Topic Distillery scoops two CSI Awards

We are honoured to have won two brand new categories for the 2024 CSI Awards.

Topic Distillery™ was named was named this year’s Best Implementation of Generative AI in Video. Meanwhile a variant of the same solution, Topic Distillery™ for Sports, was crowned Best Advance in Content Discovery following a successful trial with Liberty Global, one of Europe’s leading pay-TV operators.

How does Topic Distillery™ transform content discovery?

Topic Distillery™ is the only solution on the market tailored to detecting topics in live broadcast streams, creating chapter markers and generating meaningful descriptions, including chapter titles. Topic Distillery uses a broad collection of AI techniques to identify topics and chapters inside content, and generate meaningful descriptions, all in order to guide the viewer to the parts of content they care about.

By surfacing this additional metadata in their playback UI, content aggregators can increase the (re)use of their content by helping viewers to more efficiently find the content they’re looking for. Users can now search or browse by topic or area of interest, spending less time searching for video and more time watching. They’re also exposed to a wider array of content that’s relevant to their tastes.

Topic Distillery addresses a key pain point for Video Service Providers :a lack of descriptive metadata, especially for non-scripted live content like news, sports, talk-shows and reality shows. Service providers are unable to create this metadata manually due to the prohibitive costs that would be involved and time constraints for live broadcasts. The result is that operators chronically under utilise their assets, never realising the full potential of their content, because it cannot be discovered by viewers.

Topic Distillery was first deployed at Dutch OTT service NLZIET in 2022 and was named Streaming Innovation of the Year in the 2023 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards. Since then we have made a range of transformational technological advancements and introduced the new variant of the solution, Topic Distillery™ for Sports.

So, what’s new for Topic Distillery™ in 2024?

The nature of live programmes means that detailed content is not known in advance and the metadata available is typically generic. It states that the broadcast covers news, discussion or sports without mentioning the actual stories, teams, people or events featured. So a viewer may never know if their favourite topic is covered unless they watch the whole thing. This also means that the featured items won’t show up in search results.When we launched Topic Distillery, we used transformer models - the neural network technology powering most Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) - to detect the topics in live content, to solve this metadata and content discovery issue. In 2023 we saw that LLMs can now more easily support sports-related use cases. So, we applied a range of additional functionality to create a new variant, Topic Distillery™ for Sports. Here’s how it’s different:

• Translation. utilising the power of LLMs, we can now effectively translate chapter titles into more languages, without requiring a lot of dedicated training per language, which allows for greater accessibility
• Customising chapter description length to the UI. Whether it’s a single sentence, 150 characters, or 50, we can now make sure the description meets the requirements of each UI
• Spoiler-free sports descriptions. For news-like programs you want to give the viewer the key message of the news item (“Government loses by 10 votes”). For sports programs, however, you don’t want to give spoilers away. No viewer wants to see “Manchester City beats Chelsea 2-0” before watching the content! Topic Distillery’s use of LLMs means we can now easily tune descriptions to the needs of each program type, giving the title “Manchester City vs Chelsea” is ideal in this situation. An example of this can be seen in this example we created based on the popular UK sports programme “Match of the Day”.
• Meaningful sports topic tags from a viewer perspective: allow viewers to follow their favourite league, team or athletes. Many video services have a lot of sports content, but it isn’t easily discoverable by the viewers. Viewers can find the main event, but not the “shoulder” content around the event: the pre/post match analysis in talk shows, interviews with players, the roundtable discussions about a specific match outcome. Not only does Topic Distillery now detect these instances in all broadcast content, it employs generative AI to add meaningful and descriptive sports tags to the event. Tagging by sport, league, match, event, teams playing and players makes the metadata much more useful for viewers than generic classification tags like “soccer” or “golf”. It becomes a breeze to get updates on your favourite sports interests.

Demonstrating the Power of Topic Distillery™ for Sports With Liberty Global

In shortlisting Topic Distillery™ for these CSI Awards, the judges considered the findings of a pilot project conducted by Media Distillery and Liberty Global during November 2023. In this proof-of-concept, subscribers were asked to test a prospective new sports service that would allow them to specify sports, teams or players they wished to “follow”. They then received automatic updates in their regular TV app when the topics they’d chosen were featured in any programming. When opening a replay show, the viewer could automatically jump to the relevant part in the video, preventing the need to seek manually.

The goal was to determine whether at least 60% of users would consider the Media Distillery-powered solution appealing and the trial far exceeded these expectations. After a three week test period, users were overwhelmingly positive about the service, finding it appealing and different from current ways of watching sports. Most said it was an efficient way to follow their favourite sport. 72% agreed or strongly agreed that the service was appealing and relevant. A massive 91% of respondents had a positive overall opinion of the service. Many said that it helped them to find content in programmes they would not normally have seen, often on channels they weren’t used to watching.

The winners of the 2024 CSI Awards will be revealed during IBC in September at a ceremony in Amsterdam.

If you'd like to know more about what makes Media Distillery’s solutions award-worthy, you can visit us in Hall 5 at IBC, or book a meeting now to get an online demonstration.