As the developer of the world’s first operating system dedicated to artificial intelligence, you better be prepared to wow.
For whatever reason, that is something Denver-based Veritone has struggled to achieve in the mainstream media and entertainment sector, even after beefing up on digital asset management capabilities via the acquisition of Wazee Digital in 2018. Surely Veritone should have stolen a march on powering AI-based activities in the M&E space having been first to market with something as groundbreaking as aiWare, its thoroughbred AI OS?
The simple answer is that demand remains low, while the market remains cautious.
For this reason, a press release from Veritone this week picked itself. With a helping hand from Product Manager Ben Howell (who hails from the Wazee Digital side), we were able to hear first-hand about a bunch of new updates for Veritone Digital Media Hub, its AI-powered media management platform, pertaining to accelerating the three areas of content discoverability, content sharing and content monetization. Or, as Howell simplified it, “curate, activate, automate.”
Veritone’s DMH sits in the middle of production and media workflows within big archives, serving almost as a showroom for media, focusing on areas including transcription, translation, optical recognition, and facial recognition.
Walking Faultline through the company’s three updates, Howell fanboyed over enhancements made to one in particular – The Annotation Tool – which he described as one of the largest updates released by Veritone for some time. This is really a legacy tool that started out with roots in curation, and has evolved to offer ways to search, visualize, and validate cognitive data for media files through tagging data against content segments. New to the Annotation portfolio are features for supporting customers with multiple use cases, including licensing and monetization.
“Cognitive data is king,” Howell declared. Using this, the biggest benefit to users of Veritone’s updated Annotation Tool, according to Howell, is visualization, creating colorful displays so that customers can see where gaps in data exist. “You can see where actor A said ‘Zebra’ at what point,” for example. He reminded that a large portion of entry in asset management systems is still manual today for many customers, so striking a balance by providing the ability to do both is important.
Second up is Veritone’s Data Export Tool, which gives users the flexibility to narrow down a specific moment within a media file, a time range, or an entire data set by seconds, frames, or timecodes, and easily export this data as both JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) output files.
Third and finally for Veritone’s DMH updates comes Content Notifications, a new feature for delivering a customized email alert for new content ingested into the platform, informing users of the type of content that has been uploaded. This feature actually arrived a little earlier than the others in Q1 due to popular demand from a European athletics customer, with the ability to highlight images from events.
We have heard and seen of several AI-based tools designed to iron out the process of searching and identifying segments in archived content, something that has become a real pain point for content owners, particularly with teams shifting to remote working. Remote collaboration is therefore a big emphasis for Veritone, along with compatibility with existing applications and the ability to extract increased value from existing content.
Part of the problem for Veritone is that, like so many vendors offering services based on AI and ML, is that clients are cautious of automation dressed up as AI. While Veritone’s Digital Media Hub is fundamentally a way of searching and identifying content in massive archives, with additional features to help customers retain control over the modification of content assets, such as adding data to specific segments, Howell stressed that Veritone is very much a pure AI company. Veritone’s AI arsenal comprises a mix of some of the largest AI engines on offer today, with a number of acquisitions made over the years, as well as the proprietary AI models developed in-house.
“AI is so powerful that no media hub should be sold without AI,” added Howell. However, another hurdle for Veritone is that customers are still getting to grips with AI, how to use it, and what it means, which a dedicated AI OS is designed to help with, not complicate.
But what if a customer approached Veritone and said, “we love your Digital Media Hub, but we’ve got this alternative AI OS here that we’d like to plug-in instead of Veritone aiWare”? Even though Howell’s video wasn’t turned on, we could feel him wincing at the thought of providing a straight yes or no answer, instead distracting from the subject with how Veritone would look at alternative ways of building an AI engine ecosystem in such a scenario.
Veritone DMH is heavy on sports, accounting for about 60% of total customers, with particular expansion in international sports including an exciting deal with the increasingly popular Formula E (electric). The business is also expanding into TV networks and production, as well as winning new deals in esports and gaming, which is why Veritone has drifted onto our radar more recently, despite Howell claiming that Veritone was a driving force in M&E long before the Wazee Digital integration.
Other focus areas for Veritone include advertising verification in podcasts and news, for example allowing a news anchor to understand data about the topics being discussed, from something as simple as how many times a keyword was used.
The last spruce up came in July 2020, when Veritone updated its media search and analytics application with a retooled UX for enhanced customization and data visualization for Veritone Discovery, also powered by the aiWare application.
“We can compete with any media asset management system because we are an extension of the existing applications. Some are offering a subset of AI processing, but competitors don’t have the capabilities we do,” he added.
Prior to this, in November 2019, Veritone unveiled a network called VeriAds to give media partners access to broader placement options, to support TV and radio broadcasters and podcasters to tap into incremental ad revenue from premium advertisers.
That said, a major radio deal for the 300-person company came in July 2019 with Cox Media Group, which selected a suite of applications from Veritone for use in over 60 radio stations across 11 markets. Veritone’s Essentials applications provides analytics and insights for CMG Radio’s direct sales teams and national advertising partners.