With the lockdown having completed close to 2 months, imagine if going further in the current situation there was no internet or no OTT platforms. How different would our lives be?
Recently, a webinar was conducted by exchange4media in partnership with Myelin Foundry on the topic ‘Transforming Viewer Experience on OTT using Artificial Intelligence Confirmation’. It had leaders from Deloitte, SonlyLiv, Eros Now, ALT Balaji, BT and Myelin Foundry talk about the prevalence of OTT platforms and how AI can be leveraged to further accelerate its growth. Prashanth, Session Chair, Partner, Deloitte stated that “There is 87% tele density in India in terms of penetration of telecom sector and there are more and more smart TVs coming up. All these factors are pushing the rise of OTT sector. There are about 30-40 odd OTT players in India with about 50 million OTT customers that can be an indication of the rise of OTT sector. On an average 3.5 hours are spent on OTT platform.”
The discussion started around how willing the consumers are to pay for the content they watch on these OTT platforms. It was found that a good customer experience is becoming the key for OTT platforms to achieve success because people tend to pay for both content and experience both and not only for content. Here AI can come in to create a whole new experience that can increase the willingness to pay. AI helps provide recommendations based on not only what the person is watching but also what the peer group is watching as there is a lot of aspect related to viral ability of the content. Various factors like the heartbeat can also be taken from most of the wearables to recommend content based on the heart rate, noted Dr. Gopichand Katragadda, Founder & CEO, Myelin Foundry.
Lokesh Chauhan, the Chief Technology Officer, ErosNow explained that the primary reason that all of us believe that India is a growing market is that the cost of creation v/s the value we get on that asset is really great. This means that the content creator spends some amount of money to create and if he has limited number of people to charge, then he would set his price accordingly but with our billion plus population this is much easier and the revenue much higher.
Leveraging AI can also solve another major challenge. When a content is live, we don’t have the option to recode it and secondly we certainly can’t buffer. As a result, the encoder needs to be improved. We can use AI in the sense that if we can learn what the good output looks like we can use adaptive filtering at the output then we can improve the experience of the user. The discussion also focused on AI based upscaling without latency. Dr. Gopichand stated that “as per current capabilities we can upscale a 30 fps video at the edge device.” AI therefore plays an important role right from zero buffer, increasing resolution, removing delay, improving dynamic range, removing noise, removing artefacts, recommendation engines, video/audio X-rays, being able to participate in a show, plot generation, story generation, short recommendation, news compiling, democratizing VFX, modernizing content, generating content and so on.
Towards the end of the webinar, there was a soft product launch of Myelin Foundry that showed a demo video demonstrating the use case of one of its products- Fovea Stream. Fovea Stream is the proprietary technology of Myelin that offers near zero re-buffer ultra HD viewing experience on edge devices, independent of the source content’s quality and network bandwidth limitations. Myelin Foundry is a deep tech product start-up that transforms human experiences and industry outcomes by building Artificial Intelligence algorithms on video, voice, and sensor data, for edge devices.
Please watch the full replay of the webinar here.
