LOS ANGELES—Cineverse Corp. has announced that it will be launching a new AI-powered movie search platform called cineSearch.
The public beta of cineSearch, which was developed using Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, will be available within the Cineverse streaming platform in Spring 2024. Users can join the waitlist for the public beta at www.Cinesearch.com. It will then be made more widely available in partnership with OEM and third-party streaming platform partners in the near future, the company said.
“Effective search and discovery is currently the most pressing problem for users of streaming services today,” says Tony Huidor, chief technology officer & chief operating officer of Cineverse. “We first developed cineSearch as an answer to our own problem. Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, we now have the ability to expand this feature well beyond our initial expectations. We feel this is a great example of leveraging the power of AI to not only create better user experiences, but to also help aid in the discovery of great films that fans may not have otherwise found.”
The cineSearch service was developed by Cineverse using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search, the company reported. The underlying core cineSearch technology was built as an adaptive layer on top of the PaLM 2 Large Language Model (LLM) with the intent to craft a chatbot specifically tuned for feature film and television entertainment. Through the use of PaLM 2 and Google Cloud’s gen AI infrastructure, cineSearch promises an innovative, conversational experience for those seeking advice on what films to watch.
As part of this new service, Cineverse is introducing a new “artificial intelligence-based video advisor” that will be known simply as “Ava.”
The launch of Cineverse’s AI-powered search feature will utilize the first proprietary movie industry-specific AI model specifically tuned with an extensive set of metadata – both standard metadata as well as computer vision-based enriched, contextual metadata (such as weather or setting) – across more than 100,000 Hollywood movies and television shows, the company said.
The cineSearch tool offers a single unified search engine with support for dozens of search dimensions such as theme, tone, mood, setting, music score, plot, micro-genre, and many more traits for films available across all streaming services.
The cineSearch service will also utilize scene-specific metadata and a viewer’s previous viewing history as well as their location, the current date, the local weather conditions, and other factors to determine the ideal titles to recommend. Viewers will be able to conduct searches across a plethora of characteristics at the film and scene-level, making the process of finding the perfect movie more intuitive, simple and entertaining. In addition, if a particular movie is not available within Cineverse’s extensive catalog, Ava will recommend films available elsewhere – and provide direct links to access films available across other streaming services – for a seamless movie discovery experience.
“Generative AI has the potential to fundamentally transform the media industry, fueling a new era of cloud-enabled capabilities that can significantly improve the consumer experience,” said Anil Jain, Global Managing Director of Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud. “By leveraging Google Cloud’s leading gen AI capabilities, cineSearch can further personalize and streamline the user experience, providing viewers a vastly improved way to discover new content, with relevant recommendations for movies and television shows at their fingertips.”
