SUMMARY
- The M&E industry is going through a transformative change in terms of adopting AI technology.
- Without AI, organizations will struggle to move content through all four phases of the content supply chain.
- M&E and sports brands alike are finding success in adopting AI to maximize the value of their content.
Disruptions during the pandemic forced media companies to rethink how they move content through the supply chain. The first step was providing remote teams access to companies’ content assets to continue engaging with their target audiences. But creating these access points surfaced another problem: How do you quickly find content in an archive to react to opportunities in a timely fashion?
During a time of economic uncertainty, many hunkered down to keep the ship afloat. However, those that adopted new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are now well positioned to gain the mindshare of audiences that are always looking for more content.
AI Is About More Than Just Content Management
The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is transforming. As a result of the pandemic, 50% of companies, in general, have accelerated their AI adoption plans. But within M&E, recent research estimates that the industry will spend $16.5 billion by 2026 on AI and machine learning.
We've identified four phases that content moves through: create, manage, distribute, and monetize. AI has always been discussed in the content management phase for its ability to automate metadata tagging. But it's gaining traction as a new tool to create engaging, human digital content through AI voice.
AI in Content Creation: Synthetic Voice
AI voice, also called synthetic voice or deepfake voice, is the process in which you create realistic, generic voices or actual clones of an individual’s voice with AI. You might ask, what kind of content can you create with AI voice?
Sports brands are already investing in AI voice to create new ways to engage with fans. For example, the Pittsburgh Steelers enabled fans to ask about players and stats and receive an answer in their favorite player's voice. Stats Perform recently adopted AI voice to provide play-by-play commentary in multiple languages, making content even more accessible to global audiences.
Synthetic voice also helps creators reach more customers by localizing and translating their content into other languages. Sounds Profitable, a podcast on the business of podcasting with an active newsletter servicing over 3,500 subscribers worldwide, was able to translate its content into Spanish without losing the voice of its host using AI voice.
AI in Content Management
As we've mentioned, to reuse your content and eventually monetize it, you need a scalable way to manage it. Unfortunately, some media asset management solutions lack a robust AI piece, making it harder for digital teams to migrate physical assets into digital formats and tag all of their content once it's digital.
One such example was the LA Chargers. By integrating AI into their content ecosystem, they were able to avoid a total rip and replace their content management stack to add AI—helping them complete 371 days of metadata work in hours.
AI in Content Distribution
While AI doesn't necessarily help organizations distribute content, it can do is make content more accessible to multiple parties. For instance, the ADAC TotalEnergies 24h Nürburgring, a famed 24-hour car race that's held each year in Germany, brings together various partners, manufacturers, and racing teams. Each requires access to content to promote their brand further, engage with fans, and report on the race.
Without AI processing the live content being ingested in the archive, these parties could never have had near real-time access to this content. Now, all parties can find and use the content they need as soon as it's ingested, with AI facilitating distribution.
AI in Monetization
The manage piece of the content journey is critical to activating monetization. Once the content is easily surfaceable in an archive, companies can stand up their own marketplace if their MAM technology can create a storefront. For example, PROGRESS, a german film distributor with an archive of 20,000 historic films, did just that to increase their revenue opportunities. But the tricky part is finding a holistic solution that can offer all the required pieces to make this happen.
AI Where and When You Need It
Figuring out how to get started with AI can feel daunting. If you are looking to ingest AI into your current tech stack, determine where your bottlenecks are and find a flexible solution that can integrate. In some monetization cases, you might need more than just an AI integration; that will depend on your needs and current capabilities.
The key is to pinpoint an area you need to solve. Then, once you've onboarded AI and are actively using it in one area of your business, we often see how adjacent use cases for using AI surface. With the right solution, AI can offer the flexibility to scale as needed to meet the needs of the business at any given time.
To start your AI journey today, reach out, and we'll help you assess your situation and find the best solution to overcome your challenges.
