Did you miss the recent INMA Los Angeles Tech Innovation Study Tour? 

We heard from many companies where the focus was visual content: KCRW, YouTube, Nota, Umi Games, Snap, Verizon, Nexstar, Runway, Channel 1, Media Monks, Aeon, and Fox, to name a few.

We learned about reaching younger audiences:

• The average screen time for Gen Z is seven hours a day. The top apps they use are TikTok, Instagram, and messaging. And TikTok is hot, but YouTube is huge, and it has a steady base of users because children are introduced to it while they are quite young and stay on the platform for life. 

• About 90% of users on TikTok do not follow a single news source, according to Nexstar.

• About 80% of the traffic on the Internet is video, according to Verizon. Nexstar found live stream is 80% of what users watch.

There were a couple of underlying AI threads that ran through most of our conversations:

Personalisation is the way forward

For example:

• Verizon created a sports companion that chats with you about a game on TV and creates a highlights reel based on your favourite team and players.

• Nexstar’s connected TV product offers viewers content from local stations based on their location as well as video-on-demand clips that are algorithmically placed based on the user’s interests. 

• Using Channel 1’s tools, you can create a video stream that offers four versions of a story — you can pick the one that suits you best or you can ask the AI to pick one for you. You can chat with it as well. Over time, the model will learn from your engagement with the content. For example, if it sees that you often watch videos on a certain topic, it will learn to skip the background introduction at the beginning of the video.

GenAI makes video creation quick, easy, and cheap

• You can create a lifelike video by simply describing in basic English what you would like to see, using a tool such as Runway’s or Nota’s, which will also create different versions for different platforms.

• Or you can provide a marketing brief, brand guidelines, and a feed of urls and ask a tool such as Aeon’s to create a video. It will write the script, find the best visuals from your asset library, and clip them. This is particularly useful for sites where inventory is constantly being updated or where there are thousands of pages of text on various topics (such as WebMD).

• Or you can use an agent, such as Channel 1’s, which takes a wire video, analyses footage from the video or a shot list, writes up every frame, then writes a story, uses a synthetic voice to read the script and then uses AI to edit the video. The only human interaction here, according to Channel 1, is the editor who casts an eye over the script and signs off on it. (The original wire story is also based on human journalism.)

• You can create a digital double of a human anchor or a purely GenAI anchor that speaks in several different languages around the clock to broadcast content.

• If you are producing content in a different format, such as text or audio, use a tool like Google’s NotebookLM to upload the show and understand its potential for video rather than listening to or reading every one of them.

Content will be everywhere

How will our visual and audio offerings change when everything around us is a screen or a speaker? We’re talking about the change that will occur if products such as Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses become a household item, allowing people to record or livestream video to Instagram on the fly or join video calls through their glasses. We would no longer be creating content for a screen that sits on your desk or in the palm of your hand.

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