#IBC2025
TECHNOLOGY HEADS TALK GENERATING REVENUE WITH AI BY ADRIAN PENNINGTON
AI has moved beyond the experimentation phase to deliver positive benefi ts to the business, according to the CTOs of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and ITV during yesterday’s IBC Conference session ‘CTO Roundtable Unlocking Potential: Adopting and adapting the new tools of the trade’.
WBD is investing in hundreds of innovations in AI throughout its business from content creation to consumption, said Avi Saxena, CTO at the media and entertainment conglomerate. “The most mature area for AI is for generating [multilingual] content captions,” he said. “If we used humans, we wouldn’t reach as many consumers in their own language.” Semantic search was “a ground-
breaking development”, he observed, as consumers turn to using natural language via their remotes to fi nd content. AI is also being used to increase
engagement by improving the relevancy of video clips which viewers see when browsing content. While manual checks are still applied, the acceptance rate of the AI-driven drop-in moments at WBD is 40%.
Content discovery also benefi ts:
“We are using AI to tag and describe the content of scenes such as the narrative, theme, mood and objects. We feed this data to advertising categories to help us monetise the content and use it to power search for curating and marketing,” he added. ITV has 250 active use cases of AI
across fi nance, HR, analytics and production, including producing genAI adverts for the SME market with Comcast and Channel 4. “Our competition is Google and Meta,” stated Simon Farnsworth, CTO at ITV. “We are making huge investments in underlying data because the market opportunity is huge.” But he stressed that ITV’s largest single spend is in content creation.
5G SCORES A WIN FOR LIVE SPORTS BY ADRIAN PENNINGTON
“5G is here and real,” said Brad Cheney, VP, Field Operations & Engineering, Fox Sports, in the session: ‘Game Changer? The impact of private 5G on live sports production’.
5G is now a staple of Fox’s sports coverage, including at its biggest US event, the Super Bowl. “The goal was that 5G had to be deployable, easy and should not involve a lot of engineers. We needed a constant upload of 120Mbps” he said. “Together with Verizon we achieved that twice in succession for the Super Bowl and are replicating it at multiple events.” Jake Kornblatt, VP, Verizon Business, revealed that the telco has deployed private 5G across all NFL venues. “On the fan side this enables cashless checkout, accelerated access, facial recognition – all things that maximise revenue
Saxena: ‘The most mature area for AI is for generating [multilingual] content captions’
“GenAI will fl ood YouTube with average content. Our shows have to be better and more distinct, and we have got to use AI to do that.” ITV marketing teams are now using AI to produce 1000% more content, replacing a captioning team of 140 people for 23 regional
news stations and reformulating archive content for international sale. “We expect to grow revenue
streams from outside our traditional customer base by 300% within two years because of AI. It’s a really exciting opportunity.”
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(L-R): Moderator Mary Ann Halford; Brad Cheney; and Jake Kornblatt
for teams and leagues and improve fan experiences.”
In the session: ‘Live Sports at Scale: Breaking new ground with emerging technology’, the focus was on how sports broadcasters can deliver more content to more platforms faster than ever. “The Paris Olympics had over 60 concurrent streams at any time and 300 events on any day,” explained Mansoor Fazil, Director of Global Platform Engineering, NBCUniversal.
“That’s a huge challenge with scheduling and observability of operations. Preparation and having resiliency at every layer of your stack is essential.” BT, a distributor for TNT Sports in the UK, has pivoted to encoding in the cloud. “Last season we had 33.7TB of football over our network,” said Colin Phillips, Principal Architect IPTV, BT. “Managing those volumes has been a key concern for us, but
we’ve been seeing bitrate savings up to 60% in our trials.” Prashant Khanna, Head,
Production Services, Studios & Production Tech at JioStar, spoke about the challenge of reaching a billion people with cricket broadcasts in dozens of languages for the domestic market in India. “The ability to identify viewer issues sooner and allow fewer people to do it at much bigger scale would be extremely helpful,” he said.
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