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DISPELLING MYTHS AROUND THE AI OPPORTUNITY
Ahead of his mythbusting AI panel today, Tubi’s Blake Bassett talks to David Davies about how the technology is already delivering tangible benefi ts and where progress still needs to be made
Blake Bassett, Vice President of Product for Tools & Infrastructure at streaming service Tubi, will be among the panellists for today’s IBC Conference session ‘Mythbusting AI: Demonstrating the impact on the bottom line’. The central premise of the session is that while AI is already delivering “tangible value” across the media and entertainment industry, there is still a long way to go before its potential can be fully realised. So it seemed logical to begin a conversation with Bassett by asking whether he feels AI is still at a relatively formative stage in terms of its media trajectory. “It’s at a formative stage, but I don’t think that
it’s over-hyped across the board [as some might suggest],” he says. “There are some things that AI does extremely well, and where we’re actually outpacing where we thought we would be, and there are other areas where perhaps people think that capabilities exist which aren’t quite there yet.”
Bassett – who will be joined on the panel by Danijela Horak (BBC Research & Development), Sannuta Raghu (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Scroll AI Lab) and moderator Tom Bowers (Hypothesis Media) – indicates that “content understanding” is prominent among the areas where the present reality does live up to the hype. “The ability for large language model, multimodal AI to essentially watch content, describe it in a very detailed manner, and then use it to improve people’s ability to search and discover content and to provide recommendations, is very real,” he says. “But then one area where I think there is still a long way to go is video and image generation. Great strides have been made, but until you can create a video that is 30 minutes long, fully AI, and do so in a relatively effi cient manner, then we’re not where some people are hyping this aspect to me.”
CONTENT UNDERSTANDING With regard to the improved effi ciency and ‘bottom line’ implications raised by the IBC Conference session, Bassett says it’s necessary to “split this between the user experience for our audience, and the operational effi ciency. So, from the experience perspective, the
content understanding we’re now able to generate – leading to the creation of a ‘fan model’ whereby we’ve identifi ed fans of particular types of content or versions – and the use of this in our ML recommender has meant we’ve been able to drive several percent increases in total view-time on the Tubi platform. As an ad-supported service, that translates to an ability to serve more ads and generate extra revenue, which is obviously a big deal for our bottom line.” From an operational perspective, there have been several instances so far where the company has been able to “generate a lot of value and save money. One of these is on the customer support side with regard to people who may have issues logging in, or there is an
issue with video playback, and so they reach out to customer support. We receive perhaps 10,000 enquiries per month, and are now leveraging an AI agent within our tech stack that is showing tremendous results. Of the current outreach to AI, it’s able to solve 91% of enquiries without passing them to a human.”
“The one area where I think there is still a long way to go is video and image generation”
HUMAN IMPACT To fully extrapolate the implications of increased operational effi ciency, one must also address the impact on human resources. This is an enquiry welcomed by Bassett, who evidently feels that it needs to be the subject of broader industry debate. “It’s an important thing that people maybe
Blake Bassett, Tubi
don’t talk enough about, because there are huge implications,” he says. “Our take has always been that AI is going to enable our team to have greater impact by taking on some of those tasks that weren’t so interesting, allowing people to focus on other things. We still want a human in the loop with these AI systems to do quality checks, but otherwise they’re able to expand their scope to more strategic concerns.”
Like most keen observers of the AI revolution, however, Bassett knows it’s too early to draw any conclusions about the broader implications for the media industry workforce. “There may be very big societal implications that need to be navigated by someone above my pay grade,” he says.
Blake Bassett is taking part in the IBC Conference session ‘Mythbusting AI: Demonstrating the impact on the bottom line’ which takes place today from 14:05-15:05 in Conference Room 1.
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