The AI Disruption Curve

At the recently concluded International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), the CTO Perspectives Panel focused on the impending disruption that is already happening in the video business – the industry is at the precipice of an inflection point that is likely to change it forever. The two panelists, sharing perspectives from Paramount and Amazon Prime Video, pointed out that such disruptions in the media industry are not uncommon, having already happened with the music industry and to some extent, the print industry. While video has remained relatively protected with its revenue generation and value in the existing infrastructure, it will likely need to change given the accelerated convergence of traditional broadcast television and streaming.

Embracing a shift

The rest of the media industry, like the video business, is expected to follow a similar trajectory. Companies wanting to derive the benefits will need to experiment and invest in AI and other such disruptive changes – like how Paramount regeared their broadcast teams to look like internet engineering teams, or how Prime Video learned to leverage AI for better personalization and workflow automation.

Making these pivotal shifts in philosophy, outlook and approach often requires leveraging innovation partnerships. Such partnerships have been known to save R&D costs, add expertise, flexibility and help create new markets and address them by accelerating actualization timelines. It’s not surprising that Harvard Business Review reports more than 94% of tech industry executives considering innovation partnerships an important strategy – something that Paramount also did by aggressively partnering with Amazon when transitioning to the cloud.

While such partnerships sound ideal, HBR also reports that a majority of them are likely to fail – partnership misalignment, misguided goals, and the lack of trust often contributing significantly. Overcoming these issues requires a considerable amount of focus on the right groundwork to set up such partnerships for success.

Partnering for Innovation

Connected TV is the fastest growing advertising channel in the US, with $30 billion in projected ad spend by the end of 2024, a 22.4% increase. MediaMint is the managed services and innovation partner for some of the world’s largest streaming platforms and broadcast companies. All our partners are at different stages of their innovation and transformation journeys. The interesting observation is that there isn’t a silver bullet. For some companies we are building AI enabled accelerators that workflow automation while with other we are developing solutions furthering their trust and safety mandates

Over the last few quarters, the MM Innovation team (MMLabs) has built and deployed workflow Accelerators for the Sales, Marketing, and Media Operations functions. These include AI-enabled lead Data Enrichment, Automated Quality Assurance for Campaign Setups, and an AI-enabled campaign Order Creation workflow. Our approach to innovation has been to co-innovate with our clients, human-centric automated workflows and a judicious use of AI as needed.