philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

MEDIA CTOS REFLECT ON THE DISRUPTION CURVE AND AI

Phil Wiser, EVP and Global CTO, Paramount  ...

“In less than 10 years, most of music consumption was shifted to the new model,” said Wiser.

Print with its ad-based model had been “stickier”, he said, while in the case of video, the legacy model had been protected by the fact that it generated good revenue streams tied to physical infrastructure.

“We are just at a point where the erosion of that has really started,” he said, predicting an acceleration in the decline of the traditional pay TV model, from now on. ...

To support the economics of the business, broadcast and streaming need to be converged, said Wiser. ...

One part of the transformation was to partner aggressively with big scale players like AWS, which invested alongside Paramount in its cloud infrastructure. Paramount alone could not have invested the “hundreds of millions of dollars required”, said Wiser, adding that this lesson now applies even more to investment in AI. ...

Investment in AI

Nevertheless, investment in AI shows signs of paying off. With AI, he said, there is “no need to overinvest in data science or data teams”, even if it was important to have data capability.

“My data science team is probably going to shoot me [for that comment],” he said.

Wiser said media companies spend most time creating content and then marketing it. Production takes longer and it is hard to effect change in this area, he said. Now with AI, it is possible to create some change. However, it is unlikely to replace large parts of the creative process. ...

Girish Bajaj, VP, Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios Technology ...

Amazon has been using AI for over 20 years in video and is now extending that to tap into the potential of Generative AI. “We are definitely leaning into it. The important part is everyone is trying to find the chatbot that is going to work.”

Generative AI is now being used for personalisation.

However, using AI for practical use cases meant reskilling and retooling the entire Prime Video team. He said the technology could be used for customer facing features but also on the back end to help process media files and create cover art, for example. ...

See the full story here: https://www.ibc.org/features/media-ctos-reflect-on-the-disruption-curve-and-ai/12015.article