There was a much more mundane, muted approach to the positioning of AI and GenAI this year, as efficiency gains overtake the ‘wow’ factor
Tech trade show IBC 2024, which comes to an end at The Rai, Amsterdam today (Monday, 16 September), will, slightly unexcitedly, go down as the year of ‘efficiencies’.
Across the board, tech companies were keen to showcase how they were doing stuff to make your working life more organised, more resourceful, and, yes, more efficient.
AI and GenAI are to thank for this. Rather than utilising GenAI for adding the ‘wow factor’, the use of AI and GenAI is far more mundane.
Unlike a mere 6-12 months ago, when initiatives such as OpenAI’s Sora and Adobe’s generative fill created video clips out of thin air, it seems, for now at least, that AI and GenAI is taking the back seat and letting humans continue to take the driving seat.
The AI and GenAI developments this time around impact the more humdrum world of asset management. No meeting was complete without a demo showing how AI had analysed video clips to show you exactly where different people, brands, expletives, nudity, trains, planes and automobiles appeared in your clips. This was alongside AI-created transcripts of the dialogue, to enable you to find video clips associated with bits of dialogue.
All this AI-generated data and information was the key to unlocking efficiencies in your workflow, with no more having to laboriously actually watch anything anymore to find the content you’re after.
Startup Strada (pictured above) is one of the freshest looking tools to bring all this together. It’s aimed at editors and story producers, making it possible to quickly get to grips with work in progress with a clean, easy to use interface, showing you all the usual details AI is able to uncover in any clip.
Moments Lab (pictured above) goes one step further, curating the content it analyses – which is typically news and sports focused footage - into what it calls ‘moments’ where it has found something significant going on. It also finds standout soundbites from your clips, and overall takes up the role of an edit assistant.
Meanwhile, cloud storage specialist Wasabi showcased a practical example of how it had utilised AI from its recent acquisition of Curio AI from GrayMeta to provide Liverpool Football Club with the means to manage and find gems of content in its previously fairly disorganised archive.
Liverpool FC is also integrating Opta Data into this archive, to enable the club to use AI and football match data to quickly find key moments in its archive of games. It is putting this content out on a variety of platforms, including its social media channels, branded content, and its own OTT service.
Large language models have also been added into some products, such as the platform iomovo (pictured above), which describes itself as “way more than DAM”, to enable you to use a ChatGPT-style chatbot to interrogate your content.
A similar approach has been taken by Telestream, but instead of focusing on finding content, its chatbot (pictured above) enables you to create workflows using natural language. It’s a fascinating way to demystify a very technical, engineering task. The chatbot can also explain an existing workflow in natural language, to enable engineers to adapt and understand longstanding complex workflows that would otherwise take a great deal of time and effort to unpick.
There were still a few more ‘showy’ examples of AI on the showroom floor, especially in the dedicated AI Zone, where Monks, AWS and NVIDIA teamed up to create a street artist called Sir Martian (pictured above) that combined AI, robotics and machine learning in a slightly odd but friendly looking creature.
The martian chats to visitors while holding a half-eaten apple, drawing pictures of them, influenced by what they had to say. It uses tools including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Polly, Rekognition, Bedrock, Claude 3.5 Sonnet on AWS to power conversational experiences and perform lifelike actions.
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