IBC 2024: AI’s Greatest Power in Media is to Make it Seem Normal
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 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.”
Left to right: Bhavik Vyas, AWS; Maninder Saini, Twelve Labs; Lewis Smithingham, Monks; Richard Kerris, Nvidia; Sepi Motamedi, Nvidia
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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.”
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