Broadcasters heading to Las Vegas next month in hopes of finding new ways to lower costs while making better use of their resources to increase revenue won’t be disappointed.
Going beyond anything yet seen at a trade show, the 2025 NAB Show, April 5-9, will showcase advances dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) that seem better suited than ever to the needs of TV station owners and everyone else in media and entertainment. In fact, some of these solutions are already in the preliminary stages of adoption.
The Embrace of AI
The growing use of new, vastly improved AI-assisted broadcast translation platforms is a case in point. One such instance can be found in Corpus Christi, Texas, where E.W. Scripps-owned Telemundo affiliate KAJA is testing the delivery of newscasts in Spanish that originated in English on the company’s local NBC affiliate, KRIS-TV.
Now in trial mode, the initiative aims to add newscasts on KAJA at minimal cost rather than replace Spanish-speaking newscasters, says Christina Hartman, who joined Scripps’ new AI leadership team last year as vice president of emerging technology operations. By cloning KRIS newscasters’ voices from samples recorded in English, the AI technology from an unnamed vendor can maintain voice fidelity with a high level of accuracy in the translations, Hartman says.
Or, to cite another example of new things in play, if it looks like someone at your station group’s headquarters has leveraged incredible powers of eidetic memory and audience awareness to funnel archived programming you didn’t know the group had into a FAST channel that’s generating unusually high ratings, think again. And you shouldn’t assume the virtually overnight appearance of that channel involved recruiting staffers from the night shift to get the job done.
Nor will it be an army of interns digitizing stacks of handwritten logs from the ’40s that enables your station’s newscasters to include an old clip from that era as they cover the latest twist in a local neighborhood’s evolution. No, these are all demonstrations of what can now be accomplished with AI.
AI Comfort Levels Hit New Highs
New uses of the technology, often leveraging fast-moving gains in generative AI employing large-language modeling (LLM), are sure to be spreading at an accelerating pace in the wake of broadcasters’ visits to this year’s NAB Show. For all the publicized drawbacks, including reliability issues and concerns about job losses, broadcasters appear to be more ready than ever to embrace the technology based on what they’ve experienced so far.
“I’m very encouraged seeing the [M&E] ecosystem collaborating to wrap our arms around what this means for our industry,” says Jason Williamson, managing director and AI leader for Deloitte’s Media Solutions & Engineering practice.
But it’s not easy in an environment where chaos is the norm. “We’re not making toothbrushes here,” Williamson says. “Hats off to the seasoned media engineering experts who are willing to shoulder the learning journey.”
With so many moving parts and so many different types of productions to cope with, there’s a “pretty broad spectrum” of AI applications to validate. “The trajectory is headed in the right direction,” Williamson says, “but when we can scale as reliably as we do with traditional workflows is harder to pin down.”
That’s one reason many broadcast groups remain fairly reticent about what they’re doing with AI. One station group executive, speaking on background, says his company is “still kicking tires, so we’re not out of our shell yet on AI. But we’re working very energetically to streamline our workflows. The question is, how do we do that without risking our product?”
“2025 is when we want to take control of our archives. We’re sitting on a historic gold mine that’s very fragmented across the organization.”
Christina Hartman, Scripps
There’s also the anxiety that still pervades broadcast workforces. “Given the sensitivities that AI can be used to cut corners in creating news and entertainment or do other things that can impact jobs, station groups are hard to crack at this point,” the executive says.
Growing Revenues While Cutting Costs
Broadcasters who advocate using AI think the best way to address such sensitivities is to pursue balanced and productive use of the technology that reduces time spent executing existing tasks while freeing people to pursue new revenue-generating agendas. It’s a balance Scripps sees emerging as a natural consequence of how things work, notes Kerry Oslund, who works with Hartman on the Scripps AI team as vice president of AI initiatives.
“We’ve been able to shift our resources to where we have more people in the field to do a lot more neighborhood reporting,” Oslund says.
Similarly, Tegna president and CEO Mike Steib—who since taking over from retired CEO David Lougee in August has been anything but reticent about his enthusiasm for AI—recently stressed “the massive opportunity” AI brings to cutting costs and capitalizing on consumer demand for more local coverage.
Speaking at Tegna’s third-quarter earnings conference in November, Steib noted that, with a monthly audience of 100 million people showing “a boundless appetite” for content delivered via linear TV, streaming and mobile apps, Tegna’s use of “software automation and AI is going to help us to create more and better content.” That “helps us to win on the revenue side,” he added.
In Scripps’ case, augmenting the product mix starts with making better use of data. “2025 is when we want to take control of our archives,” Hartman says. “We’re sitting on a historic gold mine that’s very fragmented across the organization.”
The Scripps team has reached the point of using AI to generate reliable output from a massive repository of data manually uploaded from multiple sources. The next step is to eliminate manual uploading as much as possible from external as well as internal data sources.
When you can start to orchestrate information as needed at any given moment from in-house archives and external sources like Nielsen, Comscore, consumer sales trackers and financial databases, “you can start asking amazing questions,” Oslund says. Such massive powers of data orchestration can greatly facilitate advertising strategies, planning FAST and other content initiatives, negotiating with networks and getting the most out of ideas implemented by broadcasters across the country, he adds.
One concern Oslund has about the AI tsunami is the need to avoid being locked into inflexible uses of a vendor’s AI-enhanced solution. Speaking of vendors generally, he says, “We know you’re going to have AI solutions that work in your own environment, but are they extensible in a way that allows us to work with other systems in our knowledge base?”
What’s in Store on the Floor and in Conferences?
This is an opportune moment for broadcasters to tap into the abundance of advertising-related vendor innovations on display at NAB Show. While most of these solutions are designed to work in the online streaming environment, where the pervasive market penetration of connected TVs (CTVs) allows broadcasters to deliver TV-caliber advertising over their FAST and other OTT feeds, there are also compelling AI-driven solutions slated for introduction at the show that can be used with both traditional and online TV distribution.
One example comes from 24i, the provider of a cloud-based converged OTT and traditional TV operations platform supporting UX, content management, personalization and third-party integrations. As described by Stuart Huke, head of product and support, 24i’s new AI-driven intelligence and monetization solutions will allow broadcasters “to better understand what’s on screen and who’s watching” and to track ad performance by “linking different data points” related to consumers’ social media interactions with online sellers of advertised products.
New applications of AI impacting advertising will also be highlighted at NAB by longtime recommendations-engine supplier ThinkAnalytics. “ThinkAnalytics has evolved as a platform where we not only help customers monetize but help them to assemble the content,” Senior Vice President of Products Chris McGuire says.
These new tools can be used to create audience profiles based on what people are watching and to facilitate finding and aggregating assets, including long-overlooked archived content, for use in online programming lineups matched to those profiles. “We’re saying, let’s look at the content; understand the content you’ve got,” he says. “Maybe you have audiences for that content you didn’t realize you had. We can augment your ability to target those viewers with our advertising product.”
Focus on FAST
NAB Show visitors will also be able to witness the early results of the big leap in use of AI that Amagi Technologies took late last year with its acquisition of Argoid.AI, a specialist in recommendation engines and programming automation for OTT platforms. As a starting point, Amagi will be introducing innovative approaches to creating and promoting FAST channels, Co-Founder Srividhya Srinivasan says.
One application can be used to automatically create FAST channels by scouring archives, metadata files and existing FAST channel schedules to find and schedule programming that matches specific audience profiles the AI platform has developed from viewing patterns and other data. Another AI application, which is still in development, will enable personalized extractions from news and other programming that can be fed to viewers through social networks.
MediaKind plans to introduce automated approaches to developing promotional clips and building personalized customer playlists. The company is taking a vendor-neutral approach to supporting AI-based multilanguage translations of live commentary in news, sports and other programming, according to Head of Marketing Chris Wilson. “We want customers using our platform at the edge to be able to use any AI translation tool they choose.”
Of course, there will be many compelling new products on offer at the show that are unrelated to AI. One solution in that vein is a multistream viewing platform that MediaKind is introducing in partnership with Skreens, a supplier of content-compositing technology. The application, operating in real time on MediaKind’s MK.IO cloud streaming platform, consolidates up to 16 individual streams for delivery over a single TV channel or video stream, according to MediaKind senior vice president of engineering Cory Zachman.
Audiences can toggle between multiple camera angles from a single event or programming from multiple channels, Zachman says, adding that, so far, customers are having a “ton of success” offering mixes of four or fewer feeds from different sports events. “It works on any device you have from old set-top boxes to new connected TVs” without requiring additional bandwidth or any reduction in resolution or frame rates, he says.
Clearly, broadcasters will have a lot to absorb at this year’s NAB Show, especially in light of all the conference sessions they’ll want to attend while spending as much time as possible visiting exhibits. As usual, the show navigation challenge will be mitigated somewhat by the staging of many sessions in multiple exhibit hall locations, but, of course, keynotes, must-attend sessions at the Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference and much else will be staged in conference rooms.
To register for the show, visit nabshow.com.
Learn More…
NAB Show’s focus on AI will include a variety of sessions and exhibit areas, including PropelME, a dedicated startup hub created through a strategic partnership between NAB Show and FBRC.ai that will feature companies leveraging AI to transform the broadcast, media and entertainment industry.
Also, check out these selected sessions during the show:
- Legal Issues with AI Generated Assets or Content (April 6, 8 a.m.-10:30 a.m., Post|Production World)
- How AI is Transforming Caption Quality Assurance (April 6, 9:50 a.m.- 10:10 a.m., BEIT)
- DeepSeek and the New Reality: Progress or Pandora’s Box (April 6, 2:50 p.m.- 3:30 p.m., Creator Lab, South Hall Lower)
- Integrated Newsrooms with Generative AI: Efficiency, Accuracy and Beyond (April 7, 10:20 a.m.-10:40 a.m., BEIT)
- Is AI a Tool or a Threat to Creatives? (April 7, 10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m., Post|Production World)
- Shooting For Generative AI (April 7, 10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m., Post|Production World)
- Safeguarding Media Integrity From The Growing Threat of Generative AI (April 7, 11:30 a.m.-Noon, BEIT)
- AI-Powered Ad Tech: Maximizing Revenue and Balance in a Dynamic Advertising Landscape (11 a.m.-11:30 a.m., April 8, Theater 2, West Hall)
- Safeguarding IP in the Era of AI: From Deepfakes to Digital Deception (April 8, 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Creator Lab, South Hall Lower)
