HITS

It’s been about a year since Amazon Web Services began making it simple for developers to extract metadata from content using machine learning services, and according to Liam Morrison, senior solutions architect for AWS: “Our mission is to put machine learning in the hands of every developer and data scientist.”

More than 70 companies are running machine learning services via AWS today, so it sure seems like that mission is proving successful.

“We see a lot of places where machine learning is coming,” Morrison said July 24 during a presentation at the Smart Content Summit East event, part of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) Day in New York. “The journey starts with taking existing processes, and either maintaining the quality you have now at a lower cost, or improving the quality.”

Automated speech recognition, sentiment analysis, added features that enrich video content, new customer experiences and increasing engagement and attracting new viewers, all are the opportunity machine learning unlocks for media and entertainment, Morrison said.

AWS has teamed with a broadcaster, using cloud-based machine learning, to identify royal wedding guests as they arrived. The company partnered with the NFL to use machine learning to track and generate stats automatically, providing real-time data to viewers. AWS also worked with a news organization to tag and index more than 200,000 hours of content, indexing and making searchable more than 99,000 faces, and saving the broadcaster 9,000 hours a year in manual curation costs.

AWS and its machine learning offerings have helped media companies integrate scene detection, automate metadata tagging, make better content recommendations, improve scene search, and more. And Morrison sees companies realizing benefits they never imagined once they begin.

“Most people notice [with machine learning] the metadata extraction,” Morrison said. “But you’ll see [benefits] everywhere.”

The 2018 M&E Day also included Content Protection Summit East and Entertainment Production in the Cloud (EPIC) conference tracks, providing M&E technology teams valuable insights into the creation, production, distribution, security and analysis of content.

The event was presented by Microsoft, with sponsorship from IBM Watson Media, Amazon Web Services, IBM, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, NAGRA, NeuLion, Ooyala, EIDR, GrayMeta, MarkLogic, Qumulo, Avid, Cloudian, SoftServe and TiVo. The event was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council.

Click here for audio of Morrison’s presentation or here for the slide deck.