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M&E Journal: Unlocking the Power of AI to Solve Media and Entertainment Use Cases

By Muralidhar Sridhar, VP AI and ML, Prime Focus Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers tremendous promise for the M&E industry. From enabling content creators to automate repetitive tasks, to helping consumers find the content they’re interested in, the technology has a lot to offer.

Over the last year, broadcasters, studios and streaming platforms across the globe have actively begun to adopt AI tools and technologies. Early adopters of AI have successfully moved from the proof of concept (PoC) stage to realizing tangible business benefits, with sports producers leading the way. Customers who once asked, “What can I do with AI?” moved to asking, “What can AI do for me?” and then began realizing valuable business outcomes.

This evolution is largely due to the emergence of industry-specific AI solutions that have been tailor-made to serve the specific needs of content creators. Let’s take a deeper dive to understand this in greater detail.

Up until a few years ago, only generic AI solutions were available to M&E enterprises. Created by tech giants like IBM, Microsoft and Google, these broad- spectrum solutions mainly focused on identification of facets like faces, objects, actions, emotions, transcripts etc.

Off-the-shelf solutions were also available from integrators that acted as multiplexers, allowing customers to connect to multiple cloud solutions.

There were also certain consulting companies that would stitch together various AI products to create a solution. But none of these were custom made to solve specific M&E business use cases.

This is the gap that Prime Focus Technologies’ media recognition AI engine, CLEAR Vision Cloud, has been built to fill. Vision Cloud powers AI-led solutions that have been custom made for solving strategic entertainment and sports use cases. Leveraging PFT’s patent pending Machine Wisdom technology, Vision Cloud delivers automation and data that is highly accurate, relevant, contextual and actionable.

It draws on collective intelligence of the industry’s most sophisticated AI solutions and PFT’s homegrown models, as well as the company’s decade long experience of collecting, curating and annotating content (400 million tags to date).

Here’s a glimpse of how Vision Cloud delivers concrete business benefits:

AI for content discovery and search

Vision Cloud automatically identifies logical scenes and searchable clips in content and provides accurate, actionable, contextual and comprehensive sets of metadata. It helps significantly reduce the time involved in identifying clips for promo creation, as well as syndication and distribution of content to OTT platforms. Vision Cloud also enables deep consumer searches on OTT platform content and helps build interactive OTT consumer experiences.

AI for sports

Vision Cloud automatically tracks sports action and creates highlights in near real-time to engage with fans like never before. It helps sports producers cut down the time and effort involved in highlight creation by 60 percent and enables them to swiftly create a wide variety of highlights. OTT platforms can leverage this technology to deliver high levels of interactivity and personalization for consumers with a create-your-own-highlights experience and a powerful live search option.

AI for OTT traffic operations

Vision Cloud’s content segmentation technology automatically identifies unrequired segments like blacks, recaps, pre-caps, ads, montages and credits from longform content, promos and spots, with frame accuracy. It removes the segments that are not required for OTT platforms, making OTT traffic operations more efficient.

AI for playout monitoring

Vision Cloud’s highly scalable AI-led playout monitoring solution enables broadcasters and monitoring bodies to identify and measure ads, promos and program segments directly from playout. It features an innovative AI-led hybrid workflow, where AI identifies the content and human operators perform quality check (QC) on these results.

AI for conformance

With the increase in multi-platform content, there is a pressing need to reuse content made in the pre-HD era for tapping new revenue opportunities. Vision Cloud’s AIled technology automatically identifies time in/time out from original footage and detects the clips used in the final edit. This reduces the time and effort spent on conformance, making the process of remastering pre-HD era content in newer resolutions like 4K/8K faster and more cost-effective.

These are just a few examples of how AI can help content creators drive speed and scalability, reduce cost and unlock new revenue opportunities. As custom- made AI solutions prove their mettle in the market, the next 18 to 24 months will witness hockey stick growth in the adoption of these technologies, with service providers hand-holding customers throughout their journey.

Content creators will increasingly embrace AI to overcome pain points, enhance efficiencies and free up managerial time so that they can focus on their core mission: delivering great content.

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