Alex Gattari, CTO at Etere, in the TKT1957 survey «The year 2030: AI or engineer?».

1. How will the broadcasting industry and broadcast technologies change in the next 5 years?
2. If we model the world of broadcasting and broadcast tech in 2030, what role will AI play?
3. How will AI change your business segment?
4. Which professions will AI displace in the broadcasting technology industry by 2030?

1. First of all, I believe that this cloud-mania that’s going on is going to end. There are a few reasons for it. The first is that the cloud is close to 4-6 times more expensive, and there’s no clear advantage to it. It just feels like it’s a trend, but in the broadcast world, it does not sit right. There are issues with security, latency, etc., and for a broadcaster who already has a support team on-site, having an on-premises system is not an issue. Also, with virtualization, you basically have all the benefits that the cloud has without any of the drawbacks. You can always upgrade, and the upgrading is much easier. You can scale it, and it’s much better than a cloud system. That’s pretty much it for the cloud.

Something that will change is the increasing popularity of NDI because NDI is way better than SMPTE 2022. SMPTE 2022 is a standard, while NDI is very easy to just plug in like a simple camera, and it just works. We are somewhat of experts in the use of NDI because we’ve been working with NDI since 2014, and we have a fully NDI channel-in-a-box system, a full NDI visual radio system. We are really trying to push this because we believe that it’s the future and it’s the correct step forward from SDI, which also involves plugging in a cable.

We will most likely see a greater shift towards OTT and VoD. We’re seeing that nowadays, and that’s just how we are becoming accustomed to consuming content. It’s easier to consume, and it has a lot of opportunities for monetization, which is a huge part because, at the end of the day, that’s where the money comes from. I believe that broadcasters will somewhat transform into more content providers than playlist providers, and we’re kind of seeing it with our online platforms that we have for content. We kind of think that’s the road it’s going to take.

Speaking about monetization, that’s probably the biggest part because that’s where the money comes from. Media Asset Management is always key in keeping everything in control. For instance, centralized management of digital content and metadata will definitely optimize asset values. Our Etere Media Asset Management streamlines management workflows and basically orchestrates everything so that the entire media lifecycle is much more simplified with complex processes such as the capability to add rich metadata to assets. Everything can be easily repurposed, therefore increasing their values.

3. AI is always this huge taboo that we don’t speak about. But let’s just try and make some sense of it. I’m very sure that it’s a no-brainer that broadcast technology in 2030 will increasingly rely on digital tools, mainly to reduce manual labor, which is exactly where AI comes in. AI reduces those tedious tasks that you have to do manually, and it can help the organization to delegate this manpower where it should go, probably to a more creative or a more controlling role. We don’t see that AI can fully replace some jobs, but we see AI helping in a lot of things. Even in our system, we help with real-time video clips, logos, graphics, scrolling texts. AI plays a really big part in streamlining everything so that you don’t need as many people doing it because that’s just time-consuming. But yes, we believe it more or less is able to take away those tedious tasks that up until 15-20 years ago you had to do by hand.
4. Picking up from where I left off on the last question, I think that AI will significantly change how we structure our business. For instance, AI is great at analytics, data, trends, and patterns. AI can help you figure out the trends in viewership. You can input a lot of raw data, and it will give you something understandable, which you can then use to create something like a playlist that is correctly tailored for your viewership. Sometimes it’s just good to have some records.

Another thing that AI excels at is facial recognition, which works like magic. You can give it a raw picture of me, for example, and then give it a thousand pictures and say, “Find him here,” and it will. You can even set a threshold. It’s truly like magic, and it’s very tedious for a person to do this, but it’s just a background task for AI. Speech-to-text is also great because otherwise, you would need a person listening and typing in real-time, which is crazy. We support it with Google Speech-to-Text, which recognizes 220 languages, probably more than you’ll ever need.

Another impressive technology we’ve been seeing on our phones lately is OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is also like magic. I remember when it came out on phones, allowing you to copy and paste text from a picture. That’s another area where AI excels, and I’m sure it’s only going to get better. On the flip side, we are a bit skeptical of AI because it seems more of a trend than a real tool unless something very fundamental changes in the near future. I don’t see it as this amazing thing that will definitely change the world and do everything for us. No. At the end of the day, the thinking part, the creative part, doesn’t work. AI works by looking at patterns and repeating them, but it doesn’t have the spark that humans have, so I wouldn’t say it will take over everything. Not really. We are just going to move away from those repetitive tasks that a trained machine can do very well and much better than a human, but the creative things are never going to be it for AI, at least in our lifetime.

4. Like I said, the scheduler, the media analyst, and those analytical positions will kind of fade away. That’s because, like I said, AI can give you a raw schedule based on the trends of your viewership, and then you can go in and tweak it. Most of the time, it’s going to be pretty good. But just like when you use AI for a text, you give it a prompt question, and then it gives you a bunch of text. You don’t just take it as is. You still go in, check it, and make a few tweaks. This is what our role will be as humans: making the tweaks and giving the prompts. Instead of doing the tasks ourselves, we will use AI to resolve questions. So yes, AI is great at doing a lot of repetitive tasks, but on the creative side, I strongly believe that humans will not be replaced by 2030, which is in 6 years. That’s my opinion, and thank you for listening.

All the opinions of industry leaders can be seen in the survey “Year 2030: AI or Engineer?”.