” said Huma Lodhi, Principal Machine
Learning Engineer, Sky, demonstrating an AI powered sports highlights generator
that won Sky and Comcast a technical Emmy.
That said, there was little talk and less
application-specific mention of GenAI for automating entire crafts like
scriptwriting or VFX let alone narrative content. The fear of algorithms
replacing jobs has changed toward positive adoption of AI for analytics and
back-office systems and some production functions. AI in tandem with cloud is
now seen as absolutely key to getting the broadcast industry back on a level
financial keel.
“AI is an example which humans can get very resistant to
based on what they don’t know,” said Phil Wiser, EVP and CTO at Paramount
Global. “A big part of our time is spent educating with programs around
technology. We even sit in on productions to talk through ideas rather than try
to push top down.”
Experimentation to implementation
Banijay Entertainment, a French-headquartered TV production
company, is on track to post €4 billion in revenue this year. It has partnered
with Adobe and AWS to index all 200,000+ hours of content it owns with the aim
of speeding up and expanding versioning for distribution.
“After lots of experimentation, it’s clear that AI-powered
workflows and logistics will generate great savings and improve our
profitability,” said CMO Damien Viel. “We approach AI as if starting a new
business. We remain a creative company not a tech company so we have to make
sure we’re building tech that helps creatives to do their job in ways they’ve
always done.”
Similarly, Olympics host broadcaster OBS is using AI to
achieve ‘glocal’ scale for clipping and distribution of its live content to
digital platforms but is wary of cutting humans out of the chain.
“We could have used AI to publish direct to users this year
from Paris but you still need checks and balances which only experienced
editors can do,” explained Chris Jackson, Global Head of Digital Data and
Analytics, Olympic Channel.
The more capable your AI product the greater the risk of
introducing bias and errors, he warned. “We built an editorial co-pilot to help
human editors check the output data before going direct to end users.”
Toward Me TV
AI is deemed essential to unlocking IP in content owners’
archives and in slicing and dicing content for increasingly personalized media
streams.
“We are at the beginning of a content creation revolution,”
said Vered Horesh, Chief of Strategic AI Partnerships at GenAI platform Bria.
Moving from broadcasting one idea to a model in which media is expressed and
manifested in a multitude of different variations.”
Panelists agreed that consumers want more targeted
individualized playlists and that broadcast is naturally evolving to a streamed
‘Me TV.’
“We’re at a new frontier for rights owners to make the most
of the rich IP they have,” said Maninder Saini, Head of Growth at Twelve
Labs, which has developed a deep learning model that extracts information about
content and users from multiple touchpoints.
“Broadcast, sports leagues, teams, and studios are sitting
on IP and not sure what to do with it. Using AI-based metadata extraction, they
can make sense of what they have and make more of it through targeted adverting
and hyper-localized video.”
Using AI to turn a content archive from a cost center to one
of profit will only work if content owners transfer their systems to the cloud.
As Lewis Smithingham, EVP of Strategic Industries at Monks pointed out,
“Content owners with their archive on LTO tape are going to be challenged in
monetizing that asset.”
There are monetization opportunities for service providers
if they can sell personalized content recommendations or promotions.
“We will soon see AI influence content,” said Richard
Kerris, VP and GM of Media & Entertainment at Nvidia. “We’re already seeing
the ability to change on-screen logos in sports distributed to different
territories. A next step is that AI will hyper-localize the product placement
in a live broadcast down to highly specific geographic areas and specific
products.”
No standards and no guidelines
There remain concerns about the rapid pace and lack of
precedent for a technology with the potency of AI but in terms of implementing
safeguards and regulation the industry, we were told at IBC, has got this.
SMPTE President Renard Jenkins spoke of a lot of “soft
deployments” of AI in M&E and that SMPTE was is working with studios,
content owners and vendors on education around AI implementation.
“Technology is accelerating beyond our ability to keep up
with it so we’re working with the community to understand what they are
planning and launching. AI is a foundational change in how we design, what we
use and how this is integrated into our individual processes. In the age of AI
we have to have guardrails and that’s where policies and standards becomes
extremely important.”
With the European Union’s AI Act now in force, a Senior
Policy Advisor for the European Broadcasting Union told IBC that work with AI
developers was still ongoing – meaning that issues of protection and
remuneration for content creators had not been resolved.
“We want to have a comprehensive discussion with AI
providers that gives our members levers to negotiate something in return for
use of their content,” Francois Lavoir said. “Our aim is to give our members
control.”
A word of warning came from Juan Reyes of the Tech Align
Group; “AI is in every room and every panel here at IBC but there is no
standard and no guideline. Studios are concerned about losing their IP to
another studio or content creator studio because their IP has not been tracked
or accounted for in AI systems.”
No comments:
Post a Comment