DENVER—Veritone has renewed and expanded its lonstanding exclusive global licensing agreement with CBS News to also include exclusive local news content from CBS-owned stations.

For more than a decade, CBS News and Veritone’s licensing agreement has allowed television producers, filmmakers, podcasters and local-to-global content creators to access and acquire rights to millions of hours of archival and breaking-news content from CBS News, the two companies said.

Under the new deal, CBS News and Stations will continue to utilize Veritone’s aiWARE enterprise AI platform, which offers access to its extensive licensed content across numerous distribution channels, the companies reported.

The advanced AI capabilities of aiWARE index the CBS library with time-correlated metadata to enable advanced and precise search and retrieval, helping researchers and creatives to quickly find specific scenes, quotes or highlights. It also automates rights management and delivery.

“We are thrilled to extend our longstanding CBS News partnership,” Jay Bailey, senior vice president of licensing at Veritone, said. “With Veritone’s Content Licensing platform, CBS News and Stations gain continued access to advanced AI solutions to enhance the accessibility of their content and provide exceptional experiences for viewers across digital landscapes. This renewal is a testament to the value we deliver, and we’re excited to drive further innovation and growth in how users can search and identify their content.”

More information is available at licensing.veritone.com.

DENVER––In a bid to improve the content management and revenue potential of its archives, Court TV has selected Veritone to manage and monetize its extensive digital content library.

Court TV, which offers live coverage of trials, boasts a massive content archive dates to the founding of the original Court TV cable network in 1991. To better manage, organize and monetize that library, E.W. Scripps-owned multicast network Court TV is deploying Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub. DMH provides a secure, cloud-based environment for content storage, search and retrieval that makes Court TV’s content accessible to its affiliates, media professionals, partners and legal institutions.

In addition to content management, Veritone’s Content Licensing will enable Court TV to exploit new revenue opportunities by offering its unique content to an even broader audience, including more filmmakers, documentarians and podcasters, enhancing its reach and impact, the companies said.

“Consumer interest in the real-life drama of true-crime programming is at an all-time high and the Court TV library is enormous, containing thousands of hours of coverage and footage from the nation’s biggest cases over the past 30 years,” Ethan Nelson, head of Court TV, said. “We believe Veritone’s Digital Media Hub and content licensing solutions will help us pursue and unlock new opportunities for monetization of the library and make the content even more accessible to audiences and partners alike.”

Court TV’s adoption of Veritone’s solutions reflects the growing trend among media organizations to adopt AI-powered tools to become more efficient and better monetize content.

More information about Veritone’s Digital Media Hub is available here; more information about Veritone’s Content Licensing can be found here.

DENVER—Veritone’s artificial intelligence-based media and entertainment solutions are available in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog of independent vendors with software solutions that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company said today.

The availability of its AI solutions in AWS Marketplace provides media, entertainment and sports customers with the ability to access, purchase and deploy the company’s AI solutions directly within the AWS cloud environment. 

“Being listed in the AWS Marketplace is a significant milestone for Veritone’s media and entertainment and sports solutions, and another step in expanding our reach to help more organizations harness the power of AI to transform their operations,” said Sean King, Veritone general manager, Media and Entertainment. “Rights owners, rights holders and creators now have powerful AI tools at their fingertips.” 

Veritone media and entertainment solutions now in the AWS Marketplace include: 

• Veritone Digital Media Hub – an AI-powered digital asset management and monetization solution. 
• Veritone Discovery – powered by Veritone’s aiWARE enterprise AI platform, Discovery enables customers to discover large amounts of visual and audio broadcast data and easily track and verify ads in near real-time. 
• Veritone Attribute – a turnkey broadcast attribution solution that enables customers to optimize linear TV and radio campaigns by correlating ads with web lift in near real-time. 

DENVER—Veritone has launched a consulting and services group focused on bridging the marketplace gap it says exists for seamless artificial intelligence (AI) implementation. 

Veritone has a decade of experience developing and deploying AI applications and solutions and can serve as a strategic partner for AI providers and end customers, facilitating the adoption and integration of AI technologies to drive business success, the company said.

"The proliferation of AI technologies has created significant opportunities for organizations across industries, yet many struggle to navigate the complexities of implementation effectively. Veritone's AI consulting and services group addresses the growing demand for expert guidance in AI implementation," said Ryan Steelberg, chief executive officer of Veritone. “Our services group will help customers realize the value of AI and serve as a significant growth driver for Veritone." 

Being proficient as an advisor played a key role in the company achieving AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status within the AWS Partner Network (APN), it said.

AWS Advanced Tier Services Partners are recognized for proven technical experience and demonstrated customer experience. To attain AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status, Veritone met several AWS technical requirements, including AWS certifications, capabilities, and implementations as well as AWS technical and business professional training accreditations, it said.

Achieving AWS Advanced Tier Services status acknowledges Veritone’s AI consulting and services group, which plays a significant role in the advancing AI, empowering customers to use it effectively and derive the most benefit from the technology. By combining human expertise with aiWARE technology, the newly formed group will empower businesses on their digital transformation journey through custom AI strategy development, AI workflow solutions and innovation workshops, it said.

Veritone consulting and services group can also assist in data preparation and migration, expediting the path to AI activation, it said.

Veritone is now an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner offering unique value in enterprise AI. The achievement further empowers Veritone to develop and deploy innovative AI solutions, similar to the media management platform and licensing services Veritone architected for U.S. Soccer. By integrating Veritone's AI technology on AWS, clients can expect enhanced scalability, reliability and performance for their AI-driven initiatives.

 More information is available on the company’s website. 

PARIS & DENVER—Dalet and Veritone, Inc. have announced a technology partnership that integrates the Dalet Flex media workflow ecosystem with Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub (“DMH”).  

The integration enables a seamless workflow from content creation through production, curation, packaging and distribution for media, sports and entertainment customers to monetize their digital media archives, the companies said. 

A demonstration of the integration will be available at the upcoming NAB Show from April 14 to 17 at Veritone’s booth (W1642) and Dalet’s booth (W1713).

“With content consumption being at an all-time high and media-rich organizations seeking new ways to bring in additional revenue streams, monetization of media archives and assets is key,” states Carl Farrell, CEO and Board Member of Dalet. “The combined power of Dalet and Veritone enables customers to overhaul their monetization initiatives, exposing and licensing their assets quickly, securely and with the highest level of control.”

The Dalet and Veritone referral partnership enables media and entertainment companies to maximize the return on investment of their content assets to generate new revenue streams. The secure, scalable and robust solution enables media-centric organizations to automatically deliver content to partners while remaining in control of their content catalog.

“Veritone’s AI-enabled technology has long been the tool of choice for some of the world’s most recognized brands because of its ability to more efficiently and effectively organize, manage and monetize content,” said Sean King, senior vice president at Veritone. “Veritone and Dalet share a commitment to unlocking the true potential of digital content and we’re pleased to offer the content monetization capabilities of DMH to complete Dalet’s end-to-end platform and provide endless revenue opportunities to their customer base.”

Key features include:

• A cloud-native ecosystem to produce, manage, distribute, transact and monetize digital media content and archives.
• Uniquely advanced rich metadata management, to drive content catalog exposure and automated publishing based on business rules.
• The ability to easily implement branded digital marketplaces, offering a familiar content shopping experience for B2B clients, partners and affiliates.
• Customizable B2B portals, flexible monetization business models and granular searches based on extensive metadata, including timecodes. 
• A highly efficient secure solution with a common vision, long-term shared roadmap, and outstanding customer service. 

 Learn more at www.dalet.com and Veritone.com.  

This year has witnessed an explosion in the use and discussion of artificial intelligence (AI). It is, of course, something that has been around since the 1950s but since the end of last year, coverage has ranged from the serious to hysterical, particularly over its latest manifestation, generative AI (Gen AI).

This more evolved form of AI can create different kinds of content, from text and images to audio and synthetic data, which is more realistically human instead of something clearly produced by a machine. At the forefront of this is ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer), which, although only launched in November 2022, has already radically changed the direction of automated speech, text and image creation.

Fast and Precise
As is often the case with “new” technology, many of the features of AI had been available to broadcasters and media producers in the last decade.

“We’ve been implementing AI in our tools for years, so it’s not something we’ve jumped on with ChatGPT,” says Andre Torsvik, vice president of product marketing at Vizrt. “AI is used to make computers do what they are best at, which is being fast and precise. Human beings can find that difficult to do, with, for example, outdoor keying on a sports field. An AI can react much faster and the end result is a much better key, you don’t see flickering or ads on top of players.”

The most common applications for Gen AI in broadcast include: 

• image generation and video synthesis 
• automated production 
• assisted video editing 
• creation of metadata for automatic “logging” 
• subtitling, captioning, segment-specific searches and re-use of media assets 
• automatic upscaling of content to higher resolutions; and
• encoding/decoding of audio and video streams 

Simon Forrest, principal technology analyst at Futuresource Consulting, comments that AI is capable of assisting artists and producers to create content more quickly, enabling “faster iteration, more exploration and delivering media assets that approach a harmonized composition.”

Another assistive application of AI comes in the form of improved archive searches. This has been a particular area of research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS). Dr Christoph Schmidt, head of Fraunhofer IAIS’s Speech Technologies Unit, explains that it goes beyond keyword techniques, with Gen AI and natural language processing providing “improved ways to find relevant archival content to produce new programs.”

Efficient and Dynamic
In addition to reducing the number of repetitive tasks performed by operations staff and allowing creatives to do their jobs faster and better, Peter Sykes, strategic technology manager at Sony Europe, sees AI as “making the whole media supply chain as efficient and dynamic as possible, helping analyze and then address resource allocation and process steps to optimize them, leading to better business decisions.”

Sony established an AI division in 2020, focusing on projects in the areas of imaging and sensing, gaming, gastronomy (robotic manipulation of food and cooking utensils) and AI ethics. 

For broadcasting, Sony offers its A2 Production system, which, among other features, can identify sports highlights using automated logging and scene detection features. It is also applying AI to software-defined networks through the VideoIPath media orchestration platform developed by its Nevion subsidiary.

Ross Video implements AI across two of its main business groups: robotic cameras and newsroom systems. Both are working on integrating AI into their product lines, with robotics using a more proprietary-style technology built into its products while news is relying on third party AI engines.

Jenn Jarvis, product manager for newsroom computer systems at Ross Video, says this gives customers a choice of which engine they want to use and a framework for how they integrate it into a product. “We’re also now looking at the content creation side, which is part of the newer aspects of AI we’re still exploring and seeing how it fits into a news workflow,” she said.

For robotics, Karen Walker, vice president of camera motion systems, observes that the person managing shot selection will still have some work to do in keeping the presenter in frame or in focus.

“But the next thing for AI—and a lot of people have come out with this—is a ‘talent tracking’ application,” she says. “You don’t have to have any human intervention so its possible to set up pre-sets and where you want the talent to be in that shot. This is done independently of the talent and can be configured for different presenters. It takes away some of that manual intervention and I think it’s where AI has benefits, in taking out some of the mundane tweaking.”

Reducing Tedium
Removing, or at least easing, the amount of dull but necessary elements in live production by employing AI is now a realistic proposition. This is illustrated by Rob Gonsalves, engineering fellow at Avid, who gives the example of Open AI’s Whisper speech-to-text model. 

“It can be applied for live transcription and real-time translation of multiple languages within a broadcast feed, toggling through as many as 100 languages simultaneously,” he said.

Avid has also tested both OpenAI’s CLIP model and the generic GRoIE ROI (region of interest) extractor as part of research into auto-framing.

“This followed the area of a shot that is of the greatest semantic interest,” Gonsalves explains. “The traditional way to enable search is to manually annotate media assets with metadata tags describing what is in the shot. Using AI object or facial recognition can now automate the scanning and annotation process. Semantic search does something similar but, by creating embeddings into clips, it allows an editor to conduct a free-text search for scenarios.”

Sepi Motamedi, global industry marketing lead for professional broadcast at NVIDIA, comments that “live production, particularly for sports, takes tremendous advantage” of AI. “It is used in super-slow motion replays to localize advertisements seen on the pitch, to quickly generate highlights from the game, to deliver an added layer of data through telestration [which involves pitch calibration and player tracking] and, of course, camera tracking.”

Among the first developers to begin applying AI to broadcast applications from the outset was Vertitone. Founded in 2014, the company offers an enterprise AI operating system platform, aiWARE, along with engines for ChatGPT, audio, biometrics, speech, data and vision. 

“We realized there was an opportunity in the media and entertainment markets to begin to index the world’s audio and video content,” comments Paul Cramer, managing director of media and broadcast at Veritone. He adds that once material is indexed, Gen AI can be used to “create a new personalized experience for the consumer” who is looking for custom content. This could be in the form of news footage tailored for a viewer with an interest in, for example, space exploration.

From Broad to Niche
As AI is adopted more widely throughout the media sector, it is being used for both very niche and quite broad applications. Moveme.tv illustrates a highly specialized use: its search platform is designed to help viewers match films to their mood through the use of descriptive words and emojis. Founder and chief executive Ben Polkinghome says the ultimate aim is to enable people to create “their own hyper-personal entertainment channels.”

On a wider broadcast level, BBC’s R&D department initiated its AI in Media Production program in 2017 with a prototype video editing package that automatically selected and assembled shots into a finished piece. This work continues today and was expanded last year with a new data set for “Intelligent Cinematography” to assist in framing and editing. BBC R&D is due to announce its position on Gen AI soon but could not give any more details before TV Tech went to press.

AI is now exploited by all types and sizes of media creators and organizations, both new and old. Video marketing platform Vimeo announced in June it was making a Gen AI-powered “creation suite” that simplifies the process of making videos. The package includes a script generator, teleprompter and text-based editing system that automatically deletes filler words and long pauses. 

On the more traditional side, the All England Lawn Tennis Club is using the Gen AI capabilities of IBM’s Watson platform to produce commentary for video highlights of the 2023 Wimbledon championships on its app and website.

Despite the innovative spirit of this, AI has caused discomfort among media professionals, both in terms of jobs being potentially lost and the risks of the technology being misused. Major news outlets including “The New York Times” and NBC News recently voiced concern over how Gen AI could not only make journalists redundant but enable unscrupulous types to produce fake but believable stories.

The FCC has its own working group on AI and among the topics it’s initially focused on has been using the technology to improve its services including using AI to manage spectrum more efficiently. The commission is hosting a joint workshop this month with the National Science Foundation “to discuss the possibilities and dangers AI presents for the telecommunications and technology sectors.”

In the U.K., media regulator Ofcom, while acknowledging that Gen AI offers benefits such as synthetic data training for better safety technology, has similarly highlighted the dangers of bogus news and other media content. Ofcom is currently monitoring the development of Gen AI to see how its positive aspects can be maximized and also what threat the more negative ones might pose.

As for the human impact, Karen Walker at Ross Video observes that “a lot of creative things have to be done by humans—people are going to work with AI side-by-side.”

Veritone’s Paul Cramer concludes: “Gen AI won’t replace humans but it will replace the humans who are not using AI.” 

COSTA MESA, Calif.—Veritone and CBS News will continue its decade-long partnership as the two sides have announced a multi-year agreement that extends their content licensing deal.

Veritone is a provider of digital content licensing services, and for the last ten-plus years has helped TV producers, filmmakers and content creators have access to archival and breaking news content from CBS News.

With this new deal, Veritone is set to increase the amount of CBS News footage available for creators to license and leverage. It will also apply its own proprietary AI technology, aiWARE, to assist with the content search and delivery process.

CBS News content can be found at the Veritone Content Licensing site, which features more than 2.5 million hours of programming from “60 Minutes,” “CBS Evening News” and more. 

COSTA MESA, Calif.—Veritone has announced that its integration with WideOrbit has proven to be a boon for a leading U.S.-based TV station group in terms of customer satisfaction, renewals and incremental ad revenue opportunities as a result of the AI-powered data insights delivered in near real-time. 

The collaboration between the two companies features Veritone’s aiWARE operating system and WideOrbit's ad management and tracking platform, WO Traffic. Using the integration has allowed the stations to retain more advertising revenue and compete for new advertising share, Veritone reports.

WO Traffic aggregates all client ad data into a single source. WideOrbit’s API then centralizes specific customer log info from this data lake and transmits it to Veritone Attribute. The Attribute platform is designed to help broadcasters demonstrate the effectiveness of their offering and work with advertisers on strategies. This provides near real-time ad performance analytics on live, organic mentions, in-content and pre-recorded campaigns, Veritone says.

The Veritone and WideOrbit integration can be used by both TV and radio broadcasters. Attribute programmatically compares reconciled spot times within WO Traffic to web traffic and visitor data from an advertiser’s site.

For more information, visit www.vertioneattribute.com.  

COSTA MESA, Calif.—Veritone is heading to the big leagues, as the company has announced that its aiWARE artificial intelligence systems has been acquired by the San Francisco Giants to work with its 60-year media archive and help drive fan engagement.

The aiWARE system utilizes its AI technology to enable rapid content search and accelerated asset sharing with media partners, internal web and social media teams and with fans during live games. When content is ingested into the aiWARE system, multiple cognitive AI engines start to automatically transcribe the audio, recognize faces and run other selected cognition to create in-depth meta data in near-real time, allowing for advanced search capabilities through keywords, athlete descriptions, locations, logos, play-by-play commentary and more. This will allow the SFG Productions team to search through its 60 years worth of content more quickly.

There is also the Veritone Digital Media Hub that makes these clips available in the cloud. The portal is permission-based and provides centralized access to all assets from anywhere. Digital Media Hub also has an AI-enabled search functionality.

The Giants are celebrating their 20th anniversary at Oracle Park in 2020 and plans to use the Veritone system to highlight memorable moments from the past and present, according to Paul Hodges, vice president for the SFG Productions team.