SMW '18: IBM Watson Media and Weather's Scott Grizzle Talks Finding Solutions
Learn more about machine learning at Streaming Media's next event.
Read the complete transcript of this interview:
Tim Siglin: And we're back here at Streaming Media West 2018. I'm Tim Siglin, contributing editor with Streaming Media Magazine and founding executive director of the not-for-profit HelpMe! Stream. Today, I've got with me Scott Grizzle from IBM. Scott, first of all, on a personal note, congratulations. I got a chance to meet your lovely bride here just a few minutes ago. That's probably bigger news than anything else we're gonna talk about.
Scott Grizzle: Yeah, it's been a few months now since we got married. It was a lot of fun.
Tim Siglin: Nice, awesome. So, tell me what you're doing at IBM and what's new.
Scott Grizzle: Well, I'm a Senior Solutions Engineer for Watson Media and Weather, formerly IBM Cloud Video, still the same group, working on just finding crazy solutions for customers. Every customer has different needs and I'm there to help find the right needs. If it may be incorporating AI and cognitive or video enrichment, if it's live closed captioning or VOD captioning, some customers were also more of the enterprise space.
We're seeing customers in the enterprise space also doing public events, so we gotta find the right scenarios. We work with them on some production side or what gear they should buy. So, sometimes, they have no video experience at all, but they know they have this need and that's what my role is to really help them and guide them through.
Tim Siglin: Okay. And so, they come to you with the business need, "We need to get the message out, how do we best get the message out?"
Scott Grizzle: Yeah, and I always say we build a dream. They come in with a little dream that we can explain to them all they can do. How different units in their company can use this Axiom platform, because you might have an HR group who wants to do trainings, but now you have marketing. They can use it for big events or a big corporation might have investor relations.
You could have multiple platforms for one company, who can have offshoots and do one overall master account and design it so everyone can have their own specialized account.
Tim Siglin: It's interesting you say that, because just prior to coming into streaming, I spent a short stint in video conferencing, we sorta called it death by a thousand cuts. If the video conferencing room was used by a subject matter expert or by somebody who was ... we were doing military, who was connecting with a family member in Afghanistan or Iraq, ultimately it was all the uses of video for that. So, it's interesting to hear you describe that. So, what does the dream for most companies typically look like in terms of are they trying to integrate social media, are they trying to just push out an all-hands meeting or is it a combination of those thousand cuts?
Scott Grizzle: All of the above. It truly is and we even see, you mentioned the military, the military obviously is having, I'm not gonna say financial difficulties, that's not the case, but it's hard for them to backfill personnel. That's a huge thing right now, so what can you do? They're not gonna hire somebody, so what you can do is make their jobs easier and faster using AI. We're not taking jobs away, because those jobs aren't there. It's just making people more efficient, less stress, because if you have 2,500 sailors all sending videos in and the crew there is 10 people to edit all those videos, it's impossible.
Tim Siglin: Yeah, I was in that scenario. We had two people in a 3,500-person, yeah.
Scott Grizzle: Yeah, and you just wanna pull your hair out. Now, if you can have AI go through, tag video, what is in it? Do a closed captioning, so you had to have a transcript available, because then you can convert that into translation and everything else, multiple languages. So, the whole thing is helping customers be educated and again, every customer has a different workflow. What do they need? Then we can find the right solution for them and make it simple.
Tim Siglin: So, and you mentioned Watson and you mentioned artificial intelligence. I'm assuming ... Watson obviously sort of was the first public example of neural networks and the ways that those types of things are working. Is that name change to allow people to understand that that's what it is as opposed to just a video cloud solution?
Scott Grizzle: Yeah, again, really our stuff is so much more than just a normal delivery. We're more just than a CDN, we're more than just a video platform. With the AI experience on there and other integrations we're coming out with, we wanna leverage that, the other big brain. We can actually do the metadata and do all the stuff out there, have a video go through and do scene selection for itself.
It makes things easier, metadoc extraction, you can put it in a search result. The whole thing is making finding things faster and easier and lessening the work of cataloging, because to be honest, in video, even editors, the biggest problem is cataloging. You want your editors to edit video, not to go through and...
Tim Siglin: Yeah, most of the time we were spending 90 percent of your time just trying to figure out where the clips are and what's in the clips. What about live, because obviously cataloging is one thing, but what about applying that to live videos?
Scott Grizzle: Yeah, so that’s something we are working on. Obviously, right now, the big announcement is our live closed captioning, which is using the Watson. We're still gonna have little transcriptions on there now that they can go through and edit versus make sure it goes through Watson it goes through versus having a million people typing away. Then again, if you can do archiving live video enrichment, where you can again, you already had a transcript graded, now you have everything, what the scenes are, what the identification is, do that live, it makes sense, because now you save on time, but again, right now, even on the VODs, we're faster than real-time, so even if it's not live, we can do it almost as live.
Tim Siglin: Okay. Okay, good. Scott, appreciate your time. Very interesting stuff and we'll be right back.
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