Exclusives

For media and entertainment companies, digging through the sheer amount of data available to make better business decisions can be a daunting task.

At the May 17 HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit, SAS’s David Perona, director of customer intelligence, and Anand Bisen, principle solutions architect of advanced analytics, shared real-world use cases where M&E firms have used the company’s solutions — embedding AI and machine learning into their business processes — to sift through the data noise, and make actionable choices.

First up, Perona shared how SAS has had a few customers in the last year or so launch new OTT services, and use the company’s services to shift how they engage with their consumers.

“A lot of these companies didn’t have user- or consumer-level data,” he said. Every OTT operator wants to do targeted content to consumers and better use data, but doing that isn’t as easy at is sounds. “The ability to look at all this data, look at individual customer attributes, can help build models to understand user behavior,” Perona said. “If they stop watching ‘Gilligan’s Island’ after the fourth season because they know he’s not getting off the island for five more years, it tells you something interesting.”

The next step is deciding what to do with the data. Try and upgrade them to premium is they switch off because of ads? Reach out when they leave a show unexpectedly? “It might just be recommending similar content,” Perona said. “And sometimes it’s recommending in real-time, based on what the customer is seeing.”

Another use case SAS brought up was its use of natural language processing for editorial news from Bloomberg, based on examining 24-7, real-time global Twitter feeds, to understand what sort of trending breaking news the organization needed to stay on top of, and use that to drive their newscasts.

“They’re able to feed that data in a visual interface to the newsroom, to allow them to see trending topics … and cut into a 20-second editorial topic on what’s driving [discussion],” Perona said.

Bisen said that what’s shaping analytics today is an embracement of open-source environments, making it easier for everyone to be a data scientist and collaborate, the automation of machine learning and AI processes, and cloud-enabled tools to better process the analytics available.

SAS’s offerings are enabling companies to do combine these ideas and make actionable data analytics a reality.

“It’s about aligning all these stars together, so you can better put all these pieces together, and allow people from different backgrounds to work together,” he said.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

To access the SAS presentation, click here.