PwC anticipates that artificial intelligence will contribute $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030.
There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI) currently plays an important role in all aspects of our society; moreover, experts like Andrew Ng, former Chief Scientist at Baidu, a giant Asian web services company and pioneer at putting artificial intelligence to work across its organization, claims that AI will have the same impact on the world as electricity had a hundred years ago.
In this respect, the entertainment industry is no exception; it is expected that AI will have a profound and far-reaching impact in the coming years, and there will be no going back.
Today’s entertainment industry technology vendors are reeling off jargon like “AI”, “machine learning”, and “deep learning”, touting the benefits these technologies promise. It can be difficult for video server provider decision makers to discern between the future promise of AI and what is truly feasible and effective today: how can deploying AI in your organization now improve customer acquisition, engagement, and retention and by extension, prove its ROI.
There are important challenges faced by the entertainment industry – more specifically, the video industry –that can be effectively addressed by state-of-the-art AI today.
You should approach implementing AI in your organization like a journey where each step represents progress with real business benefits. Each step, having delivered satisfaction with incremental positive impacts paves the way for continued progress. Progress, that is demonstrable to senior management and represents a positive ROI for the business.
Like many other industries, the end goal of AI-powered video businesses is to automate business decisions to deliver superior products and enrich the customer experience. However, such an ambitious goal frequently falls by the wayside if it is not properly understood. From the very start, the AI-powered activities that are deployed must have a real, positive, and measurable impact for your business.
Before outlining the AI initiatives that can be successfully delivered to video services today, let’s take a moment to look back to understand where the video industry has come from, thus better understanding the momentum that is currently driving it.
Since approximately 2010, the traditional players in the video and TV industry (TV broadcasters, networks, and media companies) have responded to the threats presented by the market newcomers (Netflix, Amazon, Google, Hulu, Facebook, etc.) by investing time and money rolling out “over-the-top” (OTT) strategies to bypass the industry’s long-established content distribution structure. In today’s industry, those traditional players that are still relevant have deployed and actively market, with varying degrees of success, video distribution platforms and content catalogs (either licensed products or developed in-house) along with different business models (subscription, pay-as-you-go, advertising-based, bundled with pay-TV packages, etc.).
These players all face the same goal: to capture, retain, and engage their audience. Ultimately, they compete, not only with direct rivals from other video services but also with the overwhelming choice offered to consumers by the Internet, all vying for the limited time of their users.
In this new, fast-changing landscape, consumers who are more and more indiscriminate and capricious will abandon your service if it does not wholly satisfy them. In this context, AI becomes an extremely helpful element for video business. Netflix, a company that needs no introduction, has understood this from the start. Consequently, it is extremely pragmatic about the ways it applies artificial intelligence across various areas of its business, ways that could undoubtedly be of potential use to other video services, adapted to their business goals.
If you want to know some of the real and proven AI-powered techniques that are potentially available to all video services click here
