In a first, IBM’s Watson Media will enhance the Grammy awards’ digital workflow and user experience with artificial intelligence. IBM Watson Media has partnered with The Recording Academy, which hosts the Grammys and produces the full digital experience. According to David Mowrey, Head of Product and Development at IBM Watson Media, AI will be used to augment the Academy’s teams in order make the digital user experience more immersive than ever. The 60th annual Grammy Awards are coming up on January 28th.

Specifically, Mowrey said that Watson Media will be used to index video from the red carpet pre-show, by tagging celebrities and topics in real-time. Watson will also enrich photos from the red carpet with metadata such as name, position and facial dominance. Watson Media is providing a web-based tool that Grammys editors can use to build galleries of videos and photos to present to users.

Watson Media will also be used to create a “fashion analysis dashboard” where individual photos are analyzed for color dominance and look, so that editors can quickly create style galleries.  A “lyrical analysis dashboard” is also going to be created, based on audio cues that generate insights on emotional tone (joy, sadness, anger, etc.) for nominated songs. The data will be visualized so fans can see the insights across songs, categories and years.

While none of the new fan experiences will be monetized directly, Mowrey said that they’re all intended to bring to life the “tone and content of the Grammys with AI and video analysis.” Richer engagement also leads to better media coverage. IBM Watson Media was launched last August at the U.S. Open enabling the USTA to generate highlights from across 7 different courts.

There’s a big opportunity for AI to play in both enriching video experiences and also helping viewers find the content they’re looking for. In IBM Cloud Video’s recent 2017 “State of Streaming” report, nearly 45% of subscribers said their streaming services’ content recommendations rarely or never reflected what they want to watch. That’s in addition “more content” which was identified as the top change subscribers would want to see from their streaming service, despite the fact that more content was created in 2017 than ever. AI could help viewers get a lot more value out of their subscriptions.

The report also highlights challenges viewers still have with buffering, how extensively connected TVs are now being used, the extent to which passwords are actually shared and more. The full report can be downloaded here.

(Note: IBM Cloud Video is a VideoNuze sponsor)