Unlocking the Potential: Maximizing AI’s Impact for Broadcasters

As AI’s popularity surges across among consumers, technologists, and businesses many are seeing this tool’s transformative potential. The media industry is no exception, and AI can solve some of the media world’s biggest challenges.

The media industry is varied, and the specific use cases are different for each kind of business. Broadcasters have their own specific needs and business issues, but fortunately, AI can help them as well.

How AI can solve broadcasting’s challenges

When it comes to applying AI to a business, start by examining the big challenges and then exploring how AI can help. Here are a handful of issues that affect broadcasters where AI can provide some relief.

• Ad Optimization: Many broadcasters rely on their websites to help audiences find and discover news content. These audiences are filled with ad opportunities and resulting revenue possibilities. Broadcasters can use AI and consumer behavior data to identify audience segments that are most likely to respond to certain brands, messages and offers. Armed with these insights, broadcasters can then deliver relevant ad messages to the consumer segment most likely to respond.

• Content Creation: The rise of new generative AI products can help broadcasters through rapid content creation. This doesn’t mean full screen reporting or news articles, but rather smaller content creation, such as summaries of newscasts.
• Cost Savings: All media companies are fighting for revenue and broadcasters are no different. All of the applications above should lead to revenue-generating opportunities. Using AI across a broadcasting business can help pinpoint areas where it makes sense to implement new processes or free up more time for human content by handling mundane processes.

AI use case for broadcasters: Video content summarization

Many broadcasters have built their reputations over the course of several decades. These reputations – and the resulting relationships with consumers – mean that broadcaster brands will carry their value for a long time. In the quest to maintain and even deepen these relationships, broadcasters have built out robust online presences.

While many broadcasters have print versions of their stories on their websites, unlike print news publishers, broadcasters have to deal with the additional work of moving their on-air segments onto the web. These pages must be both easily discoverable and engaging with consumers. This is where AI can help.

As a starting point, broadcasters can use AI to summarize what is said on-air, and then use that content to build out the web pages that host the video content. This helps with crafting headlines, short summaries, and key bullet points for consumers who are short on time.

AI can also assist with transcriptions, which simultaneously helps with discoverability (allowing users to search a transcript to find content) and accessibility (more accurate transcripts are helpful for the hearing impaired, and even those who watch content on mute).

At the same time, AI can be used to quickly summarize articles and then feed that content to the news anchors, helping them more quickly digest and present the daily news. While AI can’t write the entire script just yet, it can expedite the script-writing process.

Broadcasters can also use AI to better guide what they should cover. By building a feed that takes into account everything broadcast on air, transcriptions, website comments, and YouTube commentary, broadcasters can construct a system that reports back what is the most engaging kind of content, as well as the most engaging way of presenting it. This opens the door to small refinements in the broadcasts themselves, better optimizing the product so that it resonates with consumers and viewers.

Where to start

At a time when many are concerned about AI potentially taking their jobs, fear may abound. Is AI going to read the nightly news?

Rather than go down this rabbit hole, broadcasters need to step back and look at their biggest challenges. Chances are that AI can help solve major issues that are impacting the business. By taking this approach, AI can be a transformational tool that helps broadcasters prepare for the future of media.

Here at 3Pillar we’re continuing to monitor the latest developments in AI and identify how broadcasters can apply AI to build breakthrough products that transform their business. To get started on a conversation about how AI can apply to your business, contact us.