Leveraging Gen AI to Improve Discovery and Streaming Engagement
The applications of Generative AI in streaming are seemingly endless, but what are specific ways that AI can make streaming content more discoverable, more personalized, more engaging, interactive, and more effective for advertisers in leveraging targeted content to reach the right customers? Microsoft's Andy Beach, Vecima's Paul Strickland, mireality's Maria Ingold, Alvarez & Marsal's Ethan Dreilinger, and Reality Software's Nadine Krefetz explore the possibilities in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2024.
Why data personalization is a key foundation for any AI-enhanced experience
Data personalization is cited as a key foundation for any kind of AI-enhanced experience. “If you're delivering a quality experience and you're using that first-party data and marrying it with some second-party data as well, either retail or weather or something like that, to really drive engagement and make one click be three clicks, you are ahead of the game,” Dreilinger says.
Strickland says, “There's a non-zero chance that we get into an era of AI-generated content, and I don't mean having an AI-created movie. What I mean is augmenting the metadata associated with a video asset if you apply an AI engine to the keyframes in that video. Now you can do things like AI-generated audio description, augmenting the metadata file with, ‘Here are the actors, here's what's happening in the scene, here's a way to search for anything that contains a red Ford pickup truck,’ that sort of thing. And then all the use cases that come out of that, not only in personalization, increased engagement with the user interface, but also in advertising and relevancy and all that good stuff.”
How AI can enhance viewer interactivity
Beach mentions that he was part of a keynote at last spring’s Streaming Media NYC, where he discussed his work with Fremantle’s data, developing an AI-assisted interactive game show experience, “Beat the BUZZR.”
“I think there's a lot of that going on,” he says, “It's sort of about using the AI to drive and anticipate the user experience outside of the content. If you can anticipate the things they're going to be Googling or maybe using their phone to look at while they're watching the show, you can help keep them targeted and engaged longer.”
AI, contextual advertising, and hyper-personalization
Ingold discusses the importance of AI in both contextual advertising and hyper-personalization. “There's audio content recognition to trigger related ads, but also being aware of contextual advertising, for instance,” Ingold says. “You don't want to have a car ad if you've just seen a car crash in what you're watching. There's some fun stuff around hyper-personalization where you can get a translation and say your name, but with lip sync, for instance. There are so many different pieces here that we can start using. Once you remember that AI is not just generative. There are machine learning and deep learning aspects of this, which enable so many other pieces.”
Join us in February 2025 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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