Jeff Bezos once compared Amazon’s approach to customer experience to hosting a party 24/7. “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job, every day, to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Bezos’ comments came way back in 2004. But they could just as easily be describing the challenges facing broadcast media today as brands look for growth in the OTT market.
DW Innovation – Towards Trustworthy AI in Media Tools
Broadcasters and media companies are implementing technologies powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) across the value chain. We see countless use cases for AI based automation or support and new opportunities keep emerging. So far, the focus has been on the usefulness of AI systems in terms of accuracy and performance in relation to a specific task. This is now changing with a wider uptake of AI, new capabilities for ML and public debates on this technology.
Loosening the Ad Tech Bottleneck
The two basic premises of broadcasting haven’t changed for the last 100 years or so. One, give viewers compelling programming and they’ll watch. Two, effective monetisation is critical for supporting all that programming.
Eyeing up new revenues with addressable advertising
Convergence Forcing a Focus on Data
FAST. AVOD. SVOD. MVPD. vMVPD. OTA. These services represent the options available to content owners or aggregators to deliver entertainment, sports and news content from centralized hubs to individual consumers. Their goal is simple – expose and monetize their content libraries to as many consumers as possible. However, that doesn’t mean the consumer is top of mind when it comes to facilitating their journey to their content of choice.
Optimising Edits with Metadata
Few industries are as fast paced and highly pressurised as the media industry. What was already a competitive field has become even more so, as the demand for content has increased in-line with the explosion of OTT services. To manage this high volume of throughput, content supply chains have become more complex, with multiple teams all contributing towards content preparation.
Staking your fortune on FAST? Don’t neglect the data!
Linear TV isn’t dead, but the internet has changed it forever. At a time of global downturn, an increasing number of content owners are pinning their growth hopes on ad-funded live or VOD-to-live FAST channels. But drawing eyeballs and maximising ad revenues in this increasingly crowded marketplace will rely on more than just an EPG and good promos.
Monetizing OTT Services Through Targeted Advertising in ABR Streaming
Video streaming is growing at a rapid pace, gaining more and more viewers from legacy broadcast. To keep up with their growing investment in content, video service providers need to find effective methods to boost content monetization, and targeted advertising is one way to do that. Enabled by ABR streaming, targeted advertising allows service providers to seamlessly deliver video ads into streamed content to create additional revenues.
The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin): Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE)
Researchers in UT-Austin’s LIVE (UT-LIVE), Directed by Professor Al Bovik, have singularly pioneered the use of visual neuroscience to create picture and video quality measurement and monitoring tools that control the quality and bandwidths of a large percentage of all streaming videos, television, and social media. Their breakthrough inventions include the iconic Structural Similarity (SSIM), Multi-scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) “reference” visual quality tools, which delivered dramatic leaps in performance when introduced, and are still dominant today. These tools are used today to control the quality of most streaming and social media pictures and videos in the US and beyond. Bovik and his team also disrupted the field by inventing the first accurate and practical “blind” visual quality models (BRISQUE and NIQE), using models of neuro-statistical distances, at the neural level, between distorted and distortion-free visual signals. These tools are also globally marketed and used in numerous industry applications, including inspection of streaming and social video uploads, control of cameras, and remote video transcoding in the Cloud.
Imagine Communications: Imagine Aviator
Aviator is a cloud-native platform that enables broadcasters, MVPDs and digital-first providers to plan, make and monetize premium-quality, ad-supported linear and Connected TV (CTV) content from a single, unified platform. This ground-breaking platform draws on Imagine’s broad experience in ad tech, video infrastructure and playout automation to create an entirely new approach to setting up, running and monetizing channels simply, quickly and cost-effectively.