Innovation Stations! Magine Pro Hack Days Focus on OTT AI Technologies
Magine Pro recently challenged its brilliant team of people to come together in cross-functional teams and create something new for our platform in a series of Hack Days on the theme of OTT AI. In this blog, Hayley Barnes reflects on the amazing creativity and teamwork shown, and how it underlines our commitment to innovation.
Artificial Intelligence is, without doubt, the buzzword of the decade for a whole host of industries, including Media and Entertainment. But many companies are still struggling to see how AI can actually advance their goals, rather than being just a gimmick.
That’s why we gave our teams a specific AI-based challenge for this year’s Magine Pro Hack Days. We knew our fantastic team of specialists would come up with some amazing suggestions of how AI could enhance our OTT platform and, crucially, improve the viewing experience and encourage engagement from end consumers, because that’s what our customers, the video service providers, really care about. And we were right!
The Magine Pro team enjoying the Hack Days presentations
OTT Innovation in action
In total, nine fantastic proof of concepts came to life, each showcasing the creativity and technical prowess of our teams. The diversity of projects was really inspiring and demonstrated the flexibility of the Magine Pro OTT platform.
We had two joint winners: The first implemented AI from Amazon Transcribe to automatically add subtitles to VOD content. They shared the honors with the cleverly named “TrivAI” which used OpenAI’s APIs to generate a trivia quiz based on VOD content to encourage viewer engagement.
Promoting an accessible and consistent OTT user experience with subtitles
The team behind the subtitling project found a speedy way to trigger not only the transcription of speech from the VOD files, but also the conversion to SRT file types that could then be uploaded to the relevant Magine Pro workflow for automatic display in the end-user’s video player. This would be a huge benefit for OTT services that currently disappoint viewers with only patchy subtitling coverage.
For the lowdown on this project, I spoke to Streaming Software Engineer, Catuxa Seoane Botana who was taking part in her first Magine Pro Hack Days after joining us almost a year ago. “The biggest challenge was taking the words and timestamps output by the AI and turning them into sentences with correct punctuation,” Catuxa told me. “The breakthrough moment when we successfully created an SRT file from an MP4 video was very exciting.”
One key criteria for the team was that they wanted to create something seamless that built on the existing functions of our OTT platform. “Our focus was on creating a streamlined, automatic solution,” explained Catuxa, “That was one of the drivers behind our choice of Amazon Transcribe as our AI solution for the project. But we’re already thinking about further possibilities, including using Amazon Translate to automatically generate subtitles in multiple languages – because the more choice offered to viewers, the better!”
Some of the code written for the subtitling solution
Increasing OTT engagement is not a trivial matter
So what about TrivAI? This project was centered on the concept that gamification can keep users interacting with a service longer, as well as presenting a fun way to introduce users to new content that they may like to watch, both key goals for any OTT service. You’ll see from the screenshots below that the proof of concept interface included links to the trailer and also the options to add/remove the VOD content the quiz is based on to your watchlist. TrivAI team consisted of: Rami Baarah (Web Lead Engineer), David Wong (Senior Software Engineer), Saima Iftikhar (QA) & Joel Kenne-Forsberg (Product Owner)
The spokesmen for the TrivAI team was Web Lead Engineer, Rami Baarah. “The way the Magine Pro TV app is built allows us to rapidly add features and test them on actual devices,” Rami told me. “When you pair that with our flexible backend, we could really focus as a team on making the trivia game as much fun as possible, rather than fighting with the code. Once we were having fun playing the game, we knew we’d cracked it!”
But is the trivia idea just another AI gimmick? Rami doesn’t think so: “It would allow end users to explore content in a fresh way,” he believes. “It will either help them to find new things to watch, or revisiting old favourites in a fun new way. And for the OTT platforms, it’s an engaging way to retain customer attention and provide them with entertainment – which is, in the end, what their business is!”
The Trivia Game proof of concept within the Magine Pro Big Screen TV app
Hack Days are fun, with a serious purpose
Our Hack Days not only demonstrate Magine Pro’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology but also underline our collective ability to translate ideas into tangible solutions. On a deeper level, they serve to empower our team, providing them with the opportunity to explore their passions, experiment with cutting-edge technologies, and showcase their capabilities in a supportive environment.
As Rami puts it: “It’s great to work with my regular team but also with other colleagues from across the company. It’s the spirit and energy you see in others that makes you feel confident in delivering in your day job as well as the Hack Days.”
We’re so proud of this culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning that makes Magine Pro such a great place to work.
Stay tuned for some of these great projects featuring in coming releases of our OTT platform.
If you’d like to see Magine Pro in action, why not book a demo with our team?
Magine Pro Hackathon 2018
At Magine we pride ourselves in offering innovative OTT solutions for all our new and existing partners who operate Magine Pro Pioneer or Premium services. Hackathon events are a great way to bounce around ideas as a team, develop our products and come up with creative concepts of tomorrow.
Not only do events like these promote team building but they also enable our Magineers to share, develop and learn new skills. There are no set rules, and everyone has 100% freedom in the way they organize themselves and work together. We promote a relaxed atmosphere during Hackathon and Magineers are also able to participate in a range of engaging activities that help inspire creative thinking and development.
This month’s Hackathon event was themed ‘User Engagement’. The theme was inspired by one of our partners who recently won a grant to promote European movies. In fact, they challenged us to innovate around gamification. The teams then went to work on multiple different topics that could increase service awareness, user gamification, rewards systems and user experience around content.
At the end of the Hackathon event, the teams delivered four innovative, yet very different projects that each met our partner’s initial request. As a result, we will be presenting them to our partner in the coming weeks and determining which may be developed further and adopted into their service. That’s not to say the ideas generated during Hackathon won’t be adapted in the future and made available to our other partners. This will happen once we have developed the minimum viable product (MVP) and demonstrated a real interest from the community.
Without a doubt, this month’s Hackathon event has been a real success. We’re committed to staging an event within each of our development sprints going forward, enabling Magineers to engage long-term with the development and build of features of they like and think could revolutionize the market.
Don’t forget to check back here or on LinkedIn to find out which idea from this month’s Hackathon made the grade. You can stay up to date with all our latest developments and products by signing up to the Magine Pro Newsletter. And, if you interested in getting involved with our next Hackathon event why not join the Magine team? Check out our careers site for our latest openings.