Amsterdam-based Media Distillery uses AI to understand what’s inside video; secures €3M

Artificial Intelligence or AI is already a big part of modern day technology. We use AI for numerous applications such as enabling driverless cars, identifying people and objects, processing speech, finding new medicines and more. One of the providers of AI technology, which enables better understanding of what’s in a video, is the Amsterdam-based startup Media Distillery. The company has now secured €3M in funding. 

Fresh funds for accelerated expansion

Media Distillery has raised a notable €3M in its latest funding round from a  group of entrepreneurs and executives from the international TV and broadcast industry. Media Distillery will use the funding to accelerate the expansion of the company’s team, the international business growth and to scale the research and development teams working on its content discovery solutions. 

Roland Sars, CEO of Media Distillery says, “The commercial potential of creating a ‘sticky’ video environment is enormous when consumers are engaged to a video platform that is personalized to one’s interests and when they can discover relevant content in the blink of an eye. Media Distillery’s use of AI technology to tackle these matters and gives video platforms the opportunity to set themselves apart from competition and boost viewership metrics.”

Using AI for enhancing experiences 

Media Distillery employs AI to figure out what’s the content inside a video for global TV and video companies. The company’s Deep Content Understanding solution is said to generate ‘next-generation’ metadata that enables consumers to search and analyse video content in real-time. Founded in 2014, the company says it analysed over 7.5 million hours of video content in 2020. 

With a surge in video streaming around the globe due to the pandemic, it makes sense for companies to opt for such AI based solutions that can parse through a video to provide detailed analysis of what’s in them. Instead of sifting through hours of content manually, the offering should provide an easier way to understand the context and content in a video. This, in turn, can enable platform providers to enhance the content discovery functionality. 

Alongside detecting the contents in a video, the company’s offering also includes other functionalities. Speech recognition is another offering by the company, which utilises speech recognition algorithms to ensure recognition is optimised for the type of audio or video being used. They also use object recognition and face recognition to draw insights from media, along with text and logo recognition for providing added context. Using multiple sources of data as mentioned, the startup also offers topic detection for a video.