Comtelsat uses the high-performance IBM Cloud infrastructure to host several applications that help government organizations and political parties collaborate with partners in the broadcasting industry.
For example, in the run-up to an election, political parties can simply record their own videos and upload them to a web portal managed by the government agency that oversees electoral broadcasts. The agency can check the content, make sure it complies with relevant laws and broadcasting standards, and approve it for release. Then the TV networks can access and download the content, and schedule it for broadcasting during one of the party’s designated slots.
Gómez comments: “We’ve streamlined a process that used to take days or weeks down to a point where a party can record a new video in the morning, and see it broadcast on live TV that same evening. It’s a quantum leap for political campaigning in Mexico, because it means each party can adapt their campaign in real time as new themes and issues evolve.”
A similar Comtelsat application in the IBM Cloud helps manage the creation and distribution of official government broadcasts, such as presidential addresses, emergency and alert messages, or campaigns from the ministries of health and education. It also handles the live streaming and archiving of every session of the national parliament.
Looking to the future, Comtelsat sees the IBM Cloud as an ideal platform to help enrich these applications with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“We’re very excited about IBM Watson,” says Gómez. “If we can train it to understand all the regional variations of Mexican Spanish, then it will be a wonderful tool to help our clients extract more value from millions of hours of archived video footage. For example, it could help to automatically identify the speakers in each parliamentary debate, and annotate the video so that journalists or researchers could find and analyze each politician’s contribution.”
More broadly, machine-learning techniques could be useful for any organization with a large video archive—especially broadcasters. For example, Mexico has strict regulations around closed captioning for TV content, and adding subtitles to archive video footage is an expensive and laborious process. Watson’s natural language understanding capabilities could make it possible to automate the closed captioning process, saving considerable time, effort and money for broadcasters.
Gómez concludes: “I’ve heard an estimate that businesses are only able to analyze about 20 percent of their data. In the media industry, it’s even less than that, because we’re only just starting to find ways to analyze video data effectively. Working with the IBM Cloud and Watson teams helps us explore the new frontier of video analytics and find solutions that could help our clients truly transform their industry.”