Pixel Power – Automation and Content – how can they coexist?
Stuart Russell, Head of Marketing, Pixel Power
One of my favorite things to say about our media production world is that I’ve never worked in an industry that is so obsessed with the next generation of technology but is so slow to actually adopt it. Perhaps this conservative tendency is a side-effect of working with content that we see as culturally significant or valuable, or maybe it’s just the recurring 3am nightmare of the screen going black during primetime. But when industry commentators keep lauding the next new shiny thing as a game-changer, customers watch on with their hands on their hips waiting for one of their number to go first, make all the mistakes, and iron out all of the wrinkles.
I don’t say this as a criticism, and technology has clearly made a huge difference to how video content is produced and distributed over the last 50 years, but cooler and more pragmatic heads know that things never move quite as quickly as everyone says they will.
Let’s be honest – we’ve been talking about IP for over a decade, and I still remember an IABM annual conference in 2015 when the majority of hands in the room were raised in agreement to the question ‘will the majority of workflows will be IP by 2020?’. Here we are in 2025 and SDI still lives on. IP is certainly more prevalent but not ubiquitous, and we’ve seen a number of hot topics and technology platforms float past us and disappear down the river. 3D-TV anyone?
I’m being deliberately provocative, of course, and we have undeniably seen the development and introduction of some really interesting tools that have helped us boost creativity, improve efficiency, reduce the need for dull and repetitive tasks and improve our ability to share and collaborate remotely.
The Covid pandemic may be painful to think back on, but it is hard to deny the mark it has left on our industry when it comes to working practices and its role as a catalyst in accelerating new product development. Those two years were probably the equivalent of five regular years in our industry, as vendors and customers alike sought to develop new tools and methods that would help us respond to forced remote working patterns.
When I consider the last decade, I think that this issue of remote collaboration, sharing and production is one of the more significant themes. Cloud storage costs may remain stubbornly high – one of the obvious barriers to the adoption of full cloud-based production – and the environmental footprint of working in the cloud cannot be ignored – but the ability to move content around remote teams for comment, editing and approvals has been an important shift.
Pre-pandemic, we saw the introduction of innovations such as newsroom automation platforms and robotic studio camera systems. While these solutions were shrewdly marketed by vendors as tools to improve quality, consistency and accuracy – reducing human error and providing more predictable results – the side-effect was almost certainly some redeployment of human resource.
All of this brings us to AI – the latest hot potato to be juggled. Having previously worked for a company that is very active in the AI space, I can see how AI solutions can be used to automate some of the less glamourous heavy lifting work that needs to be done. As the amount of content being produced every year continues to grow, it makes sense to deploy tools that can help producers and broadcasters stay on top of the production and delivery landscape. As examples, we’ve seen the development of software platforms that can transcribe speech to text and then create broadcast quality subtitles, and clever solutions that can ingest a sporting event and create custom length highlight reels. While solutions like these are not perfect – I often describe AI as a toddler that should never be left unattended for any length of time – they are improving with every iteration.
Automating these repetitive tasks can help drive efficiency savings for broadcasters, and while ‘efficiency’ isn’t a particularly exciting theme, it’s only going to become more important as the amount of content keeps growing. With many online platforms now managing a mix of both short-form and long-form content, bringing order to complexity is the name of the game and AI can clearly assist here.
When it comes to the creative side of the business, the idealist in me wants to say that the future looks bright and relatively AI-free. While we’ve seen the emergence of some tools like Midjourney for image generation and Adobe’s latest version of Photoshop which can help generate small additional segments of video, I think we’re a long way off a full movie or TV show being AI-generated. I’m also not sure that there is (currently) much audience appetite for this. After all, AI is just the statistical analysis of historical data, and that doesn’t always lend itself to creativity. In this sense, AI may be smoldering in the corner of the room, but we’ve yet to see any flames. I’d like to believe that the content explosion coupled with greater efficiencies in production and delivery techniques will lead to an uplift in creative work, but of course time will tell.
Automation (in some form or another) has been a fact of industry life forever, and it has changed the composition of workforces and the way organizations are structured. While many have railed against the perceived deskilling of the industry, I would suggest that the skills base has simply shifted. I hate the idea of media production ever becoming a fringe offshoot of the IT world, but we do have to admit that the way we move content around, share it and manage it has irreversibly moved into this IT/networking domain. While wholesale adoption of new technology platforms rarely happens quickly, there is definitely a need for agility within our customer base – some traditional roles will continue to diminish in importance (and number) but new roles will emerge and will require a different set of skills.
