TORONTO—Eon Media, WCTE Central Tennessee PBS and Public Media Venture Group (PMVG) have announced a pilot project to evaluate the potential of Eon Media’s eonArchivesAI product to enhance programming, enrich local service and raise additional revenue in a local public television environment.
As part of the pilot, Eon Media with the assistance of PMVG will work with WCTE PBS, serving rural Tennessee, to deploy the product to index extensive WCTE archives using AI-generated metadata, PMVG said.
WCTE’s archives include years of public events, public service programming, cultural features and local sports. While the station has digitized much of its archives, the lack of any metadata encoding or indexing has presented a virtually insurmountable obstacle to WCTE’s ability to leverage these archives, it said.
The potential to create new programming or enhance current programming, to identify material that may have value to local government or public service organizations or to generate license revenue from archives is a significant opportunity for the station. The WCTE pilot will provide this metadata indexing, a user interface to extract content and a public-facing online storefront to allow interested parties to identify and license material that might be of interest to them, it said.
Eon Media has a successful record with commercial broadcasters. These efforts have enabled the company’s broadcast customers to generate over $50,000 in revenue in the past six months—a sum that excludes the value of leveraging archives in news reporting, creating nonbroadcast content offshoots and other benefits that add to the value of the stations, it said.
The pilot will help EON Media and PMVG identify challenges and opportunities unique to local public television stations and determine what features public television stations need to derive the most value from their archives. The pilot will also help stations develop and augment policies for responsible, ethical and journalistic uses of AI as well as respond to potential concerns of donors and the general public about stations’ use of AI.
More information is available on the Eon Media, PMVG and WCTE Central Tennessee PBS websites.
