AI’s Growing Role in Media Production

By Peter Sykes , Strategic Technology Development Manager

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is popping up everywhere in our daily lives – from facial recognition on smartphones to online chatbots and banking fraud prevention. But what about AI’s relevance in the broadcasting and content space?

Industry research by the IABM’s Media Tech Business Tracker suggests that nearly a third of broadcast and media companies are already deploying AI and Machine Learning (ML) in some capacity. What’s more, according to IABM 56% of end users intend to deploy AI/ML within the next few years. IABM’s analysis also pinpoints the production and management phases of the end-to-end content chain as currently being the most fertile areas for AI’s adoption, ahead of other areas like acquisition and distribution.

Creating more from less

Fuelled by the industry’s transition towards cloud-hosted solutions, AI/ML clearly has immense potential in today’s production space. At Sony we’re examining specific areas in the end-to-end content chain where the technology can streamline workflow by automating fiddly, time-consuming or repetitive manual processes. From a programme maker’s perspective, the ability to automate ‘low value’ but essential tasks can save valuable time in getting content to air. Equally, it can free up busy teams to focus on creative aspects of a production.

Marking sports production smarter

A specific area of programme making where Sony is actively exploring the application of AI is sport.?Footage of a football match is a great example of an event where there’s a lot going on in the scene. Equally, this kind of content is characterised by repetitive actions like passes, shots on goal, near misses or collisions between players. A suitably trained AI agent can reliably recognize objects like players and goalpost, spotting these ‘highlight’ events that follow a very similar structure each time they occur. The engine can log these clips automatically and instantly add them to an edit timeline – potentially saving a human operator hours of work in compiling highlights from a match.

Beyond sport, AI can assist producers of documentaries, lifestyle and other programmes by helping to identify people or specific objects, particularly where there’s a lot of activity in a piece of content. And aside from their application in scene detection and clip creation, AI agents can be trained to perform a wide range of tasks including subtitling, media enrichment, data analysis and more.?

Embedding AI in our cloud-based production ecosystem

We’re already giving broadcasters and media organisations the opportunity to explore the possibilities of AI within Creators’ Cloud, Sony’s hosted environment that gives programme makers access to a suite of file-based content production and management tools. AI Automated Production – or ‘A2P’ – is our cloud-based service that combines our own AI engine with other third-party algorithms and analytics tools.

Right now we’re exploring the possibilities for integrating A2P with Sony’s wider cloud-based production portfolio. It’s a potent addition to our M2 (multipoint to multipoint) Live Cloud Switcher that handles video and audio mixing, graphics and caption generation, using AI to generate highlights in real time from sports and other live events.

A2P is also a great complement to NavigatorX, our Media Asset Management (MAM) and workflow orchestrator. AI-generated highlights can be catalogued, organised and routed automatically to destinations like external FTP servers, Twitter posts, or other collaborative tools like our Ci Media Cloud platform.

The real power of AI will come with integration into other platforms, such as cloud-based MAMs or production switchers

Experience AI today

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and its longer-term influence on the media and content industries is certainly going to be transformational. Right now its principal role is in helping to automate repetitive and labour-intensive tasks. But as we’re already seeing with the rapid evolution of other technologies like ChatGPT, the potential for AI as a complement for human invention and creativity is virtually limitless. Who can guess its impact on the film and TV programmes we’ll be watching five years from now?

If you want to find out what AI can do for your own productions – today and tomorrow – it’s high time we discussed your needs. Speak with a consultant about our?bespoke cloud solutions.

Written by Peter Sykes , Strategic Technology Development Manager, Sony