Exclusives

Smart Content West: AWS, Azure Share AI Successes

LOS ANGELES — With the sheer amount of video being produced today, extracting meaningful metadata out of the content may seem like a daunting task.

That’s where machine learning and artificial intelligence come into play, according to Shawn Przybilla, M&E solutions architect for Amazon Web Services, and Martin Wahl, principal program manager of Azure Media Services for Microsoft. They shared what their companies are up to in the realm of AI and video content Feb. 27 at the Smart Content Summit West event.

“With all this data, we need a way to make sense of it all,” Przybilla said, during his presentation “Practical Applications of Machine Learning for Image and Video in the Cloud.” Przybilla shared a story about how one company used AWS’s services to create an easily searchable digital asset management system for more than 100 years worth of content. Another beneficiary is C-SPAN, which had “so much content, they couldn’t keep up with it,” Przybilla said. Within three weeks they were able to build a platform that indexed against nearly 100,000 people, and saved an estimated 9,000 hours a year in manual creation costs.

Meanwhile, in the presentation “Microsoft Video AI: What’s In Your Content?” Wahl shared how Azure’s Cloud AI video indexing service allows for automatic metadata curation from uploaded video content.

“The ability to use the cloud, and the AI capabilities within the cloud, is what [we’ve] been focused on,” he said. “You never know what data is going to be valuable tomorrow, so gather as much as you can today.”

. Standard video AI features like speech-to-text and face and object detection are covered, but Azure’s Cloud AI video indexing service is offering the ability for even more, including face emotion detection, video summarization and even content moderation, to detect and prevent explicit content.

Wahl shared how the Azure AI offering makes it simple for users to jump to any part of a video using simple keywords, making search and discovery a cinch. “The ability to jump to parts of your video, that’s where the power is,” he said. “Capture and automatically tag everything.”

Produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council, Smart Content West was sponsored by Amazon Web Services, MicroStrategy, NeuLion, MarkLogic, SAP, Bob Gold & Associates, Ad-ID, DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group, and the Entertainment Merchants Association.

On March 8, MESA will hold its Smart Content Summit East event in New York City. To register or for more information, click here.