What's Next For Media and Entertainment Technology in the New Roaring '20s?

It takes more than just a killer catalog or cutting-edge creative to stand out in today’s media markets. The winners are harnessing the power of emerging technologies to simplify operations, drive more value from data, and bring analytics to the forefront of decision-making. There’s a lot to take in, and to pay attention to.

Realizing goals for 2022 in an agile and cost-effective way will depend in large part on advertisers, MVPDs, operators, and content and streaming providers’ willingness to look beyond the current ways of creating and delivering media to new possibilities provided by emerging media and entertainment technology.

As advertisers and media and entertainment providers of all types seek to create highly personalized viewing experiences for customers, they will move toward embracing technologies that allow them to increase engagement, deepen relationships between audience and brand, and find new ways to monetize.

Smarter workflows with ai / ml 

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have a lot of science fiction and misapplication applied to them; but these powerful technologies underpin the next evolution of video workflow automation.

As content and video providers search for new avenues to broaden their reach, AI represents an exciting opportunity for businesses to do more with data. In fact, analysts like ABI Research expect revenue from AI and machine learning from video ad tech to surpass $9.5 billion.

Operators and providers need a better way to understand how to get the highest performance out of their content investments. Emerging solutions will address these opportunities, and VideoAI™ is a new framework of learning technologies designed to do just that. VideoAI scrutinizes video content – video, audio, closed captions -- to create actionable metadata that streamlines operations and improves content ROI. This rich metadata can be applied in creative ways to improve workflows, give advertisers contextual information to target ads more effectively, and to create new experiences for live and on-demand viewers.

As AI technology proves itself in real-world video applications, more companies will move to adopt it to drive revenue growth and create tailored experiences for consumers, particularly as the end of third-party cookies approaches in 2023. One report suggests that AI-powered audience solutions will grow by as much as 20%. Are you ready for this sea change?

From soup to nuts, automation is on the menu 

Automation is a buzzword across all tech sectors, and for good reason. Not only are AI and ML solutions the next step in the evolution of automation, savvy businesses will recognize that taking a comprehensive and holistic approach to automation will make all the difference in their ability to execute transformation. The right automation strategy saves time and money, allowing businesses to allocate resources from mundane, routine tasks to focus, instead, on strategic undertakings.

Automation in advertising will become especially important third-party cookies become more challenging for campaigns to rely upon. In today’s media landscape, many advertisers operate with a patchwork of solutions across multiple media sources, data providers, and technology partners. Under these conditions, it’s a serious challenge to gain a clear view into the ad creation and delivery process — and advertisers are unable to use new audience targeting solutions to tailor their messages. In a business in which automation has a foothold, plenty of people are still poring over manual spreadsheets.

That’s why a more holistic and unified approach to automation will enable faster and more seamless management of creative, media buying, and distribution. Instead of relying on manual processes and vendor-specific platforms, businesses can deploy a centralized, automated tool to support ad targeting and versioning.

A well-conceived and comprehensive automation strategy will ultimately allow advertisers to really and truly connect the dots across the world of channels and formats and across internal workflows and external partners. Instead of limping along, with piecemeal automation, an across-the-board strategy will bring together distribution, creative customization, and reporting to help reinstate control over a fragmented process, increase ROI, and deliver measurable results.

Redefining the ecosystem with aggregation and terrestrial distribution   

In response to an abundance of content destinations, consumers are faced with a new challenge: How do I manage all my choices? Moving from device to device, app to app, service to service – it’s a 21st-century problem in search of a more streamlined solution.

To address this, successful pay TV operators will find a way to transform into “super aggregators.” Not only will this dramatically reengineer the viewing experience to prioritize consumer preferences, it will require operators to find soltuions that work across multiple services and platforms and provide customers with the content they want, when and how they want it.

For operators that have traditionally relied on satellite to get content onto screens, fiber-based delivery represents an exciting opportunity to stay ahead of the curve. Not only does terrestrial distribution allow providers to reduce their footprint and lower overhead, it provides a convenient path to IP while maintaining clear, high-quality service and expanding channel offerings.

Ultimately, in the evolving landscape, the winners will be willing to explore new ways of doing business and embrace opportunities such as emerging media and entertainment technologies to expand their vision and enhance the viewing experience for their customers in exciting and innovative ways.