a TV control room

AI won’t replace humans in broadcasting, but it will help reduce time wasted on mundane stuff. Source: Shutterstock

How AI powers the next generation of broadcasting

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) will touch every aspect of business in every industry. In broadcasting, AI is already an integral part of the day to day operations.

As AI continues to evolve, it will open up more opportunities for broadcasters. New solutions will create new business potential, which will help organizations remain competitive in the market. Innovative tools driven by AI will also become available to help users improve productivity.

AI provides businesses with a wide range of possibilities; it can be confusing navigating through all the capabilities AI has to offer.

In an interview with Tech Wire Asia, M. Thangarajan, Senior Vice President, and Chief Innovation Officer, Tata Elxsi, breaks it down into manageable pieces.

Media, in general, holds large amounts of unstructured data, which requires humans to understand it. Tasks like content management, processing, interpretation, quality checking, take a lot of time and effort.

However, current AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms have reached a level of accuracy close to humans. This means many labor-intensive processes mentioned above, is now taken over by AI instead.

“There is a clear sign that AI is here to stay for a long time, if you are not acting on AI today, you will be playing catch-up,” said Thangarajan.

Current day AI

Currently, broadcasters are already using AI in their day to day workflow, from content management to video quality assessment.

Thangarajan shared some of the technology that broadcasters are currently using:

  • Machine Vision: using neural networks, machines can understand the content and generate useful metadata such as objects, actions, descriptions, face recognition, etc.
  • Natural language processing (NLP)/ Natural Language Understanding (NLU): used to analyze audio and textual data and automate workflows. These generate useful data such as sentiment, opinions, transcripts, and captions.
  • Predictive Analytics: using a combination of AI algorithms to build statistical correlations, identify patterns and use this data to predict future behavior or trends.
  • Event stream processing techniques: Root-cause detection, case-based reasoning provides real-time situational awareness in your full video delivery solution and process.
  • Anomaly detection: track hundreds of parameters simultaneously and analyze any abnormal trending of individual parameters or their combinatorial effect to establish early trends of abnormal behavior and provide timely insights.

Implementation and benefits

For example, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is used for generating subtitles and closed captioning. In sports broadcasting, AI can identify highlight-worthy moment to automatically generate sports clippings.

By automating repetitive tasks like these, it frees up time for engineers and operators, who can dedicate more time in delivering quality content.

AI is also useful in automatically checking video quality and provisioning resource capacities with the help of predictive analytics. Some broadcasters apply AI in apps and media players to optimize searches, to provide users with more personalized recommendations.

By correlating multiple factors, measuring various metrics, and predicting issues before it occurs, broadcasters get a better understanding of the audiences. Ultimately this translates to offering a better customer experience.

Advertising is a huge part of broadcasting as well. Often, audiences would want to skip advertisements; but AI can provide insights on your audience, which you can use to offer more immersive and engaging ads.

In turn, strategic placements of ads can help broadcasters engage their audiences, and collect information that companies can use for market insights. These insights can feedback to businesses to improve their processes.

What’s in store for the future?

The uses of AI in broadcast is far and wide. Yet, the technology continues to evolve. Thangarajan will be talking more about the uses of AI in broadcasting at the ConnecTechAsia Summit in Singapore later this month

“The focus is shifting from selling products or services to selling experiences,” Thangarajan explained. “The drive for this change is not just technology but the rising user expectation along with technological advancements.”

He advised that broadcast companies must move from a business-centric approach to developing customer-centric offerings.

AI and automation provided the ability to handle large volumes of data, and it will continue to drive business operations.

However, by constantly upgrading your AI, broadcasters can accurately measure the all the factors that affect the customer experience. Companies can also gain insights on how to improve customer longevity and satisfaction, thus driving better revenues.

“The most important thing to remember is that AI technology is not a means to all end,” he warned. “It is an important contributor which permeates into all the aspects of the business.”

AI is an integral part of business strategy to retain customers, grow business, and look for leverage points to propel your business forward. The right applications will set the company up to achieve wonders.