Avi Saxena joined Discovery Networks (as it then was) back in 2019, having previously worked at tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft. His initial mission was to build a direct-to-consumer product, which led to the creation of discovery+. This paved the way for a larger role when Warner Media and Discovery merged, forming Warner Bros Discovery.
As chief technology officer, Saxena now oversees all digital products, including HBO Max, discovery+, and Eurosport, uniting them under a single backend platform called Bolt, to ensure a consistent, high-quality streaming experience across all devices and content genres. With HBO Max now available in over 100 countries and 30 languages, the past three years have been a period of intense growth and expansion.
With both Eurosport and TNT Sports in its European portfolio, Saxena cites sport as a key area for innovation within the industry, especially in terms of personalisation and dynamic viewing experiences.
“If you watch football on discovery+, you’ve probably noticed some of the innovations we have brought to the product, like timeline markers,” he states. “If you watch the Olympics on discovery+, we do medal alerts to make it easy to switch between different sports going on at the same time.”
All of these innovations are transforming the way viewers engage with content, particularly if it is live. “When people watch a movie, they want a more lean-back experience. They get their popcorn and coffee and just sit down and watch a movie and really enjoy it. But when it comes to sport, if it’s golf, football or cricket, it could last hours. People don’t always have hours to watch the game, so they’re looking for things such as timeline markers to quickly show them the next goal, the next yellow card.
“Multiview lets viewers switch between games. There might be three football matches going on, and they might want to keep an eye on the score and quickly flip between them when something happens. We are working on a lot of innovation and then scaling how we do this for all of the different sports like football, cricket, and the Olympics.”
As CTO, Saxena’s role encompasses technology strategy, product development across global markets and platforms, and building an effective technology organisation, which leads to him asking a lot of questions. “On the technology strategy side, it’s about exploring how we build a platform that supports all of our products. How do you build a technology organisation to build the product, because as you know, our organisations are split across the globe? How do you build an organisation which is effective and delivers on the promise of one global platform and a great consumer experience?
“Operations is also a very big aspect of my role. For example, during the Olympics, there were 60-70 concurrent events going on. How do you operate that, all the way from live encoding and getting the right sport to the right consumer? It’s a very complex undertaking.”
AI: The new foundational technology
Artificial intelligence is at the core of WBD’s innovation strategy. Saxena reveals that AI is being applied across every aspect of the business, from internal operations such as content localisation to enhancing consumer personalisation.
He cites the previously mentioned timeline markers as a prime example of how AI is helping identify and mark exciting moments in sports streams. “You can have humans sit and press a red button and say, there’s a goal here, there’s a yellow card here. But that doesn’t scale if there are 20 games at the same time,” he explains. “We use AI to identify if something is happening in a stream, and where it started. It puts in a marker to detect exactly what happened.”
As well as employing AI for its consumer experiences and content processing, WBD is also leveraging the technology in engineering best practices, code development, and system testing. “You name it, we are using AI in that area.”
Asked what words of advice he would offer his creative colleagues about the impact of AI, Saxena states that while it is helping with certain aspects of content, it is not a content creator.
“Warner Bros Discovery is really a company of creators. Content is our product. People come to us to consume the best-of-breed content that our creators produce. We don’t think AI is ready to create new content,” he stresses.
Instead, when talking to creatives, he encourages them to consider AI as an extension of what they do, not a replacement. “There was initially a little bit of anxiety around CGI, but once people adopted it, they realised they could create more and offload some of the more manual and mundane tasks to technology.
“The other thing I would say is, technology evolves continuously. Look at the last 100 years in media or any other industry, technology has constantly evolved, but storytelling has endured. It’s about how you tell the story, how you engage the customers. There are all these disaster scenarios about AI and how it can make a movie by itself. But AI is not going to make a movie by itself. I work with all the top AI model providers in the world, and none of them are even remotely close. They can create short-form video, but making a movie? That’s not going to happen, not in the foreseeable future,” he states.
“Storytelling is all about creating new content, new concepts, new characters, new emotions. That’s very hard for AI. However, being a technologist, I would never say never. Someday, in future, that might just happen.”
Don’t forget the audio
Beyond visual innovation, WBD is heavily invested in delivering immersive audio experiences to its at-home audiences.
“We really believe audio is more than 50 per cent of the experience, especially when it comes to theatrical content. More and more consumers are watching theatrical content in their living room, so when you’re watching a Superman movie or a Barbie movie, you really want to have a theatrical experience.”
To help meet those expectations, all of the content produced by WBD’s studios is created in Dolby Atmos, even if viewers at home don’t have that capability. “We give you stereo or 5.1, whatever your device is capable of, created from the Dolby Atmos feed. That means the quality is much, much superior to something which was originally recorded in 5.1 or stereo.
“These things are really helping our audience enjoy our content at home,” states Saxena. “We’ve also gone back and reencoded a lot of our library so that the dialogue is front and centre, like Dolby Atmos.”
A look into the future
The broadcasting industry faces significant challenges, primarily driven by evolving consumer habits. Viewers increasingly prefer on-demand content, watching it across multiple devices, whether they’re at home or travelling.
“These disruptions in broadcast are creating an opportunity for us to meet our consumers where they are,” says Saxena. “We are investing very heavily into digital extensions, FAST channels, streaming platforms, download features, and then making our products, HBO Max and all other digital products, available on every platform.
“We need to focus on multi-platform storytelling. How do you seamlessly transition between these experiences? This is where we are investing the most, because we know that the days of somebody sitting in front of one TV all day long are gone.”
This article was first published in TVBEurope’s December issue, which is available to read here.
