Streaming Video Blog

With the news moving at lightning speeds, consumers are more tuned into current events than ever while media companies are challenged to keep pace. Broadcast networks are under intense pressure to respond quickly to breaking news, world events, and sporting games in order to satisfy consumer demand for instant, quality digital experiences.

However, delivering accurate captions for live broadcast is both time and resource intensive for broadcast networks, given that production teams must manually transcribe live programming in real-time – which often leads to delayed or incorrect captions. To solve these challenges, IBM launched Watson Captioning – a flexible, scalable solution that leverages AI to automate the captioning process and uses machine learning to improve accuracy over time. As outlined in this white paper, Captioning Goes Cognitive: A New Approach to an Old Challenge, Watson is bringing greater context to video assets while removing some of the challenge associated with closed captioning.

Through its Live Captioning functionality, Watson Captioning empowers closed captions for broadcast networks, unlocking value from live video content and optimizing the viewer experience. By accurately captioning live video content, broadcasters can provide premium experiences for local viewers, increase accessibility for the hearing-impaired community, and adhere to compliance standards.

One of our core tenants at IBM is to find and work with great partners who share our vision and values. The ecosystem is important. At Watson Media, we’re focused on bringing powerful portfolio of cognitive video solutions to market. To meet the unique needs of our customers, Watson Media works with a number of partners to augment our solutions and build robust solutions that aid in driving efficiencies, delivering elevated video experiences and delighting consumers.

In media, context is everything: Just as a hand signal that means “V for victory” in one country may be incredibly offensive in another, what’s culturally acceptable in a television show in the U.S. may be verboten elsewhere around the world.

By flagging questionable content for media compliance, Watson not only saves time and costs, but opens up opportunities in new markets for content creators and broadcasters alike. For more information about how AI can save time and money with compliance, also be sure to  download IBM Watson Media’s ROI analysis paper: From AI to ROI: When playback means payback.

When average TV viewers are channel surfing on the couch, they probably aren’t thinking too much about big data. But it’s already beginning to shape the viewing experience, namely by providing recommendations. And as time goes on, it will begin to have an even bigger impact.

As the amount of video content—and video viewers—grows, so does the data available about viewing habits and preferences. This is a boon for content creators, who can begin to leverage these insights to create better experiences for their customers in a variety of different ways. While there’s still a lot of data left to be uncovered, changes are already underway in the realms of service quality, content recommendation and production.

For more details on the topic of using data for video enrichment, also be sure to read this Uncovering Dark Video Data with AI white paper.