MediaTech Spotlight: AI/ML

MediaTech Radar

October

MediaTech Radar is a monthly newsletter put together by IABM’s Head of Knowledge Lorenzo Zanni. It focuses on a spotlight topic in MediaTech and reflects on a series of past, present, and future business developments in the industry. In this edition, our spotlight topic is the AI/ML.

MediaTech Spotlight: AI/ML

A spotlight topic in MediaTech.

• IABM has just published a report analyzing the adoption of AI/ML in the broadcast & media industry. Below, I have included some of the main highlights of the report.
• AI/ML adoption is growing, reaching 32% in 2022 (see the adoption tracker illustrated below). AI/ML adoption is enabled by the growing cloud adoption and accelerated by COVID-19.

• Manage and Produce remain the main deployment areas for AI/ML technology in the broadcast & media industry.
• Most AI/ML use cases in content management systems are to automate routine tasks such as metadata tagging, image recognition, audio/video recognition, and speech-to-text.
• Data availability is growing, and the cost of data training is declining with wider technology deployment, resulting in more a predictable ROI.
• Media businesses prefer internal deployment of AI/ML technology, which requires recruiting talent with specific skills, making talent scarcity one of the main challenges for AI/ML adoption.

MediaTech Watchlist: Gen Z, Netflix, ABC News and more…

A watchlist of selected past, present and future business developments in MediaTech.

• According to research conducted by quantilope and reported by WARC: “a third of Gen Z and a third of Millennials in the UK are considering cutting their streaming video subscriptions in the next three months.” This is consistent with the increasing pressure on streaming we reported in a previous newsletter.
• Netflix announced that it would launch its ad-supported streaming service in November at a $6.99 monthly price for the US market. Netflix has taken only six months to prepare this launch although, according to reports, it still only provides only basic targeting tools based on geography and genre to advertisers. The company plans to gradually improve its targeting technology over time. The revenue-generating potential of this move is highly uncertain as this is the first time a pure SVOD player pivots to ad-funding.
• ABC News has revamped its app with the support of Disney’s proprietary technology. The revamp includes an enhanced video experience, new UI features such as a “dark mode” as well as improved discovery capabilities for viewers to find relevant news stories. This announcement shows two things from my perspective. One is the continued focus on digital for news brands, even more so than other sectors in M&E, as news consumption habits have shifted quite dramatically in the last few years. The other, perhaps more interesting, thing that this announcement illustrates is that consolidation and the creation of large M&E conglomerates coupled with the rise of digital is a catalyst for in-house technology development, as often argued by IABM research. This is happening also as technology becomes more generic and applicable to different use cases. ABC News is owned by Disney and has taken advantage of technology developed by Disney for its DTC proposition.
• In September 2022, Adobe acquired Figma in a deal valued at about $20bn. This acquisition is the most expensive ever of a US private company, surpassing Facebook’s $19bn takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. Financial markets didn’t take the acquisition well due to its price tag, sending Adobe’s shares down and producing the steepest decline in its stock since 2010. Figma is a cloud-based maker of collaborative design tools and remote collaboration was a driver for Adobe’s $1.275bn acquisition of Frame.io in 2021 as well. Although that price raised some eyebrows too, Adobe’s shares did not go down which reflects the current downturn in digital tech stocks we reported in our State of MediaTech report.
• In past newsletters, including the last one, we talked about the increasing pressure on public broadcasting in European countries such as the UK and France. In the UK, the new government may make a U-turn on this after it announced it would review the planned privatization of Channel 4 and scrapping of the BBC license fee.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. If there are topics you would like me to cover or have information/ideas you'd like to share, please get in touch with us.

Lorenzo Zanni

Head of Knowledge

IABM