[This article was written in support of the forthcoming Broadcasters Convention – Southern Africa on the 28th – 30th October 2025 in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Industry practitioners can learn how to participate in the event here]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s changing how the broadcast media industry and its practitioners operate.
For all industry leaders and executives, the focus must be on practical, executable strategies that boost efficiency, engage audiences, and create new revenue.
Here are some key practical reminder points on how AI can help us win!
- Using AI to automatically log raw footage, generate transcripts, and create highlight reels in seconds. This frees up creative teams to focus on storytelling, not tedious tasks. AI can also instantly search and package decades of archived footage for new productions.
- Leveraging the use of AI to analyse viewer data and social trends. We can then go ahead to predict hit programmes, determine the best time slots for premieres, and reduce churn by recommending content you know your audience will love.
- Move beyond one-size-fits-all broadcasting. AI, as you will imagine, enables addressable advertising, showing different adverts to different households during the same programme. We can also use AI systems to curate personalised news feeds for our streaming apps (for those of us who have one already), which will help boost engagement and loyalty.
- Unlock and make money from your archive: Use AI to automatically scan, clip, and license your vast footage library to advertisers, filmmakers, and other media companies. This turns your archive from a cost centre into an automated, revenue-generating asset.
- Drive deeper commercialisation of your current content and programmes by getting AI to digitally and dynamically insert brands into content. For example, say you are showing a drama episode, the billboard in the background could display a brand relevant to that specific viewer, creating a highly-targeted, premium sponsorship opportunity.
- Use AI to analyse which of your programmes or segments have high potential for international sales. The AI can suggest edits for different markets and even handle preliminary subtitling, speeding up the process of selling your content abroad.
- Use AI to help you develop and manage a hyper-personalised subscription tier: For example, you can launch a “Sports Fan Plus” subscription that would then use AI to create a personalised channel for a viewer that only shows content related to their favourite football club, pulling from live games, archive footage, and news reports.
[This article was written in support of the forthcoming Broadcasters Convention – Southern Africa on the 28th – 30th October 2025 in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Industry practitioners can learn how to participate in the event here]
