Entertainment Entering the AI Age

Humans For AI
Jul 24, 2017 · 6 min read

(Part 2 of 2)

Written by Deepa Naik

In continuation to the earlier article Entertainment Entering the AI Age — Part 1, we go on to deep dive and see how the following entertainment segments are experimenting with AI — Television, Movies, Digital Advertising, Out of Home, Print, Gaming, Animation & VFX, Music, and Radio.

Television

In the Television industry today, AI is being used for audience engagement, content planning, and network management.

Television is marked in two distinct categories

  • Linear TV — service where the viewer has to watch a scheduled TV program at the particular time it’s offered
  • OTT — over-the-top content (OTT) is the audio, video, and other media content delivered over the Internet without the involvement of a multiple-system operator (MSO) in the control or distribution of the content ( Ex — Netflix)

In the OTT segment, since it is based on the internet as the platform, a lot of AI has already been mainstream as discussed in the earlier section (personalization recommendation engines etc.). For the Linear TV segment AI involvement is in nascent stages. Mi TV has come up with a Smart TV with deep learning AI system. The AI TV system understands preferences and intelligently classifies content, so you get highly personalized content each time you switch on your TV.

Dive.tv is an interesting app which helps immerse users in the show or movie they are watching by offering recommendations based on the movie. While watching a movie on TV or any other device, the user has to “Dive In” into the movie using the app installed on their mobile. Once it is synchronized, lots of content dynamically appears on the device simultaneously as it appears on screen. The user then clicks on any of the cards to know more details. The user can access more information about the characters, the clothes they’re wearing, fun facts, the music that’s playing, vehicles, locations, etc.

Gaming

Google’s AlphaGo learned to play Go (board game) through watching millions of games. In video games, artificial intelligence is used to generate intelligent behaviours primarily in non-player characters (NPCs), often simulating human-like intelligence. Pathfinding is another common use for AI, widely seen in real-time strategy games. Pathfinding is the method for determining how to get a NPC from one point on a map to another, taking into consideration the terrain, obstacles and possibly “fog of war”. AI has recently been explored in games such as Creatures, Black & White and Nintendogs and toys such as Tamagotchi. The new research area for gaming developers is working to create an emotional AI for the NPCs.

Animation and VFX (Visual Effects)

In the animation segment, we have a story from a research team from the University of Edinburgh. They have developed a way to animate game characters using neural network computing. It allows more realistic and fluid animations. This is different from other animation methods and has a drastic reduction in the amount of time and effort animators need to achieve their goal.

OOH — Out of Home Advertising

Santander is the first brand to work with Posterscope to create a programmatic ad service which customises creative executions in outdoor digital posters tailored to the passing consumer.

“Dynamic scheduling”, powered by Liveposter, uses a “genetic algorithm” which enables brands to fully exploit dynamic digital out-of-home advertising. By using data to create, change and schedule adverts that change over the course of a day, a week or an on-going campaign, they make brands more relevant, more engaging and more effective.

As more and more OOH spend is moving to be digital, programmatic OOH is paving way for the future and AI is all powered to lead the way.

Music

AI is showing its mark in the music industry right from creation, to search, delivery and monetization. For music creation, Amper is an artificial intelligence music composer and API that creates and customizes music for your content. Pacemaker is an AI based DJ app. Music distribution is moving fast from transaction to streaming subscriptions and by making the music recommendations tailored and more relevant to the user.

Jukedeck, started by Newton-Rex, is called the ‘Musical AI’ Company and is revolutionizing the way people and companies make and consume music. According to Newton-Rex, the main technological challenge for creative AI, and particularly one that can write music, is that there’s simply no right — or wrong — way of doing it. If we take image recognition done by neural networks, there’s always a sure way to train the algorithm by evaluating the results, i.e. telling if it was right or wrong. Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) is a fast growing research area and one that is gaining much prominence.

Digital Advertising

Digital Advertising is one of the most impacted areas by Artificial Intelligence, there is a lot that can be said about AI and digital advertising and it needs a separate article on its own. To mention some top areas, we have AI enabling the personalized advertising experience, AI to improve content, self-learning algorithms helping to achieve super-accurate user analysis and as a result make advertising more efficient, programmatic advertising and others.

Coca Cola wants to use AI bots to create ads. They have hired the first chief digital marketing officer, David Godsman. That digital transformation includes four focus areas: customer and consumer experience, operations, new businesses, and culture. Within the customer and consumer bucket, Coke is interested in using artificial intelligence to improve content, media, and commerce — particularly when it makes the creative process more effective.

In the digital advertising world, futuristic vision shows AI stepping up for creating music for ads, writing scripts, posting a spot on social media.

Radio

In this segment, AI is in its infancy. Cognitive radio, which deals with the intelligent assignment and use of the radio spectrum; and cognitive networking, which deals with the intelligent routing of information through a network, taking into account local constraints are some research areas. Applying distributed artificial intelligence to wireless devices, giving them the cognitive capabilities to route information through a network and access the radio spectrum, by taking into account behaviour of other devices and the local environment in which they operate, holds the key to the next communications revolution.

Movies / Films

In the movies segment, big studios are already using data models to predict box office performances. Story writing is another area where AI and data analytics seem to be creating a mark.

Print

For the print media, the rules of the games are changing very quickly. Content and Distribution is no longer the key, the competitive advantage is the relevance to the consumer. As seen in the examples earlier, the print media are using apps which will have integrated AI & machine learning (ML) into their platforms so they serve contextual relevancy.

Conclusion

AI in the entertainment industry is in its infancy. The industry currently relies primarily on the artistry the human touch provides. The future is going to see the creative professionals, data technologists, and machines working together to carve out their creative world in order to grab and retain the consumer attention. Like all transformative digital technologies, AI in the entertainment industry must make its way through the hype cycle and it will be interesting to see what AI holds in the future for these industries.

References

About the Author

Deepa is a founding member of Humans For AI, a non-profit focused on building a more diverse workforce for the future leveraging AI technologies. Learn more about us and join us as we embark on this journey to make a difference!

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