streaming
Artificial intelligence has revolutionized everything. AI models can be trained intelligently by feeding vast amounts of data to make intelligent decisions.
AI has evolved significantly over the past few years and now plays a major role in every business sector.
It has proved to be extremely helpful in creating powerful recommendation engines to help consumers actually find products that are most relevant to them.
AI has also given birth to Natural Language Processing algorithms that are proving extremely helpful in training chatbots and virtual assistants suited for online shopping.
Like in almost every major industry, AI is also playing a major role in modernizing the way we consume content online. OTT industry is now AI-powered. From helping users discover new content t watch to helping improve picture quality, AI is extraordinarily improving how we consume media.
With AI, computers can learn and analyze past data and make calculated predictions to improve our experience further – just like us humans.
In this short blog post, we talk about how the major role of AI in the streaming industry.
Let’s get started…
AI Offer Personalized Content Recommendations
We’re sure you’ve used Netflix. Heck, we bet you already have a subscription for it too. It offers some of the best shows and movies, doesn’t it?
But have you ever noticed seeing recommendations for other great shows that you didn’t search for?
You can thank AI for that.
Based on your viewing habits, Netflix intelligently suggested what you should watch next. Netflix’s AI knows exactly what you’d like to watch. It can suggest TV shows, series, and short films from genres you like.
Offering personalized content recommendations is one of the most prominent applications of AI.
An AI-powered recommendation engine powerful can suggest content based on your search history, your age, the content you watched previously to improve your viewing experience.
Make Content More Accessible
As someone who streams content daily, you’ll know that some movies and shows are not available in your country. That’s all because of content licensing and distribution issues.
This is something that AI can solve.
How?
Well, AI can analyze searches in your country. If there is demand, video streaming providers will consider making certain content available in your country. But this isn’t as simple as it sounds. There are a lot of limitations that prevent production houses from making their content readily available worldwide.
This is why a lot of channels such as Voot, Hotstar, Oxygen TV and so many others alike are not available globally.
While a little off-topic, if you wish to unblock any channel in your country to watch your desired content, we strongly recommend checking out howtowatchchannel.com for easy channel unblocking guides.
AI Integration with P2P to Reduce Video Buffering
We all have video buffering. Not everyone is blessed with a super-fast internet connection. We’re sure you can relate.
Video streaming amounts to 2.8 exabytes of data transferred over the internet. That’s a lot.
When you stream any content, it gets pulled from a server to your mobile, laptop, or TV.
Traditionally, video streaming companies deploy CDNs to deliver content to your device. CDNs basically cache the content from the main server, allowing you to quickly start streaming without having to wait. CDNs are located all over the world. Whichever CDN is closest to you, your device will fetch data from it.
With that being said, CDNs also have some limitations. For one, CDNs are expensive. Deploying CDNs in every country, every city, and every neighborhood is a costly practice.
Secondly, with fewer CDNs, users will face buffering issues when there’s too much load.
Thirdly, due to the scarcity of CDNs, content delivery in remote areas becomes difficult.
Because of such limitations, it becomes challenging for video streaming companies like Netflix to offer a great user experience. But thankfully, this problem will hopefully not exist in the future thanks to AI and peer-to-peer technology.
By combining P2P and AI, video streaming companies can use computers around the world as an alternative to CDN. Computers that we all have at our homes and workplaces.
Considering that there are billions of computers worldwide, delivering content to a user’s device even in remote areas becomes easier and more cost-effective.
This will make video buffering almost nonexistent.
Save Bandwidth with the Help of Super Resolution
So what is super-resolution?
It is as cool as it sounds. Basically, super-resolution works on generative algorithms. Powered by AI, it can basically create images without there being pre-existing information.
Say you have a blurry, pixelated image. Super-resolution can fill in the finer details to create a high-resolution image.
All this is possible because of AI and machine learning. Super-resolution is also used to enhance videos. Low-resolution frames can be upscaled to high-resolution frames. For example, someone sends you a video in 480p resolution. With the help of AI, you can play that same video in 1080p.
This technology becomes super helpful when streaming content online. Being able to convert a video in low resolution into a high-resolution video saves up bandwidth. As per approximations, super-resolution can help us save 30% of our bandwidth consumption while simultaneously improving our streaming experience.
