Stream Smarter: How AI is Reshaping Media & Entertainment

It’s hard to imagine our entertainment world without streaming. It’s become so ingrained in our daily lives — and for many of us, it consumes over three hours of our time every day. With that level of time commitment, as consumers, we expect easy access to the content we love and to experiences that inspire and engage us. The reality is that the proliferation of streaming platforms in the media and entertainment space has created fragmentation in the market, leaving much to be desired when it comes to delivering a seamless experience. 

How have media organizations addressed this challenge to date? Content providers have used bundling to grow and keep subscribers, but with the volume of streaming services, even this strategy hasn’t been entirely successful. Free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels, like Tubi and Pluto TV, have continued to grow with major players like Warner Bros. Discovery entering the market, but these services still require significant effort for consumers to find the content they want to watch. 

Advancements in AI have opened a window of opportunity to create a personalized and seamless experience for consumers by analyzing user behavior, application usage data and search navigation patterns. 

AI-Driven Opportunities that Engage Consumers & Optimize Revenue 

From personalized recommendations and interactive content to voice-activated control and enhanced support, there are a variety of ways AI can help content providers offer a more efficient, engaging customer experience, while also delivering increased revenue profitability for content providers. 

• Personalized Recommendations: With rule-based, feature-based, semantic-based, context-based and collaborative models, GenAI can tailor recommendations and enhance discoverability of relevant content. Gaining insights from viewing history, general interests, user ratings and viewer frequency data, an AI-powered navigation system can learn a user’s preferences and behavior. For example, a user named Monica* who likes sci-fi and fantasy, specifically with intricate storylines and strong female leads could be offered a “For You” list consisting of a newly released sci-fi series, underrated fantasy movie or show with a female protagonist. 
• Enhanced Search: LLMs can understand natural language queries to allow consumers to search for content by theme, genre, plot, character depth or more. By analyzing user input, LLMs extrapolate what elements and themes are appealing to the user and then search through the database to find content with similar themes using semantic understanding. This means Brad* could ask for “movies with surprising plot twists” or “shows like The Wire” even from streaming platforms that don’t have that movie in their title catalog, and GenAI could interpret these requests accurately and produce a curated list —recommending similar movies or series from the platform Brad is in. AI can also leverage computer vision and image recognition to power visual search, so Brad could snap a quick picture to search for similar content. 
• Interactive Content: To further increase customer engagement, AI can be leveraged to create new personalized content. For instance, GenAI can be used to create dynamic content where users choose their own storylines or outcomes. While this is not new, AI can analyze vast amounts of information specific to the customer and generate plausible endings from data sets they would want to choose to keep them engaged. Offering other interactive features, like chatbots, games or shopping opportunities while viewing content, provide another touchpoint for content providers and a monetization opportunity for retailers. AI can be used to enable immersive fan experiences, providing the ability to create a digital world as an extension of their products. Gabriel*, a diehard Game of Thrones fan, could buy virtual posters, get signed autographs and customize merchandise; or Irina* could view an extended sing-along after watching Wicked with the option to buy tickets on Broadway for later this month. 
• Voice-Activated Control: Integrating GenAI with voice assistants allows users to interact with the service hands-free, which is useful in living room environments and for accessibility. While voice-activated control is nothing new, real-time speech recognition leveraging GenAI boasts higher accuracy while also providing increased flexibility and context awareness to handle more scenarios. It can detect personalized acuity to know a mother’s voice versus a father’s in a household, and deliver personalized recommendations that differ from one another. This feature is especially important when thinking about content localization and translation among content providers, extending the usage of AI in providing cost efficiencies in the digital media supply chain. 
• Support Experiences: GenAI chatbots and virtual assistants can handle customer queries in real-time — from troubleshooting basic issues to handling subscription questions or even providing personalized viewing suggestions. This can be a more natural and intuitive way for users to navigate and interact with their streaming platform in the moment they need assistance. It is especially helpful in curbing churn by leveraging customer data, identifying early warning signs of potential churn and then generating personalized interventions through the virtual assistant to proactively retain a customer if they are at risk of leaving their subscription service. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your AI getting frustrated at the customer during any of those heated customer support moments. 

When consumers can find the content they love, learn about new content ideas and are offered different ways to consume that content, satisfaction and loyalty increase. For content providers, this prevents churn and enables continued subscriptions, which directly contribute to revenue growth. Additionally, using AI tools can help increase productivity — from creating short-form content like trailers and teasers, or automatically generating descriptions and metadata — which leads to cost savings. 

As the media and entertainment industry continues to be disrupted and customers become more cost-conscious and inundated with offerings, content providers need to show value. AI can help provide that seamless, personalized, engaging experience customers expect from their streaming service enough to keep them as loyal customers for life.

*Names do not represent actual individuals and are illustrative.