Advanced Television

Lynch: ‘Machine intelligence to power TV of the future’

May 14, 2014

By Colin Mann

Celebrated technologist Dr Mike Lynch has suggested that intelligent devices could play a major role in creating video content in the future.

Lynch, who was CEO of Autonomy prior to its acquisition by HP for $11 billion in 2011, made the comments during the first Royal Television Society (RTS) and Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) joint public lecture.

Addressing the topic ‘Prediction is very difficult, particularly about the future’, Lynch said: “There are new creative forms coming along. They will allow creativity to be expressed in very interesting ways,” demonstrating the point using Google Glass, a Samsung wearable watch and a state-of-the-art iPhone to show what could be done given recent advances in processing power and machine recognition technology.

A tiny digital dinosaur played on a real table in real time in 3D and a family portrait suddenly came to life, while a film clip played from the recognition of a still from that scene.

At the beginning of the lecture, Lynch had warned the audience of TV creatives and technologists that what he was going to show was the equivalent of looking at a TV set in the 1940s. “It’s going to be fuzzy, clunky – but one thing we can be absolutely sure about is that it is going to get a lot better quickly,” he stated.

“I am going to show you the equivalent of the Test Card on some of these new technologies. It is for you [TV practitioners] to start thinking about the creativity that you can put behind that.”

According to Lynch, “the reality is that while I don’t think television will die in the same way that radio hasn’t died, I do think there are new creative forms coming along. They will allow creativity to be expressed in very interesting ways.”

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