iQIYI founder: AI to transform entertainment
October 17, 2018
Colin Mann @ MIPCOM
Gong Yu, founder and CEO of iQIYI, China’s largest online streaming platform, has predicted that advances in machine learning over the next two decades will reshape the entertainment industry more than the Internet has done until now.
Delivering a Media Mastermind Keynote at MIPCOM in Cannes, Yu suggested that iQIYI was “well-positioned” to capture the huge entertainment market in China, with a mission of becoming a technology-based entertainment giant that brigs “fun and joy” to people and their families.
He described iQIYI’s business model as “Netflix+”, a mixture of AVoD and SVoD, as opposed to a reliance on premium content and membership services.
He suggested that in the future AI era, each user would have a ‘personal assistant’ that would present personalised recommendation and even bespoke content. “Using machine learning to provide personalised services will be a key trend going forward and will reshape the entertainment industry over the next ten to twenty years, much more so than the Internet did over the past three decades,” he asserted.
“AI technology can be applied to many aspects of the online video industry, including content production, content distribution, viewing, monetisation and customer service,” he suggested, with a company promotional video on iQIYI AI advising that every stage of the commercial and creative process could be transformed, from scriptwriting and casting, right through to content acquisition and marketing.
In a separate session on ‘China, Big Data and Content’, Xiaohui Wang, iQIYI’s Chief Content Officer, told delegates that the platform had been developing its artificial intelligence technology to create a profiling system to customise content for its viewers, suggesting that it can achieve 80 per cent accuracy. iQIYI now plans to end video view counts to determine a show’s popularity and relevance to viewers. “We shall only use the backend date to guide our partners when it comes to content creation,” he advised.