AI Revolution in the World of Media

Vitaly Shoykhet, VP Of Engineering, Streaming Platforms, Entercom

Over the last decade, we have seen a great rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in almost all fields of technology and entertainment. It has become a new darling for executives of the world and is starting to penetrate our everyday lives, from in-home virtual assistants to AI-driven customer care. Telecommunication and media industries are actively incorporating the role of AI in day-to-day operations, customer interactions, and analytics, but the vision of AI has much greater implications, which we have not yet fully explored. The expansion in data supply chains and the exponential increase in compute resources, power the rapid growth of AI, and the impact it is making on how our users consume content.

For a long time, media and entertainment industries have recognized the enormous potential of AI, in a race for a new audience. Our customers are becoming more and more savvy, migrating from scheduled linear viewing/listening habits to on-demand published media, any type, any device, hyper-focused, just-in-time content feeds. This is, in turn, generating a new, tight relationship between media and end-users, establishing never before seen patterns of targeted and particular viewing and listening habits. 

This offers a huge new growth promise for media applications, expanding customer experience, and capturing a dedicated audience.

With the abundance of produced media, which includes long and short form content, publications, news, talk shows and opinions, the sheer volume of sources can overwhelm an average end-user. Forcing lengthy, frustrating and redundant investments in time to locate topics of interest, often deter customers from this task. Specifically, if information about a certain event is not well publicized, one has to scour multiple sources, each typically presenting a one-sided view, limiting one’s ability to get diverse perspective such as a mix of democratic, centrist and republican read-outs and opinions. Each media outlet has the tendency to gravitate to one or the other spectrum, and AI could play a role in tracking debate comments, opinion pieces, and assembling your own media channel or personalized streaming feed.

"For a long time, media and entertainment industries have recognized the enormous potential of AI, in a race for a new audience"

AI is here to stay, and as the demand for tailored, focused, relevant content, and advertising increases, media and telecommunication industries will continue to play a much more active role in that new revolution of your time, your device, your topics - harvesting the power of AI through content supply chain, automated operations, predictive analytics and, more importantly, personalized customer experience. Major advents in AI ability to apply complex deep learning and algorithmic patterns can establish an environment where we as users can start consuming fragmented content and interest-specific clips of video and audio without human interaction. Just like the last decade of investments in targeted advertising, which focused on sociographic and demographic information, AI-powered content discovery, curation and preference recognition will fuel more personalized and scalable customer experiences. Bringing all of media branded assets, user-generated content, and creative advertising into a visual and audible feast for consumers and will enable immediate feedback loop for content creators and distributors.