Compliance – Can AI lend a helping hand?
By Muralidhar Sridhar, Vice President – AI/ML Products, Prime Focus Technologies
Compliance regulations for content differ across platforms and nations. While many regulations are similar worldwide like those around violence, nudity and profanity, in certain markets there are cultural sensitivities that also need to be addressed as part of compliance. Failure to adhere to compliance regulations can invite costly legal exposure and penalties, sometimes even resulting in revocation of business license. Hence for content publishers, compliance remains non-negotiable. With the growth of OTT platforms and enhanced digital consumption of content, compliance efforts have increased manifold resulting in significant cost and manpower escalation.
When a broadcaster buys or commissions a show, it is known which territories it has been purchased for. However, the need to acquire rights for new territories often emerges at a later date. Additionally, even though compliance experts view content frame by frame, broadcasters often find themselves with limited metadata to work with. This means that the same content has to be reviewed and edited multiple times in order to ensure compliance for a new territory, platform and/or regulator resulting in significant cost, as it entails extensive use of manpower and edit infrastructure. Additionally, as each asset is unique, it is often difficult to predict timelines and calculate resource requirements accurately. Moreover, as multiple individuals need to give inputs during the compliance process, there is also a lack of visibility when it comes to managing aspects like risks, escalations, and quality checks. There is also a constant need to keep abreast with ever-changing territory specific rules and legalities along with socio-political factors that impact compliance regulations. With regulatory requirements changing frequently across the board and content volumes increasing drastically, there is a huge need to make the entire compliance process faster, smarter and more cost-effective.
The process of compliance editing needs to evolve dramatically to address today’s multi-platform content realities. Content moderation and compliance checks involve strict standards and high levels of accuracy for playout on television (general, restricted and post-watershed versions) and digital platforms, as well as hospitality and airline use cases. Traditionally, teams doing compliance have frowned on whether automating compliance using AI will be useful enough as it may not deliver 100% accuracy. Can AI/ML interventions speed up the compliance process and enhance efficiency & productivity while ensuring a reasonably high degree of accuracy?
There are use cases, particularly in digital distribution where a quick content moderation and compliance scan of the content needs to be done to asses what the content is composed of. Also, auto identification of some of the most important compliance issues reduces the time and cost of operators who work on compliance. Enabled with a good content moderator toolkit, the remaining compliance issues missed by AI can be identified more efficiently by the operators.
Once compliance issues are identified, they need to be edited upon. AI interventions to enable automatic edits for compliance issues offer significant operational efficiencies and resultant cost savings. In some of our studies while working for our customers, we have noted that verbal cuss word bleeps and mutes could save as much as 35% of the compliance edit time!
The ideal AI solution for compliance will help automate detection of a set of key compliance issues; have Advanced Metadata which identifies logos/brands & celebrities, and ensure verbal compliance by identifying cuss words & phrases. The use of Machine Wisdom to capture compliance issues from various sources will improve accuracy by leaps and bounds.
To make the AI solution for compliance more effective, it should come armed with a content moderator toolkit offering a brilliant user experience to detect, visualize, edit and export EDLs or edited videos out. The AI content moderator toolkit can help automate the bleeping or muting of the cuss words completely at high accuracy (90%) and save significant compliance edit time. The biggest upside is that such an AI solution will not be disruptive at all as it will easily participate or integrate with an existing content workflow system while delivering substantial benefits.
AI can significantly enhance accuracy and actionability for compliance overview and edit, and substantially reduce related efforts and resources.
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