How Will AI Change Your Streaming Business?
AI is the buzz term of 2024, and indeed, tech companies have put a lot of resources and commitment into adding or improving AI components in their products and services. The term AI covers a wide swath of technologies, but for this column, I’ll focus mainly on generative AI, or services that can generate human-like output based on input that we humans provide. I’ll review the services I use on a near-daily basis and discuss how they’ve affected how I conduct work in streaming media.
ChatGPT
One of the most popular and accessible AI services is ChatGPT, which has only been publicly available since November 2022. In just 2 years, it has become one of my favourite research tools.
While Google is adding AI Overviews now to most searches before showing sponsored results, Google and other search engines aren’t generative engines like ChatGPT. Here are examples of how I use Chat- GPT professionally on a daily basis:
- Exploring current options in streaming tech: Whether it’s comparing two technologies, like Media over QUIC (MoQ) and established real-time protocols used in WebRTC, ChatGPT can more quickly gather information from the internet and present usable results.
- Testing the difficulty and accuracy of ChatGPT for low-level details: Many people think that AI will replace their jobs or put specialties that were reserved for subject- matter experts like me into the hands of the average software developer. While ChatGPT can create some great code to build software, I have found that my complex FFmpeg problems, for example, are usually inaccurately solved by ChatGPT. These results could be due to poor AI prompts, but I have put quite a bit of time into lengthy or very specific AI prompts in which ChatGPT still provides FFmpeg commands that didn’t produce the intended result.
- Improving writing effectiveness: While I have yet to take whole articles and “polish” them in ChatGPT, I often ask ChatGPT to take an intention and improve my communication of that intention for a specific audience. For example, if I’m writing to a client or someone on my team who is delaying some aspect of a project, I’ll take the original text I’ve written and ask ChatGPT to make it more empathetic to the person to whom I’m writing.
- Comparing hardware devices: If I’m evaluating the purchase of two similar products that I use in streaming video tech, ChatGPT can often find details that I’ve missed in product literature.
Adobe Firefly
Adobe released Adobe Firefly, a generative AI service currently used for still-image output, in March 2023. When I have to create a placeholder graphic or need an inspirational still image to use in a presentation deck, Firefly can produce amazing results.
Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers can access Firefly at firefly.adobe.com. You can download high-resolution output, provide sample images of your own, and save iterations to your online library. While the online service isn’t video-specific, Adobe is aggressively adding Firefly features into nearly all of its products. If you’re creating video in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects, you can already use Firefly-assisted services to generate content to fill gaps in your original footage or to create footage from scratch with text-based input.
Gen-3 Alpha
A tech company called Runway released a new generative AI video service named Gen-3 Alpha in June of this year. In my initial tests, I’ve been impressed with how intricately you can describe camera shots and use reference images to influence or guide the results.
The landscape of AI services that affect streaming media business and content creation will continue to expand as we head into the new year. I encourage you to test out these services and push the limits of any of the AI tech you’re using.
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