AI: Moving into the mainstream

The transition has been a remarkably short journey for AI, first really breaking through to widespread attention at IBC2017 and racing round the track of the hype cycle since.

Indeed, Gartner, the analyst that invented the hype cycle, plots an AI Maturity Model that begins at Level 1 with ‘Awareness’ and ends at Level 5, which it tags as ‘Transformational’.

You could possibly make the case that 2019 is when the broadcast industry starts to transition to Level 3, ‘Operational’, and “AI in production creating value by product optimisation or product/service innovations.”

One thing is for certain, and that is that AI exemplifies the modern marketeer’s favourite phrase of ‘disruptor’. So, what is driving it in the current industry: customer demand or R&D spend? According to Tedial vice president, products, Jerome Wauthoz, it’s both.

“Customers bring ideas to address immediate needs but first we analyse the customer’s pain points and challenges, and then we present solutions that answer those requirements,” he says, pointing to the company’s SmartLive live event production assistance tool as an example.

“In terms of AI, the chief current requests are: automatic metadata enrichment to give more context to ingested content; speech-to-text of commentary track or interviews; and face recognition, sentiment analysis and place recognition. Today, clients must hire people to log all this information and it is really costly. They seek to automate this process, so their production team can focus on creating value and not tagging.”

Produce more
Efficiencies are very much the name of the game here, with Wauthoz saying companies are looking to constantly produce more, automate more, and are looking to address the demand for multiple deliveries in a more efficient manner and add more remote production capability at the same time

“AI will continue to grow in terms of automation in all aspects of…