Posts for 'IBM'

Brands are poised to ramp up their use of live-streaming video in 2018, according to the 2018 Live Video Streaming Benchmark Report, released by Brandlive and IBM Cloud Video. 84% of respondents said that live-streaming video is either important, very important or a top priority in their 2018 marketing mix, comparing favorably with the 86% of who said the same about pre-recorded video.

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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.

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At our SHIFT // Programmatic Video & TV Ad Summit a couple weeks ago we had two sessions that were connected: one that focused on executing the roadmap for success in audience buying and one that focused on maximizing data’s ROI.

Panelists for the audience buying panel included Gabe Bevilacqua (SVP of Product Management, Advanced Advertising, Viacom), Jason DeMarco (VP, Audience and Data Solutions, A+E Networks), Anupam Gupta (Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights) and Adam Hecht (VP, Monetization, SintecMedia), with Mary Ann Halford (Senior Advisor, FTI Consulting), moderating.

Panelists for the maximizing data’s ROI panel included Scott Ashby (Sr. Director, Advanced Ad Products, Fox Networks Group), Judith Hammerman (SVP, Data Solutions & Programmatic Solutions, Time Inc.), Mark Risis (Head of Global Data Partnerships, IBM Watson Advertising), Damian Garbaccio (Global Chief Revenue Officer, Nielsen Marketing Cloud), with Brian Leder (Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, Promatica), moderating.

Watch the session videos now!

Watch the session videos

IBM Watson Media is being launched at the 2017 U.S. Open Tennis Championships, enabling the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) to quickly generate shareable highlights from matches occurring across 7 of the tournament’s courts.

IBM Watson Media is a suite of artificial intelligence powered solutions which use the IBM Cloud to analyze images, video, language, sentiment and tone. The USTA will use a module called Cognitive Insights which finds a match’s critical moments based on statistical tennis data, audience reactions and facial expression recognition. Cognitive Insights ranks these moments, enabling more rapid curation of highlight packages.

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The video industry could be about to get a whole lot smarter, as IBM announced it will marry its Watson cognitive computing capabilities to its cloud video technology. IBM has been heavily promoting Watson as a way for diverse industries to exploit highly unstructured data to better understand and run their businesses (if you missed the recent “60 Minutes” on how Watson is helping researchers treat cancer, I highly recommend).

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I'm pleased to present the 330th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Colin and I were both very enthusiastic about news earlier this week that Comcast will integrate Netflix into its X1 set-top box, a move we’ve been advocating for a while. In this week’s podcast we discuss how complicated this negotiation must have been, and why joint subscribers will be the big winners.

Surely a motivating factor for Comcast was the acknowledgment that viewers are spending more time on SVOD, which new research from IBM Cloud Video highlighted this week.

More specifically, the research showed how important video has become for Amazon Prime members, with 75% of them now watching. By not charging for video in Prime, Amazon is potentially a big disruptor in the video/TV industry down the road.

Listen now to learn more!

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IBM Cloud Video has announced Comic-Con HQ and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as new customers. A partnership of Comic-Con International and Lionsgate, Comic-Con HQ will launch on May 7th with both SVOD and ad-supported options.  IBM will provide subscriber and content management, billing, and live streaming across devices. For CBC, IBM will power the ad-supported service that includes 600 different series, online and on mobile devices.

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With my focus yesterday on Amazon’s introduction of its Streaming Partners Program and my recognition as a top 10 media writer by LinkedIn, I didn’t have a chance to weigh in on something else significant, which is that Clearleap has been acquired by IBM (terms weren't disclosed). I have covered Clearleap for years and was able to catch up with CEO Braxton Jarratt later in the day to learn more about what drove the deal and what to expect going forward.

Braxton said that Clearleap will be a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary, retaining all of its employees and offices while being integrated into IBM Cloud. Clearleap will continue to provide its cloud-based video/OTT services to customers including HBO, A+E Networks, NFL, BBC America, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and others but it will gain new sales/business development leverage internationally, which is a key company focus. Clearleap’s solutions will be sold by IBM’s Media and Entertainment teams internationally, with incremental Clearleap staff to be hired internationally as well.

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Turner Broadcasting System Latin America has launched a new OTT service in Latin America and Brazil, powered by Kaltura's OTT TV platform and IBM's SoftLayer cloud infrastructure.

The service is being offered in Spanish and Portuguese and is available on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. It includes both live TV channels and VOD options. Notably, it is being offered through Turner's pay-TV partners, so it does not appear to be disruptive to the existing ecosystem, but rather a TV Everywhere extension.

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