2024 will be the year that broadcasters focus on driving greater revenues from their audiences on all platforms and seek to deliver more efficient workflows throughout their organization.

That is the view of Rob Ambrose, co-founder of one of the leading industry analysts, Caretta Research, and detailed in the first episode of the Making the Media Podcast of the new year.

The episode looks back on the major developments and trends of 2023 and assesses what are going to be the key developments in 2024 across the media landscape, including in general production and news. While AI was a major theme last year, Rob says that a lot of that has not yet translated into the products in use by creators.

In the latest Making the Media Podcast, called “Predictive Text,” Rob tells host Craig Wilson how some of the hype around AI needs to be translated into tangible benefits for business. “I think the challenge ahead now is for the vendors to harness the AI services and capabilities that are out there and translate those into tools that actually create an ROI and a benefit to buyers.”

But he adds that he still sees caution about the use of generative AI services, adding, “And of course, at the same time we've been seeing buyers, particularly the bigger, higher-profile media companies and the public service media and paying really close attention to the rules that they want to apply around how they're going to use AI, particularly generative AI. When the AI is creating content, when is that ethical to do? But particularly for, say, news content, what's the right role for AI and news and how do we manage that effectively and how do we signpost what's been created by AI and what's been created by humans?”

Rob also discusses the focus within newsrooms of delivering greater collaboration between disparate teams working on multiple platforms.

He says, “There's a focus on getting the efficiencies upstream in the news operations so that the planning and the news gathering operation is common across all of those platforms. So there's one person who's going out to film a piece of video, but doing it with all of those platforms in mind and also getting still images and so on and so forth, feeding that all into one big pot. And then having people who really understand what TikTok is all about manage the agenda and manage the packaging just for that platform. And I think that's got to be the key to engage with different audiences on these different platforms. Start with the audience and then work back into how best to meet their content needs.”

Find out more on the next episode of the Making the Media podcast, available on all major podcast platforms on Friday, January 12.

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