The lawsuit, brought by the firm Scott+Scott and representing “thousands” of British businesses, says the tech giant charged higher prices to customers to access its server if they were using rival could services from Amazon, Google, and Alibaba.

“Put simply, Microsoft is punishing U.K. businesses and organizations for using Google, Amazon, and Alibaba for cloud computing by forcing them to pay more money for Windows Server,” said Dr. Maria Luisa Stasi, who is representing the businesses and organizations in the lawsuit.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

The company, according to Stasi, has tried to “force” customers into using its Azure cloud services and restricted competition as a result of its actions.

“This lawsuit aims to challenge Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, push them to reveal exactly how much businesses in the U.K. have been illegally penalized, and return the money to organizations that have been unfairly overcharged.”

The lawsuit is being funded by LCM Funding U.K., according to the Wall Street Journal, which ensures claimants don’t face a financial risk to joining in the collective action.

Microsoft’s stock price is flat on the day, trading at $430.40 per share.

The lawsuit shines a light on the highly competitive and lucrative cloud sector among the three major providers. Amazon’s cloud business brought in $27.5 billion during its most recent quarter, and the company expects $110 billion in cloud revenue in 2024. Microsoft reported cloud sales of $24.1 billion last quarter, and Google reported $11.4 billion in revenue from its cloud business.

The post Microsoft Hit With $1.27 Billion Lawsuit Over ‘Punishing’ Cloud Practices appeared first on TheWrap.

Founded in 2021, The Forbes Union represents about 100 writers, editors, and other editorial staffers at the outlet. Tuesday’s walkout was first reported by Fox News.

The Union is currently looking for a $75,000 wage floor, 8% annual raises, and 15% raises, at minimum, for promotions; they also want bonus pay for working weekends and overtime. Forbes management, on the other hand, has proposed $60,000 minimum salaries, a 1% annual raise, and a 5% minimum increase for promotions.

“[Forbes] CEO Mike Federle said at a recent town hall that management is eager to get a contract but that it seems like a very long way off. That’s because of his actions and that of management,” Andrea Murphy, Forbes’ unit chair and statistics editor, told Fox News. “We have been and will continue to be ready to get this contract done, including pay that recognizes the value we bring to Forbes.”

Murphy added Forbes’ $60,000 minimum salary proposal isn’t good enough. “That is just not a fair salary for the amount of work that people are doing.”

The walkout was scheduled for the same day Forbes planned on releasing 20 “30 Under 30” lists, its annual lists highlighting young movers and shakers in a variety of fields.

A Forbes spokesperson said the company was “working diligently with the NewsGuild of NY” to reach a deal.

“While we respect their right to stage a walk out, we are disappointed by the Union’s decision, especially when we have a bargaining session scheduled tomorrow and a willingness to meet across the month. In the meantime,” the spokesperson said. “Forbes continues to serve its audiences and publish its content across platforms.”

The spokesperson added: “It’s worth noting that the company has continued to make increases in the salaries of Guild bargaining unit members since 2021 when the NewsGuild of NY was certified as bargaining representative. In fact, 58% of our employees in the Guild unit received increases in 2024. Many companies freeze increases for employees until an initial labor agreement is reached.”

The Forbes Union has been working to get a new deal for three years with the help of The NewsGuild of New York; the NewsGuild on Tuesday said Forbes employees have been “met with disrespect and illegal, union-busting tactics” by the magazine’s management during that time.

The post Forbes Staffers Walk Out on ’30 Under 30′ Day to Protest Salaries appeared first on TheWrap.

“Apple’s speech suppression policies have harmed – and continue to harm – Apple’s employees,” the lawsuit claims. “The secrecy permits the wrongdoing to continue. This is a real and ongoing concern.”

The lawsuit was filed in state court by Apple employee Amar Bhakta, who has managed digital ads for the company since joining in 2020. Bhakta and his lawyers claim Apple violates its employees right to free speech by imposing stiff restrictions on what they can talk about.

This hurts employees in several ways, the lawsuit claims, including: blocking them from discussing their wages and work conditions; “invades” employee privacy by having them submit to having their nonwork devices surveilled; and allowing Apple to unlawfully “clawback” earned wages.

“Apple’s surveillance policies and practices chill, and thus also unlawfully restrain, employee whistleblowing, competition, freedom of employee movement in the job market, and freedom of speech,” the lawsuit claims.

In particular, Bhakta was upset the company “forbade” him from discussing his job on podcasts and in other public settings, as well as required him to edit some information on his LinkedIn page — something that hurts his future job prospects, the lawsuit claims.

Apple did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

“At Apple, we’re focused on creating the best products and services in the world and we work to protect the inventions our teams create for customers,” Apple spokesperson Josh Rosenstock said in a statement to The Verge. “Every employee has the right to discuss their wages, hours and working conditions and this is part of our business conduct policy, which all employees are trained on annually. We strongly disagree with these claims and believe they lack merit.”

The tech company, headquartered in nearby Cupertino, California, has access to personal emails, photos, and health information, among other private details, thanks to its overreaching surveillance, the lawsuit added. Apple violated California law by requiring employees to allow the company to “engage in physical, video, and electronic surveillance” of them, the suit continued.

“The personal data contained on an iPhone or other digital devices is more than private. It is also valuable,” the lawsuit continued. “Personal data is the fuel of surveillance capitalism.”

And employees who wish to switch from Apple to Google or other non-Apple products to avoid surveillance are put in a tricky spot, according to the lawsuit.

“The cost to employees of switching to a non-Apple device for purely personal reasons is too high,” the lawsuit claims, pointing to Apple’s “monopoly power” on the U.S. smartphone market. “Apple’s employees, even more so than Apple’s customers, are trapped in Apple’s prison yard.”

The lawsuit does not specify how much Bhakta is seeking in damages.

Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.

The post Apple Employee Sues Over Company Surveillance Policies That ‘Unlawfully Restrain’ Staff Freedoms, Suppress Speech appeared first on TheWrap.

The new valuation — which says the company formerly known as Twitter is now worth $12.32 billion — comes from a Sunday report in Axios.

Fidelity’s marked-up valuation offers something for everyone: Musk fans can say the company, which went private when the Tesla CEO took over in October 2022, is headed in the right direction, while Musk haters can gloat its worth much less than what he paid for it. (Just two months ago, Fidelity had valued its X shares at $9.4 billion, or nearly 80% less than what Musk had paid.)

It’ll be worth seeing whether Fidelity gives its X shares another boost before the end of the year, too. The financial services company’s updated valuation reflects its price up through October, so it excludes X’s performance leading up to and during the 2024 election. Musk has said several times recently the app experienced “all-time high” usage around November 5, when his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the race to the White House.

Because its now a private company under Musk’s stewardship, X doesn’t report its financial performance. The company in July said there were 570 million monthly X users, up 6% year-over-year.

In the U.S., X had 73.5 million monthly users, according to data from Similarweb shared with CNN — down 20% from when he bought the company. Following the election, X had 25 million daily active users in the U.S., according to data shared with TheWrap from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.

X has seen a wave of left-leaning users — including several high-profile reporters and celebrities — flee the app following the election. But those losses seem to have been offset by new downloads, with X’s daily user base in the States remaining steady post-election.

Musk himself said he was “obviously overpaying” for X right before the deal closed in 2022. But he said the “long-term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value.”

The SpaceX and Tesla head honcho said he bought Twitter because it had become overly censorious under the previous leadership of Jack Dorsey.

In September, X released its first Global Transparency Report since Musk took over. Suspensions on the platform had quadrupled under Musk, the report said, due in large part to taking more action against users who violate its “Child Safety” policy.

At the same time, X is censoring far less content and accounts for violating its “hateful content” policy than it did pre-Musk ownership. During the first half of 2024, X suspended 2,361 accounts for violating the policy — which is 97.7% less than it did compared to 2021, when the company was still being run by Dorsey.

Even with X being worth much less than when he bought it, Musk is doing just fine. His net worth has rocketed higher following the election, as his shares of Tesla have increased 44% in the past month. Forbes has his net worth pegged at $335.3 billion on Monday, comfortably ranking him ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person.

The post X Is Worth 72% Less Than the $44 Billion Elon Musk Paid for It, Despite 32% Rebound in Share Valuation appeared first on TheWrap.

Friar didn’t offer a time frame on when ChatGPT users may see ads alongside chat responses, saying the company wanted to “thoughtful about when and where we implement” them.

And following her interview with FT, Friar tempered expectations even more about a pending ad rollout.

“Our current business is experiencing rapid growth and we see significant opportunities within our existing business model,” Friar said in a statement after her interview. “While we’re open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we have no active plans to pursue advertising.”

Currently, OpenAI sells access to a premium version of ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot, for $20 per month. The San Francisco-based company, led by CEO Sam Altman, expects $3.7 billion in sales in 2024, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. OpenAI’s revenue is anticipated to hit $11.7 billion in 2025, according to those same documents.

After raising $6.6 billion earlier this year, OpenAI is now worth more than $150 billion. The company said in August it had 200 million weekly ChatGPT users. By hitting those users with ads alongside their questions for its chatbot, OpenAI could augment the subscription revenue it gets from premium subscribers — although it is unclear what OpenAI’s ad rollout would look like and if it would turn off some users.

The post OpenAI Considers Ads, Wants to Be ‘Thoughtful’ About Serving Them With Chat Responses appeared first on TheWrap.

A month into the season, the NBA’s ratings are down 28% on ESPN through Nov. 21. Meanwhile, the ratings for its games on TNT are flat at 1.8 million viewers per game, while ESPN is slightly behind at 1.77 million viewers per game. This comes after every major studio fell over itself vying for the rights to air NBA games this year, resulting in a $76 billion total deal.

What’s behind the league’s popularity decline? While it is tough blame any one factor, analysts say the NBA has too many regular-season games and lacks continuity, with players changing teams more frequently and teams changing uniform designs more often, which has confused and turned off some fans. The NBA’s social justice focus, starting with Black Lives Matter, made the league a target for conservative pundits and turned off right-leaning viewers. And the league and its players have shown a penchant for not valuing the regular season enough — coaches are still resting star players for long stretches to save them for the playoffs — which has further hurt fan engagement.

The ratings drop has been conspicuous — and potentially worrying — considering the NBA signed its 11-year, $76 billion TV deal this past summer. The new deal, which nearly triples the annual revenue the league brings in from its current contract, will see the league remain on Disney-owned ABC and ESPN, plus bring games to Amazon’s Prime Video and NBCUniversal, starting next year.

The NBA ratings decline comes amid a broader decline in cable TV viewership which is also affecting other sports, including college football and NHL. And Wall Street analysts said it’s too early to panic.

“All of these media partners have entered into long-term deals with the NBA, and I’d say they’re all very excited about the path ahead and the trajectory of the league,” MoffettNathanson senior analyst Robert Fishman told TheWrap. “And so any sort of short term ratings blip is really not what they’re focused on.”

Still, the networks bet big on basketball, and the ratings dip means the cost to acquire viewers is going up. The increasing premium placed on sports rights and live entertainment helped spur a bidding war for the NBA’s TV packages. At the same time, the rise of streaming added new deep-pocketed bidders to the market — ultimately leading to Amazon securing its NBA package for $1.8 billion per year.

The NBA’s acceptance of Amazon’s offer led the league to reject Turner’s bid, a move that severed a 38-year relationship with the network. That caused Turner parent company Warner Bros. Discovery to sue the NBA. The lawsuit was settled earlier this month, with WBD retaining rights to a few international markets and being able to license its popular “Inside the NBA” show to ABC starting next year. But WBD’s stock price took a hit when it lost the NBA and caused Wall Street analysts to speculate whether the company could prosper without it.

While it’s only been a month, the rating dip may well not be a blip. The NBA’s ratings have been heading in the wrong direction for several years now. ESPN’s first-month ratings are down 7% compared to the 1.9 million viewers the network averaged during the 2016-17 season. And the drop-off is even more severe than that, considering Nielsen started including out-of-home viewership from places like sports bars in its ratings in 2020. In other words, the ratings are beefed up compared to a decade ago — and the NBA still can’t match its past performance.

Why the new media partners should care

The ratings dip matters because it means the cost to acquire a viewer is rising for the league’s media partners.

Heading into this season, the NBA’s new deal averaged $12.12 per viewer. The networks are paying an average of $6.40 per viewer for Disney’s package to $25.45 per customer for Amazon’s package, according to Guggenheim research shared with TheWrap.

On average, that means the NBA’s new media partners are paying more than three times what the media partners for the National Football League pay per viewer.

The NFL’s most recent deal, signed in 2021, pays the league $110 billion over 11 years. It includes CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and Amazon as media partners. (Netflix also signed a deal with the NFL in May to broadcast two games on Christmas, starting this year. Each game cost the streamer $75 million.)

That “doesn’t necessarily mean [the NBA] is a bad deal,” Michael Morris, an analyst at Guggenheim Partners, told TheWrap. “Maybe the NFL is just a complete steal.”

It means, however, that if the NBA’s ratings continue to decline, its media partners will have to find ways to offset the increasing cost to acquire viewers.

“As ratings decline and the relative cost per viewer goes up, the pressure on generating additional revenue is greater in order to get the expected return on these rights investments,” Morris said.

Here, the media partners may have different strategies. ESPN and NBCU could look to double down on their sports betting operations in order to make more money from NBA viewers. Amazon, on the other hand, can leverage its expertise in online shopping to drive sales — a Lakers fan who is watching a game on Prime Video could easily be hit with an ad to buy an Anthony Davis jersey, for example.

But if the ratings continue to slide, networks will have to get more creative than that to make this new NBA deal look anywhere close to as good as the NFL’s.

The big issue

What is going on? Ethan Strauss, a sports and culture writer who covered the Golden State Warriors and now writes about the NBA on his House of Strauss Substack, believes the “core issue” behind the falloff is simple: How does the league make the players try harder? That “seems like a question you wouldn’t even be considering 15 years ago or even 10 years ago,” Strauss told TheWrap. “And it seems like it’s so mundane that you should be able to solve this problem.”

But it hasn’t been solved. Player effort and availability has been a thorn in the side of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for years now. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich popularized a trend dubbed “load management” during the 2010s, where teams rest their star players during the regular season in order to keep them fresh for the playoffs. The NBA has tried to curb load management by adding games-played incentives to contracts and barring players who haven’t played enough games from being eligible for major awards. But the trend has held strong.

Before the start of the season, Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid said he planned on never playing the second game of a back-to-back (where teams play games on consecutive nights) ever again. And Clippers star Kawhi Leonard has routinely sat out games, despite being healthy, during his career.

This, Strauss said, has delivered an unmistakable message to fans: The league and its players don’t value the regular season. And fans have responded by not tuning in as much.

“There’s just too much awareness that an individual game really doesn’t matter — that an individual game is one out of 82 and it’s important not to get injured, and it’s important to be there for the postseason,” Strauss said. “So you pick your spots.”

This should be a bigger concern for Wall Street analysts and league partners, he said, because it makes it less likely casual fans will tune in during the playoffs, when ratings are scrutinized more closely.

As Strauss put it: “It’s hard to get people to tune in for the season finale if they haven’t watched the show to that point.”

Other potential factors

There are other factors that are potentially pushing down ratings.

Social Justice: The NBA has been the most outwardly pro-social justice league among the three main sports in the U.S. The league allowed players to replace their last names on jerseys with phrases like “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” after the death of George Floyd in 2020. The NBA also canceled games after players boycotted the death of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man who was shot and paralyzed by police, after cops attempted to arrest him for breaking into the home of a woman he allegedly sexually assaulted. More recently, the league has tried to move away from social justice issues and be less political, although stars like LeBron James and Steph Curry publicly backed Kamala Harris for president. But the league’s pivot may have come too late. Strauss said the NBA’s social justice focus made it a “woke pinata” for conservative pundits to bash and simultaneously turned off some right-leaning viewers.

Too Much Inventory: There are too many games for fans to care about, many league observers have said. “There’s too much of it and it’s too available. [There’s] Nothing special about it,” Bill Simmons said on “The Town” podcast last month. The NBA’s 82-game season stands in stark contrast to the NFL’s 17-game season, which makes each regular season football game an event.

Style of Play: All NBA teams shoot way more three-pointers than they did a decade ago — something that’s been a byproduct of Curry’s revolutionary shooting range. Lakers legend Shaquille O’Neal said earlier this month that is bad for fans, though, because not //not? Or now?// every player can shoot like Curry. Now, “everybody’s looking at the same thing” when they watch an NBA game — a ton of long shots being jacked up.

Lack of Continuity: The NBA has made it hard for casual fans to follow the game in recent years because of added “noise,” as Strauss said. Teams now have several alternate jerseys and court layouts, and teams are not relegated to wearing lighter color jerseys at home anymore — making it hard for fans to tell which team is playing at home or on the road when watching on TV. Players also change teams more frequently than in decades past. And last season, the NBA added an “in-season tournament” that awards a trophy and cash to the winning team — a move that devalues its actual championship. The overall lack of continuity complicates matters for fans and makes it harder to follow the league.

Dearth of American Stars: Three of the top five players in the league, according to most experts, were born outside the States: Nikola Jokic (Serbia) of the Denver Nuggets, Luka Doncic (Slovenia) of the Dallas Mavericks, and Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) of the Milwaukee Bucks. The league, in this sense, has been a victim of its own success in its multi-decade push to make basketball a global game. Non-American stars, for one reason or another, haven’t connected with American viewers as much as homegrown talent.

“A lot of people are under this illusion that you could become more international while being just as resonant domestically,” Strauss said. “I don’t think that’s the case. It’s actually a trade off. And some of what we’re seeing [with ratings] is that trade off.”

The post Why the NBA’s Ratings Are Down Big — and Why Its New Media Partners Should Care appeared first on TheWrap.

Ohanian, who has been married to retired tennis legend Serena Williams since 2017, shared a hospital selfie to Instagram on Thanksgiving in which he wrote, “After tracking some suspicious nodules on my thyroid for the last four years, I recently got half of it surgically removed.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alexis Ohanian Sr. (@alexisohanian)

He went on to explain, “The nodules were getting bigger and the latest biopsy revealed they’d very likely turn cancerous. My mom had breast cancer around this age (41) and then ultimately died from brain cancer a decade or so later. I hate cancer.”

Ohanian made the decision to undergo surgery because, “I wasn’t going to take any chances.” He added, “The surgery was smooth and I’m extra grateful this Thanksgiving because I got the call this morning that my now-removed-half-of-thyroid was indeed full of some gnarly nodules that were very likely to become cancerous.”

He griped that the worst part is “not being able to lift for two weeks but big fella will be back at it next week.” He added that he took his two daughters, Alexis and Adira, to Disney World this week.

He advised his “fellow men” to “make those doctor’s appointments — especially if y’all are dads.”

Ohanian made headlines along with Flavor Flav during the 2024 Olympics when he volunteered to help pay Olympian Veronica Fraley’s rent after she tweeted that she was struggling to make the payment. He tweeted at the time, “C’mon now! I’ll split it with @flavorflav,” and later shared that he’d given Fraley $7,760.

He resigned from the Reddit board in 2020.

The post Alexis Ohanian, Reddit Co-Founder, Has Thyroid Partially Removed After Cancer Scare appeared first on TheWrap.

OpenAI, after the leak was available for about three hours, shut down access to Sora on Wednesday morning.

The group behind the leak posted its reasoning in a letter titled “Dear Corporate AI Overlords.” The leakers said they were not anti-AI in their letter, but were protesting the tight control OpenAI had over the operation and the messaging related to it.

“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement,” the group said.

There were about 300 Sora beta testers, according to the letter. The leakers also complained about not getting paid for their work; OpenAI, after getting an additional $500 million in funding from Softbank in September, was valued at $150 billion. CEO Sam Altman’s slice of the company, following the raise, is now worth about $10.5 billion.

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company,” the letter said. “While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.”

OpenAI shut down access to Sora a few hours after the leakers made it public. Company spokesperson Niko Felix to the Washington Post that the artists had “shaped” the tool and given feedback on new features and “safeguards,” but were not forced to participate.

“Participation is voluntary, with no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool,” Felix said.

Before access to Sora was turned off, some people on X were able to use the text-to-video tool to make videos. Some users shared their Sora clips on X, including one user who created a clip of a drug-fueled techno club:

The post OpenAI’s Sora Video Tool Leaked by Artists Recruited as Beta Testers in Protest of ‘Corporate AI Overlords’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The objection, filed Monday in a Texas bankruptcy court, attempts to block the parody news site from running Jones or InfoWars’ X accounts and objected to them being included in The Onion’s bid on Jones’ media operation. X’s lawyers pointed to the platform’s terms of service in its filing, saying any accounts were “exclusive property” of X and not its users.

X account holders simply own the content “they submit, post or display” on X, the filing claimed.

The company, as the owner of the platform, “grants each user a ‘personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and nonexclusive license to use the software provided,” the lawsuit added.

That means, according to X’s lawyers, the company should retain the InfoWars account, as well as ownership of Jones’ account, which has 3.3 million followers; a judge will be deciding whether Jones’ personal X account is included in any selloff tied to his bankruptcy.

X clarified it “does not object to the proposed sale as a general matter,” merely the transfer of the social accounts as part of any deal.

Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022 for $44 billion. He reinstated Jones’ account, after he had been booted from the platform in 2018.

The Onion announced it had bought InfoWars earlier this month, but the deal has been held up in recent weeks. The outlet’s bid now hangs in the balance, with U.S. bankruptcy judge Christoper Lopez on Monday scheduling a hearing for December on whether the deal goes through.

Jones liquidated his assets and declared bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay a $1.5 billion defamation settlement to the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.

Jones had said on his show that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 children were murdered, was “staged” by the government in order to grab guns.

“It’s as phony as a $3 bill,” Jones said about the shooting. He also called the parents “crisis actors” who were faking their grief.

He was later sued for defamation by a number of Sandy Hook families.

In a court deposition, Jones said he “wasn’t trying to cause pain and suffering” to the families with his comments. He also said the parents and the kids were now “being used to destroy the First Amendment.”

The post Elon Musk Claims ‘Superior Ownership’ Over Alex Jones, Infowars X Accounts as The Onion Pursues Acquisition appeared first on TheWrap.

This includes AI-generated summaries of episodes or even seasons by analyzing video segments and subtitles. There’s also an AI-powered pop-up feature for Thursday Night Football that provides insights about players and teams during NFL games. And then of course there’s personalizations, which recommend what viewers should watch next. While these personalizations were previously powered by traditional AI, generative AI has supercharged this initiative.

“We’ve been working in AI for 20+ years. So everything we do around content, discovery and personalization is AI-driven and that’s the core of our service,” Prime Video’s vice president of product Adam Gray told TheWrap in an exclusive interview. “When you’re looking at being the first stop entertainment destination for customers where they bring all their subscriptions in one place, really what you’re offering is a way to easily find the best movies and TV shows and live sports for you across all that.”

According to Gray, the AI-focused improvements are driving engagement on the platform. For example, Prime Video’s new X-Ray Recap feature is the most-used feature to date on the service’s app on Fire TV, the company said.

“We’ve been very happy with engagement across the features and our focus is on if there’s a practical problem we can solve,” Gray added. “So as we launch features, we’ll look and see if they’re being used in that way and then how can we build on it.”

Personalization, Dialogue Boost and Audio Descriptions

One of the major generative AI upgrades to Prime Video is in the form of personalization, with the technology being used to make more relevant content recommendations by helping users find movies and shows with similar plot points and character arcs to their favorite picks. It also groups titles tailored to a user’s interests in “Made for You” collections.

“One of the fundamental things that we’re always trying to solve when it comes to recommendations is trying to understand customers habits and needs and that is very, very complicated. We have streaming history that we get from customers and we derive their taste and habits through that,” Prime Video vice president of technology Girish Bajaj explained.

“There’s also a lot of creative intent that goes into creating content and a lot of different dimensions to it. So understanding the content itself is another area of expertise that we that we have to build,” he continued. “When you understand your customers really well and you understand the content really well, then you can build relationships and start to recommend content that actually caters to your customer.”

The feature is powered by Amazon BedRock, a fully managed service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) for building and scaling generative AI applications with foundational models.

“We’ve been using traditional AI machine learning models for recommendations for many, many years, and generative AI has given us a new door to make it even more impactful and more meaningful to customers,” Bajaj added. “That’s helped us go deeper on understanding the semantic nature and the attributes of content itself.”

Additionally, Prime Video has a dialogue boost feature, which uses AI to analyze a movie or series’ audio, identify points where dialogue may be hard to hear, isolate speech patterns and enhance the audio to help viewers catch every word in languages including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Hindi.

It also offers Audio Descriptions, an AI-powered narration tool that describes key visual elements of a video to make content more accessible for blind and visually impaired users. The technology identifies gaps in dialogue to help Prime Video’s production teams build Audio Description scripts faster.

X-Ray Recaps

Bedrock’s models, as well as AI models trained on Amazon SageMaker, are also being used in Prime Video’s recently launched X-Ray Recaps, which analyzes video segments, combined with subtitles or dialogue, to generate detailed descriptions of key events, places, times, and conversations across for specific episodes or even entire seasons across all titles.

“If you were to do this using traditional approaches, the development cost of it would be exponentially high. The generative AI approach of it has dramatically reduced the cost of development and deployment at scale,” Bajaj explained. “Amazon Bedrock really gave us a way to fast track this development and and get it out to customers. And this is something that we know customers want, they use it.”

“To date, when people do these types of recaps, it’s only for the most premium content, because it’s very expensive to do it manually,” Gray noted. “So the idea of doing this across every title in a catalog of our scale is a solution that only happens with the power of AI.”

Guardrails are also applied to ensure the generation of spoiler-free and concise summaries, which are overseen by Prime Video’s production team.

“As we build these features initially, there’s a lot of manual work to ensure the quality is there as we improve it and as we get much better at the guardrails around the prompts that we use we need less and less over time,” Bajaj said. “You continue to have manual folks involved for audits to make sure the quality continues, but it’s a higher lift initially and then scale comes in as you improve.”

Prime Insights for “Thursday Night Football”

Prime Video’s “Thursday Night Football” is also integrating AI in its presentation of live sports, developed in collaboration with “TNF” producers, engineers, former NFL players, and Prime Video Sports’ AI and Computer Vision team. Prime Insights highlights key players, illuminates hidden aspects of the game and predicts pivotal moments before they happen.

“If you look at the NFL, it was over 25 years ago when they introduced the yellow line for first downs, which really made it so much more accessible. And there’s been very little in-play innovation since until we’ve looked at how we could use AI to change that. So we’re taking a look at how we can make the game more accessible to folks and easier to understand,” Gray explained.  “The basic idea is for someone watching, we want them to be able to have a much more immersive experience, because there’s so much rich detail around what’s happening in the game.”

Defensive Alerts tracks defensive players before the snap and identifies “players of interest” in real time that are likely to rush the quarterback.

“It looks across thousands of data points, the positioning of players and their movements to highlight those for the play that are likely to pressure the quarterback. We put a red orb underneath them,” Gray added. “It’s a great example of starting to be able to watch the game like a quarterback would or an offensive coordinator.”

Prime Video is also rolling out an expansion called Pressure Alerts in the coming weeks, which tracks defenders attacking the offensive backfield during live action and highlights those that are in position to disrupt the play, as well as Coverage Identification, which uses an AI model combined with live player tracking data to identify the defensive scheme, such as man-to-man or zone, for fans in real time before the snap.

Though the pair declined to reveal what other generative AI-powered features may be ahead, they emphasized that the the streaming service is only just getting started.

“The only way we’re able to do things at a scale, across around discovering content and around a more immersive experience when customers watch content is going to be through AI. So you’re going to see this accelerating,” Gray said. “The teams are really learning how they can move faster and innovate and use it. So it’s really a change in the entire structure of how you build.”

“Literally every team in Prime Video is leaning into AI and generative AI, every single team,” Bajaj added. “So there’s a lot more to come.”

The post How Prime Video Is Capitalizing on AI to Drive Engagement | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.