Accedo has announced a project with British broadcaster, ITV to use Artificial Intelligence to automatically generate cover artwork.
The project will be tested with a focus group of ITV users.
The project follows a prototype developed on top of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform to leverage the emotional triggers of viewers to deliver personalised cover art and in turn increase user engagement and video consumption. It has initially been tested on a number of video samples, generating thumbnails for different artwork strategies, such as focusing on main characters or the mood of the user, for example.
Working with ITV, Accedo will be able to validate the business case. The focus group with ITV’s customers will aim to evaluate in depth emotional reactions to a different set of pre-generated thumbnails. The observations will be the baseline for a prototype set of rules to preselect relevant thumbnails, such as key characters in the episode, key elements in the episode’s description, or key scenes, for example.
Lee Marshall, Head of Product, ITV Hub, commented: “Improving User Engagement is extremely important to us, helping to ensure that we are delivering relevant and interesting content to all of our users. This projects opens up huge potential to offer our viewers a much more personalized, and therefore engaging, experience.”
The prototype combines the deep learning-based image and video capabilities of Amazon RekognitionTM with the video experience platform, Accedo One™, Content Management Solution, Accedo PublishTM and A/B testing platform, Accedo Optimize™, to dynamically create, test, and adapt artwork, based on a number of different criteria.
Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo, added: “Video services are gradually putting more and more effort into personalizing services in numerous ways, from personalized ads to content recommendations. This technology has the potential to revolutionize that personalization. Collaborating with ITV gives us not only the content to test our prototype on, but also the reality check our innovation ideas need to make sure they address an existing challenge in a way which will have a positive impact on our customers’ business.”
Accedo is looking to launch other similar initiatives with partners, in order to bring innovative media use cases to the market, helping broadcasters, operators, and content providers to reinvent their services.