Surfing the AI wave

Some 80% of cloud technology used by broadcasters comes under the headings of private off-premise, private on-premise and hybrid, but within four years the dominant headings will be public cloud and private off premise cloud services.

Jean-Pierre Evain runs the EBU project Metadata Information Management and Artificial Intelligence (the many supporting broadcasters include RAI, VRT and NHK) and has a target for the future potential of AI in cloud applications.

“We are evaluating AI and its uses in terms of business needs and operational pertinence,” he says.

This is all about live speech to text and natural language processing (NLP), real-time translation, text/data to speech (sport and accessibility), automatic logging in sport, automated summarisation, face recognition and identification.

“We are also looking at AI tools to address fake news,” says Evain. “The tools list could grow very long. Of course, we are also looking at the integration of these tools as micro services into the workflow. We have renamed FIMS as MCMA (Media Cloud and Micro-service Architecture) with a primary focus on AI using a hybrid workflow of onsite, AWS and Azure services.”

Broadcasters have been open to AI for years, and the EBU has worked on automated metadata extraction (AME) for the same period. What is the big difference now?…