Hit Factory 2020: Using AI and Cloud to create Emmy winners
The Emmys are over and the winners have been crowned — with streaming service Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale as the surprise winner of “Best Drama.” So our prediction last week was right about the impact of streaming TV on the Emmys but completely wrong about the winner. Half-right is better than all-wrong.
Last week, we looked at the peaks and valleys of streaming and how streaming providers need to adopt “living networks” over the next two years to deal with the explosive growth of unpredictable streaming video traffic.
Now let’s look at the content filling those pipes and how technology — in particular, artificial intelligence and cloud — will change the creative process of hit-making over those same two years.
No, Skynet will not be creating our programming. AI has come a long way since Johnny 5 of Short Circuit. It’s clear now that creatives will be able to work with a new partner to reduce time spent on labor-intensive but low-value tasks and even spark the creative process. Who? Artificial intelligence platforms like IBM’s Watson.
How can creatives use artificial intelligence? Here are two examples:
Creating highlight reels and trailers. Watson Highlights is part of the new Watson Media platform that can be trained to recognize compelling moments in content and suggest clips for trailers and highlights packages. Watson Highlights got to strut its stuff at the US Open two weeks ago when it created highlight reels for the USTA’s website and mobile app. Watson connected fans with the moments that matter to them as individuals and delivered them in near-real-time from the IBM Cloud.
Watson isn’t just for sports. When Fox and IBM Research teamed up to train Watson to help create a movie trailer for the AI thriller Morgan earlier this year, the studio found that Watson helped reduce the time to create the trailer from 30 days to one day [1]. In fact, likes for the trailer outnumbered dislikes by 100-to-1 on YouTube, while the actual film scored a weaker 40 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.
Creative Inspiration: IBM’s CTO for Media and Entertainment, Peter Guglielmino, went to Las Vegas earlier this year to meet with magician Tommy Wind. Their conversation was captured in this episode of Strange Exchange:
Tommy described how he could use the power of Watson to figure out how to pull off his ultimate trick — making the Las Vegas Strip disappear — by having Watson read and understand how thousands of previous illusions were pulled off. Then Tommy imagined how he could use Watson Audience Insights to target a specific audience — families — to enjoy the spectacle. Again, all these services were delivered with the IBM Cloud.
These are just two examples of how putting Watson and artificial intelligence in the hands of creatives via cloud can both save time and spur creativity.
So if the 2020 Emmys feature Short Circuit 3 and the return of Johnny 5, streamed without a hitch by Netflix, we’ll know that AI and the living network have arrived in the media and entertainment industry.
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