IBC 2024: Better Content Curation Through Conversation with Imaginario AI
In his opening keynote at IBC 2024, behavioral expert Thimon de Jong compared the “impact of AI on everything” in 2024 was a bit like assessing the impact of the World Wide Web in 1997. “We are in 1997 with AI,” he declared. Suggesting that attendees brace themselves for the likelihood that AI would prove every bit as transformative as the web (and in ways we wouldn’t have imagined in its early days), he went on to predict, “Everything with AI is going to be an emotional roller coaster. We are used to technology being stronger and faster than we are.”
Noting that AI too would of course be all that, he concluded, “We are going to have to get used to it being smarter and more creative than we are.”
IBC 2024 was such a blur of AI hype and AI-driven, AI-enhanced, and allegedly AI-infused solutions that they seemed to blur together after a while—including further blurring the line between solutions fueled by “traditional” AI/machine learning and large-language model-based Generative AI. And there was arguably less discussion of AI in human-displacing creative roles in the media and entertainment world such as those propelling the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 than AI-powered workflow enhancements easing and accelerating creative efforts.
One AI-driven solution that stood out at IBC 2024 as particularly smart and creative comes from a London-based company called Imaginario AI. I met with CEO and Co-Founder Jose M. Puga and got an up-close look at a content indexing and curation tool that uses multimodal AI models to “make video content searchable like text.” Imaginario AI made a big enough splash at IBC this year to take home 1st prize in the “Manage” category of the IABM’s BaM awards.
I’ve been an Adobe Premiere Pro editor for close to 20 years now. Since Adobe integrated Lumetri Color Correction into Premiere Pro’s main UI in 2017 or so, one of the few new features that have really made the needle jump for me is the AI-based speech-to-text capability introduced in 2021, which not only provides built-in captioning but also magically streamlines the process of searching for key moments and grabbing highlights from hour-long conference videos and even making text-based edits.
But imagine being able to search through not only longform individual videos but entire video archives, and not only doing so through transcribed text but via speech, video, and sound, and an AI-driven contextual system that’s “not subject to the limitations of keyword search or tags.” That’s what Imaginario AI offers.
Repurposing and repackaging content is a critical part of video content delivery and IP ownership in general, whether it’s for live sports highlights, doing film rushes or dailies, or generating snackable social content. “Large studios are betting part of their future on social media,” said Puga
Reality TV shows, Puga noted, shoot footage at a rate of about “100-to-1” compared to what they actually air, which can mean endless hours spent crafting storylines and “dressing up the script.”
With larger libraries, text- and keyword-based searches for content can be particularly cumbersome and time-consuming. Not only does Imaginario AI bring more search elements into play with sounds and sound effects; it moves content companies much closer “to the point where editors can have a conversation with their content for repurposing.” This approach can reduce the time large content owners spend rewatching video by “50-75 percent.
Comcast, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Cineverse are currently among the “dozens of companies” working with Imaginario AI, Puga said.
This type of indexing tool can also dramatically reduce the time ensuring regional compliance for localized content, where it’s necessary to re-cut shows to edit out adult content or drug abuse for markets where such content is forbidden. Again, tamping down “AI is coming for our jobs” fears, Puga notes, “You still need a human in the loop” for compliance work. “But AI gets you 70 percent there.”
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