Mo Goyal, Sr. Director – International Business Development – Live Media Production at Evertz, 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. The broadcasting industry will continue to evolve over the next five years to address the challenges of distributing content to multiple platforms and the ever-changing needs of the end consumer. The broadcast facilities of today will need to be flexible to handle content distribution without incurring excessive costs. This will likely include the possible adoption of SMPTE ST 2110, public/private cloud, or a hybrid infrastructure that can evolve more quickly than what was seen with SDI. The fragmentation of the audience is becoming a bigger challenge in identifying long-term and reliable revenue streams. The recent Paris Games highlighted the multiple platforms that host broadcasters had to deliver content to. For example, in the US, host broadcaster NBC had record audiences that consumed their content across all their platforms (linear TV, streaming platform Peacock, and others). These offerings gave the audience multiple ways to enjoy the live competitions at their leisure, but it was a massive undertaking to accomplish. Long-term, content will need to be personalized to attract (and retain) audiences. Achieving this at scale is an enormous challenge. New tools, including machine learning and AI, will help create and deliver personalized content more efficiently to maintain the audience over a longer period.
2. As we’ve already started to see, AI and machine learning (ML) will play larger roles in content creation and distribution. AI models will continue to evolve to help reduce the monotonous and repetitive steps in the creation, modification, and formatting of content. Today, these tasks include restoration and colorization of archived content, logging with metadata, and expanding SD material to fit a full 16:9 raster. These tools will help creative teams focus on their storytelling instead of mundane tasks. The media supply chain workflow will benefit from large language models (LLMs) to further optimize the content delivery process. AI has already started to generate captions, but could, in the future, support multi-language programming.

AI and ML will also be important in maintaining media facilities leading up to 2030. They will help address the gap between qualified engineering teams and their abilities to manage and monitor large and complex systems. AI and ML will evolve to help identify areas of concern (e.g., anomalies) in the infrastructure or content delivery workflow and provide “natural language” information to help resolve issues more quickly with smaller support teams.

The real challenge for the industry will be balancing the efficiencies that AI can offer with the creativity of the storytellers. AI and ML should be tools that enhance the creative aspects of content creation while making it easier to deliver to audiences. However, we must also be very careful as an industry to ensure that AI-created content (e.g., deep fakes) can be authenticated and that intellectual property (IP) for content used to train models that generate content is protected.

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4. It’s hard to identify what professionals AI will replace today. Most of the AI tools currently being utilized are aimed at creating more efficient workflows. For example, reviewing archival material and entering metadata is a very time-consuming exercise. As such, most media companies have minimal resources dedicated to this task. Therefore, we may actually see additional resources added as AI tools expedite the process.

Another aspect is that AI tools will enhance the creative process by allowing more individuals to participate. These new tools can remove barriers that some creative people encounter while trying to achieve their vision. So, we may witness growth on the creative side.

There may be some displacement of functions that exist today where AI or ML can provide a more optimized workflow (e.g., captioning). However, these displaced resources can be moved to other areas where their skill sets are better utilized.

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