M+E Connections

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly improve an enterprise video portal, according to IBM senior sales engineer Adam Pastana.

Using AI can increase content accessibility and discoverability, and these are among the capabilities offered by IBM’s Enterprise Video solution, he said Dec. 11 during a webinar on “Getting Started with Enterprise Video.”


He provided a detailed demonstration of IBM’s Enterprise Video solution, including AI capabilities, and explained how users can create a customized, virtually secure enterprise video portal for live and video on demand (VOD) content. 

Watson Generated Captions leverages AI and offers speech-to-text capabilities and automatic captioning with an easy edit interface, he said.

But first up was an explanation of IBM Enterprise Video Streaming, a solution for internal or secured communications for an organization’s employees and partners. It supports live and on-demand content, Pastana noted. Access is restricted to video assets through integrations with corporate directories, he said. Also enabled is the creation of a dedicated, searchable video portal, he pointed out.


“Ninety-nine percent of our customers use the dedicated video portal for internal communications,” he said.


Noting that IBM’s Watson Media division is comprised of various companies that IBM acquired, including Aspera, The Weather Company and Ustream, he said: “We’ve decided to incorporate [their] products so they fit nicely together.”

Among those capabilities is High Speed Uploads, which he said allows uploading video files to an IBM Watson Media account via the Aspera Connect self-installing application. Aspera Connect “allows you to configure the available bandwidth for uploading,” Pastana said, noting it does that “really quickly, and we found that a lot of our customers love using this tool.” By default, the feature will work with the user’s enterprise video streaming account, he noted.

Among the basic features is live polling, which he said, “really helps you engage with your audience [by] making sure they’re continuing to watch and they’re really paying attention.”

The Playlists feature, meanwhile, uses existing video files to create playlists. But IBM has also expanded Playlists functionality to include dynamic playlists, he said, noting it uses metadata to automatically categorize playlists based on the user’s specific preferences. Users can now either manually select videos or create dynamic playlists, he noted.

During the Q&A, he said High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was “not currently supported in the player at the moment [but] we are working on that.”

Also, he said: “Right now we do support multiple language” – but that’s only 
“if you upload” captions because “we’re not automatically transcribing them.” However, he said: “We’re working on that” for 2019 and there are “a lot of initiatives around this.” In general, he said, IBM’s “rapidly developing” additional features.