As the streaming war continues, one of its biggest players is leveraging its AI expertise to improve the viewer’s experience. Those watching movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video can use generative AI features like Dialogue Boost and X-Ray Recaps. They serve as early indicators of how AI tools can impact the streaming service model.
The Streaming Wars
Since 2019, the streaming market has been rife with competition trying to keep up with Netflix and carve out an audience for themselves. This led to what has been called the streaming wars, where we saw competition, mergers, and tactical bundling as major services duked it out for survival.
Streaming is just part of a wider trend that has been happening for decades – the internet’s growing role in how we find our entertainment. While movie production houses are embracing online distribution through streaming, other business models have made and distributed online content for years. For example, iGaming has been around since the ‘90s and has only grown with time, as every kind of casino game made its way online. Now players can find vast libraries of slots online at Paddy Power, with games inspired by popular media themes like adventure, sci-fi, and even horror. In iGaming, games are created by developers and hosted on websites through an agreement. This wasn’t the case with streaming, as competitors pulled IPs away from Netflix to host on their proprietary service while producing their own movies and TV shows.
That leads to where we are today – Netflix is still the frontrunner and has been declared the winner of the streaming wars by outlets like Yahoo Finance. The streaming audience is more fractured than ever, as some customers are unwilling or unable to buy multiple services. Free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) services are getting more popular with consumers, who now prefer ad interruptions over paid, ad-free content. After a lull in the streaming wars, AI features could give some platforms a significant advantage over their competition.
Amazon’s AI-Powered Features
It’s no surprise that Amazon was one of the first companies to introduce AI features to its Prime Video streaming service. When they aren’t shipping boxes or producing movies, AWS is exploring generative AI through Amazon Q and Amazon Bedrock. Over the past year, they have leveraged some of those in-house tools to improve the Prime Video experience.
Dialogue Boost
If you’re a cinephile or have experience in the AV department, you may notice that some modern shows have poor sound mixing. Often, the dialogue is the first, quietest layer of sound to get lost amid flashy explosions or bombastic soundtracks.
To solve this, Amazon introduced Dialogue Boost in 2023. This tool scans the movie and finds points where speech is difficult to hear. It then isolates the dialogue and boosts it over other audio tracks, making it easier to hear.
@PrimeVideo just launched the new Dialogue Boost option 🗣
It lets you increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects 🔈
Try it on select titles now. We’ll make the feature available on even more titles later this year! 🎬
Amazon (@amazon) just launched the new Dialogue Boost option 🗣
.@PrimeVideo just launched the new Dialogue Boost option 🗣
It lets you increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects 🔈
Try it on select titles now. We’ll make the feature available on even more titles later this year! 🎬 https://t.co/bss4Cfu9tL— Amazon (@amazon) May 25, 2023
X-Ray Recaps
Generative AI is capable of a lot of things, as explained here by MIT, but it became famous for its ability to understand context and act as a smart chatbot. X-Ray Recaps taps into those qualities, using AI tools to scan and then summarize content on the Prime Video platform. In particular, these recaps are powered by Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker.
This feature generates accurate descriptions of movies, episodes, or whole seasons of TV. Descriptions can even be personalized depending on how deep into the season you are. This ensures the recaps are always accurate, context-specific, and don’t spoil things that haven’t happened yet.
These are just early examples of the AI-powered features Amazon has introduced to their platform. As generative AI continues to improve, we will likely see it influence how we view movies and TV shows more in the future. Whether it’s enough to make Amazon more competitive in the streaming wars remains to be seen.
