#OTTuesday: AI Destined for Big Role in Entertainment

by Shane Keats on January 8, 2019

After years of hype, AI is finally making headway in industries like manufacturing, medicine and transportation — and it’s beginning to play a supporting role in media & entertainment. AkamaiTV’s Paul Jackson chatted with Peter Chave, Principal Architect here at Akamai, to learn how AI is stepping into the spotlight to not only change how content is produced, but also how we interact with it.

Welcome back from the holidays! My daughter is home from college and I took her and her friend out to lunch this week. I was asking this friend about her favorite classes and they all involved machine learning, algorithmic optimization and artificial intelligence; and I thought, “I should introduce her to Peter Chave!”

Why? Because we recently chatted with Peter Chave, our Principal Architect, in the latest episode of AkamaiTV to discuss AI and the future of this technology in media and entertainment. He believes that AI paired with OTT, metadata, facial recognition and image capture will have a significant impact on nearly all forms of entertainment media. And unlike other breakthrough technologies like virtual reality that’s taken years to become mainstream, AI will begin reshaping media in a much shorter timeframe.

If you pause a TV show or movie on Amazon, Peter notes you’re actually peering into the future of AI in entertainment. Take Amazon’s X-Ray application, for example, which provides viewers with information about the actors on screen and the scene in progress. While most of this information is manually fed into the program now, future AI applications will rely on metadata to gather these details in real time. The same approach can be applied to clothing, buildings, or cars in a given scene.

For news and sports, Peter says AI-enabled apps with facial recognition will make it easier for reporters to identify people attending events like royal weddings, and will help announcers share player stats during games and matches more quickly. AI paired with automated cameras will be able to direct and predict camera angles without an operator, making it affordable to cover smaller events. As this technology evolves, we’ll also see streaming providers improve content recommendations.

After watching this video, it’s hard not to get excited about the future of news and entertainment. In the next episode we’ll sit down with Rowan de Pomerai and Mark Harrison from The Digital Production Partnership to discuss how to overcome the biggest challenges facing the OTT industry today.

Shane Keats is Director of Industry Marketing for Media at Akamai.