Editorial
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Nick Snow nick. snow @ advanced-television. com
Inside information
Editorial
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Colin Mann colin. mann @ advanced-television. com
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Chris Forrester
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Nik Roseveare
nik @ advanced-television. com
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Steve Overbury steveoverbury @ yahoo. co. uk
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David del Valle- Madrid Pascale Paoli-Lebailly- Paris Branislav Pekic- Rome
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3Vision ABI Research Ampere Analysis Caretta Research Decipher Media Consultants Futuresource Consulting MIDiA Research Omdia Parks Associates PP Foresight SNL Kagan
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Sanjeev Bhavnani
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ISSN 1477-8092
In this IBC 2025 edition we take a look at AI. Yeah, I know, the least surprising sentence you’ ll read this week. And it wasn’ t written by ChatGPT( other journalism cheat bots are available).
Specifically, we look at the use of AI in content discovery. Massive viewer choice used to be the dream when there were only a handful of channels. Then it became the bad dream of‘ 1,000 channels and still nothing on’. And now it has become the nightmare of doomscrolling couch dwellers paralysed by too much choice to the point they switch off, and eventually unsubscribe.
But will( is?) AI coming to the rescue? The, not altogether surprising conclusion, of content discovery vendors is, yes. And that does seem logical – if a hyper powerful and intuitive pattern recognition system can’ t do better than a generic search based MLT rack, then we’ re all on the wrong road.
The key addition, it seems, is not so much that AI will knock existing recommendation out of the park – some of the current specialist algorithms actually do a decent job – but that the context it will bring with it will give confidence, comfort even, to the user. In other words the criterion it will surface is the Why it is recommending content, not just what, where, when.
That said even some of our enthusiasts caution that building in too much LLM fed GenAI( that can obviously mega-scrape more contextual links than any curator), will bring the same hallucinatory problems GenAI has demonstrated elsewhere. And if your GenAI discovery tool gets the wrong end of the stick, the recommendation results could be bizarre and annoying.
As in other areas of AI, some of the questions are ethical as much as operational. Will it, or not, increase choice in a way that will bring new content, creations, culture, to a user? Will it use the deep knowledge it will accumulate about my interests( my emotions?) in a responsible and transparent way? Will it gossip about my risible rabbit hole viewing obsessions with other AI engines?
Inside
The Wrap 4-7 Cover Story 8-12 Company contribution 14-15 Company contribution 16-17 Research 18
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