Media Distillery has won a coveted BaM award from the IABM at IBC 2024. Our new solution, Topic Distillery for Sports, won the Consume category following a successful trial with Liberty Global, one of Europe’s leading pay-TV operators.
The BaM Awards® is a celebration of outstanding technological innovations that deliver real business and creative benefits. The BaMs are widely recognized as the gold standard for rewarding Broadcast and Media innovation.
BaM Awards ceremony
Topic Distillery is an innovative content discovery solution that leverages AI to transform how viewers find and engage with replays of live, unscripted broadcast content like news, sports, and talk shows. These programs often fall short in providing detailed metadata, making it difficult for viewers to locate specific topics of interest. Topic Distillery addresses this challenge by detecting topics in real-time broadcasts, generating chapter markers and meaningful descriptions that enable viewers to search or browse by topic.
Following the product’s successful launch in 2022, Media Distillery has added three new variants in 2023-4: Topic Distillery for Search and Discovery, Topic Distillery for Chaptering, and Topic Distillery for Sports. The latter marks a particular advancement, applying the power of Generative AI, more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), to cater specifically to sports content. Attractive (but crucially spoiler-free) chapter descriptions are created to fit different user interfaces, along with useful sports-specific tags.
A successful pilot project with Liberty Global demonstrated overwhelming user approval. 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.
After a three week test period, 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 it helped them find content in programmes they wouldn’t normally have seen, often on channels they weren’t used to watching.
Topic Distillery empowers viewers to discover and enjoy more relevant content, making it a vital tool for content consumption in today’s media landscape.
September 16, 2024
