The US Open tennis championships proved to be more than a platform for tennis stars to show their prowess this year: it also served as the launchpad for IBM Watson Media – a new suite of artificial intelligence-powered solutions on the IBM Cloud that is also being showcased for the first time at IBC.
David Kulczar, offering manager, said the first product, Watson Video Enrichment, will officially go live on 19 September 2017. Using dark video data, Watson is able to create a metadata package that transforms an asset into a searchable and more valuable piece of video, thereby improving content search and discovery.
Other products will follow later in the year and will focus on aspects such as compliance, closed-captioning and cognitive highlights. Kulczar added that facial recognition technology is also under development and could be made available in the fourth quarter of 2017.
The suite of products is designed to be integrated with asset management platforms to help video content providers improve both their internal efficiency and the customer experience. Kulczar noted that particular interest has been shown in the indexing capabilities to help find a certain piece of content among back-catalogues that could date back decades.
Overall, IBM Watson Media will provide five main solutions to help solve some of the current issues faced by large businesses. These are content and discovery as outlined above; recommendations to help understand why users watch a particular piece of content; closed-captioning; highlight clipping; and a compliance solution – initially with a focus on detecting nudity and profanity, for example.
The suite of solutions is being offered globally and already supports a large number of languages, with more to follow in the coming months.
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