CTOs from two major broadcasters have been detailing how they are using AI in their company’s output.
In an IBC2025 panel Warner Bros. Discovery’s Avi Saxena explained that streaming platforms open up many more opportunities to use metadata. “Legacy media had only one way to discover the content but with streaming there are dozens of different ways,” he said, showing how AI can create data tags across a narrative theme, the context, advertising categories and a rich scene description.
The AI model can identify the characters and describe the scene.
Saxena believes voice to text AI is now mature, making it possible to caption in more languages faster, opening up more markets. Dubbing is also advancing, but at the moment while a single-voice documentary is straightforward, an action scene with people talking over each other is much more complicated.
AI can also be used for Drop-In Moments – the scene you might see when scrolling through the top 10 shows on a streaming service, which Saxena described as “It’s pretty nascent”. “We’re creating six to eight candidates… there’s then a human who then scores them and picks the final moment.”
In sport, Metronome captures audience excitement levels that is then combined with data of what’s happening on the pitch. The excitement levels makes it possible to identify which shots off target are worth including in a highlights package, among other features.
ITV’s Simon Farnsworth said that digital advertising platform Planet V was the best investment his company had ever made. “You can get super granular… you can say you want to target males living in affluent areas who are interested in SUVs and build a campaign around that.” Key is that the UK commercial broadcaster is taking on Big Tech, owning all the data, that might otherwise involve the likes of Google or Meta.
“The competition is a big guys. We have to generate more data. What we do with that data is really important, so we’ve also developed this proper lantern which essentially is an an outcome measurement tool. We’re ingesting data from things like Tesco Clubcard so when people buy campaigns on ITV, we can now actually prove that is what is what that is doing to consumer behaviour.”
As a public broadcaster, ITV is obliged to provide 23 separate regional news services. Farnsworth said that 140 people were previously needed to subtitle the bulletins. The job was now done by AI and the money saved invested in news gathering.
