How Viacom modernized its Intelligent Content Discovery Platform with Google Cloud

Now more than ever, entertainment has become an immersive experience that often transcends cultures, borders, languages and devices—something that Viacom knows well. The media company delivers entertainment content and experiences to billions of people in more than 180 countries every day through award-winning brands like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and Paramount.

As the amount of content available to a global audience has grown exponentially, Viacom has been working to strengthen its targeting capabilities for content delivery across platforms and to better leverage insights to more efficiently serve personalized experiences to audiences wherever they are.

To acquire more content intelligence and workflow efficiency, Viacom selected Google Cloud to power its Intelligent Content Discovery Platform. The platform comprises Viacom’s media lifecycle from content creation to distribution. For example, when new content is produced, Viacom will be able to automatically extract short-form "clips" identifying what’s relevant to a viewer, all to better showcase new content. Through video intelligence APIs, machine learning technologies will help create an optimal, personalized viewer experience.

Google Cloud also empowers smarter direct-to-consumer choices, so that Viacom can provide better in-context ads placement and help consumers reach the content they prefer. Google Cloud’s machine learning capabilities provide Viacom with automated content tagging, discovery and intelligence for more than 65 petabytes of content—the equivalent of 2.5 billion Blu-Ray DVDs of material. This will make it easier for Viacom’s internal stakeholders, such as content editors, to have a deeper understanding of content while also ensuring viewers get access to more of the content they want to see.

Finally, Viacom will be taking advantage of Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) model. Designed to deepen our partnership with customers, CRE comprises Google engineers who collaborate closely with a customer’s operations teams to share the reliability responsibilities for critical cloud applications. Collaborating in this way creates a shared ownership between Google Cloud and Viacom to meet the needs of Viacom and their customers.

“We needed a partner who not only has the technical prowess but the dedication and collaboration to help us pivot toward a cloud-first strategy,” said David Kline, EVP and Chief Information & Technology Officer at Viacom. “One of the most important considerations in selecting Google Cloud was its commitment to ongoing learning and training. The team is the perfect combination of people and technology to help us scale, develop applications, and deliver the best experience to our audiences around the world.”

We are thrilled to help Viacom infuse machine learning intelligence into legacy workflows to help evolve its business in the digital media ecosystem. You can hear more about the Viacom story from CTO Dave Kline onstage at Next '19, or learn more about Google Cloud’s media and entertainment offerings on our website.