The Cultural Algorithm

Xperi-owned TiVo and Vestel, one of the top three European TV manufacturers, announced that as part of a multi-year, multi-country and multi-million-unit agreement, the first “Powered by TiVo” smart TVs are expected to ship as early as spring 2023 featuring chipsets from MediaTek, a global fabless semiconductor company that enables more than two billion connected devices a year. When released, consumers in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Turkey will be able to purchase “Powered by TiVo” smart TVs under brands including Vestel, Daewoo, Regal, Hitachi, Telefunken and JVC.

Happy New Year! Everyone at Spherex wishes you and yours a healthy and prosperous 2023.What's that old saying, "Out with the old, in with the new"? Or maybe it's, "What's past is prologue" or "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Whether your perspective is optimistic or pessimistic, the end of the old year and the start of a new one requires retrospection.

Spherex, a global entertainment technology and data company, will demonstrate Spherexgreenlight™, which is its revolutionary expert-in-the-loop artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solution, at Pepcom’s Digital Experience! at CES.

Legendary novelist and screenwriter William Goldman famously said , "In Hollywood, nobody knows anything." He was right in referencing Media and Entertainment's ability to predict what will happen. With that, we offer our predictions of the events that may impact M&E in 2023.

Revisiting Our 2022 Predictions for Media & Entertainment  Lewis Carroll's famous "Alice in Wonderland" metaphor of "Through the Looking Glass" describes a world that looks recognizable but unfamiliar. A fitting description for the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry in 2022. The year began with the hope that life and the economy would return to pre-COVID "normal," but it did not happen. With much of the planet still impacted by COVID and a global recession, M&E markets tried to make sense of it and respond accordingly. Just as Alice found Wonderland, a world turned upside down, that's how we find the world of M&E at the end of 2022.  In December 2022 , we predicted three things would occur in M&E: 1.     The battle for audience share would intensify 2.     Investment in original foreign-language content would increase 3.     Culturalization would become an integral component of localization Let’s see how close we came to predicting life in Wonderland in 2022. Audience Share Despite a global recession and a Q2 decline in Netflix subscription numbers, consumers continue to move from linear TV to the alphabet of Video on Demand (VOD) services in increasing quantities. For the first time, streaming overtook cable in total viewership in July with a 34.8% share of the audience compared to 34.4% for cable and 21.6% for broadcast TV. Across the board , subscriptions increased for streaming services and gaming platforms, while satellite and cable companies continued to experience six-figure declines . Streaming platforms also saw significant subscriber growth in Asia and Pacific (APAC) markets. Accompanying this growth are industry churn rates for subscription platforms that have increased year-over-year by 5.3% . The reason for that is, according to Evan Shapiro, "Users are signing up for hit shows, bingeing them, and then canceling in favor of another service with a different hit show." The lesson for M&E is, "keep the hits coming." Answering the question of where those hits come from leads us to our second prediction. Foreign Content Spend Increased Driven by increases in international subscribers, total investment in non-U.S. content increased to $115B in 2022, while total spending increased to $232B . Netflix, for example, committed $45M to develop French and European content over the next three years. Paramount+ expanded into 45 new foreign markets , which means like other VOD companies, they must comply with EU content origin requirements . Even as the global economy slows, analysts expect global content spending to increase industry-wide by an average of 10% in 2023, with a focus on quality and cost. Culturalization Became Important Along with the recognition that titles bought for single-language markets may find audiences globally came the realization that localization and culturalization matter. We refer to this as the "Squid Game Effect." Although wildly successful, "Squid Game" suffered from sometimes brutal social and news media reports that the show suffered from inaccurate or misleading subs, dubs, and closed captioning. While these reports didn't seem to affect the series' audience, they left many wondering if the story they saw was the one intended. The reaction's effect on writers, directors, and producers was to make them more aware of the need for cultural and linguistic accuracy. Localization firms have responded to these critiques and challenges, but so have the people doing the work . While there is some fundamental disagreement about how to improve the process, the underlying reality is that the industry accepts that culture matters to audiences — a lot. What about next year? Predictions are fun to make and revisit at the end of the year to see how well you guessed what might happen. Our 2022 predictions were pretty accurate, but they weren't lucky guesses. As Hall of Fame baseball player, Yogi Berra famously said , “You can observe a lot by just watching." What we predicted for 2022 was inevitable because of how audiences, content, and regulation have evolved. The trends driving that evolution are still in play and will continue to impact the industry, not just next year but for years to come. We will explore the evolution and impacts when we debut our 2023 predictions next week.  The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.

Few technologies instill intense fear or promise in the public’s mind than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). From personalized shoppers to writing press releases to robots performing physical warehouse tasks to video content analysis to “Terminator’s” Skynet and video deep fakes , AI/ML can impact industry and society positively and negatively.   AI/ML applications are already affecting the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry. Spherex greenlight ™ uses an AI/ML platform to analyze video content for regulatory and age rating compliance. Flawless.ai uses it to digitally edit content to sync language translations to facial expressions and lip-movement. Respeecher uses AI to create speech that’s indistinguishable from the original speaker.   Volumes have been written about AI since the first workshop in 1956 established the field. A discussion of the systems AI/ML runs on would overwhelm most people, but understanding what makes them function is much more comprehensible and relatable.   It’s Complicated Each time we learn something new or are exposed to new information, we’re processing “data.” Our brain uses those data to learn how to speak, think, and interact with others. The more data we’re exposed to, the more we know.   Think about describing the task of using a hammer to drive a nail. As simple as it sounds, for a computer to recognize, understand and accurately identify what’s happening requires many types of “data” humans take for granted. For example:   1.   Why would you use a hammer and nails? 2.   Are there different kinds and sizes of hammers and nails? 3.   How do you hold the hammer? 4.   How do you use a nail? 5.   Where do you hit the nail with the hammer?   Computers can’t know any of this, so every component and step must be described in detail. “Showing” a photo of a hammer and nail is insufficient because computers can’t know if you want them to recognize the image or the objects in the picture. What if a roof with shingles, people, trees, a toolbox, and the sky is visible? How is the computer supposed to differentiate between these other objects if it doesn’t know what they are, their relationship to the hammer and nail, or the significance of the other things?   The point is, you have to teach the computer. This process gets complicated quickly and shows how hard it is for AI/ML systems to recognize simple objects or tasks. Consider how complex it becomes when teaching the system about the context and nuance of artifacts in a movie scene.   Those who build AI systems understand these challenges and recognize the difficulty of collecting, analyzing, and processing the mountains of data required to make their systems work.   Data, Data and More Data No company or organization owns or maintains all the data necessary to make AI/ML systems function. It is a global and collaborative undertaking. Universities and corporations understand the challenge, so they open-source their datasets to help seed the industry and invite others to contribute to their improvement. Google , YouTube , IBM , Kaggle, and hundreds of others have contributed trillions of individual records covering hundreds of data types that comprise AI’s comprehensive knowledge base.   Spherex harnessed its near decade of cultural and rating expertise and its catalog of 25M film and TV titles as a knowledge base and augmented it with public and private-source AI datasets to build its award-winning Spherex greenlight ™ content-rating solution. It is the M&E industry’s first AI/ML-based system that automates rating and cultural event detection and extraction for any form of video content. This patented technology scales to enable any regulator or company to rate quantities ranging from single titles to complete catalogs of thousands of titles efficiently and correctly.   In future posts, we’ll provide additional peeks into how these data are used in M&E to improve content creation, post-production, and distribution workflows. The best AI/ML applications are the ones that help you do your job while saving time and money and reducing risk.   A lot has changed since we wrote about AI in M&E in 2021. Technology and science have improved dramatically since then, and 2023 looks to be another year of significant advancement—especially with Spherex products and services.

How local awareness can keep your content from being censoredHardly a week goes by when a film or TV title isn't criticized for offending someone somewhere. This week alone, two lead news stories focused on titles some audiences will find offensive. Each example provides insight into title content judged and interpreted differently by the show's producers, regulators, and audiences.

English may be the world's most spoken language, but that doesn't mean everyone understands it in the same way.