Editor’s note: “We’re on the cusp of a video data revolution, and we need to tell those data stories,” says veteran entrepreneur, blogger and author Joe Procopio.

DURHAM – “It is estimated that media companies and user-generated content creates over 2 billion digital images and over 1 billion hours of video watch time every day.” — Justin Pang, head of publishing partnerships at Google.

I don’t have to tell you that a digital video revolution is underway. That you know. But what I do want to get across in this article is that we’re quickly approaching a critical point at which the explosion of unstructured data generated by digital video content will make it next to impossible to understand, utilize, or even recall most of the information contained in all of that video.

Automation can fix that.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) should be telling the stories behind all that video using all that unstructured data. This is the message I’m bringing to NABShow, the annual gathering of the National Association of Broadcasters, when I speak there on April 23rd. If you’re in broadcasting and working with digital video, I want to talk to you.

I’ve been automating content for seven years, from the very inception of our company, Automated Insights, and have produced billions of unique and insightful human-sounding narratives from raw data for companies like the Associated Press and Yahoo. All along, I’ve been fighting a battle for acceptance of automated content in the universe of traditional journalism.

Last week, the Associated Press published a report that neatly summarized that battle and declared it all but over. Augmented journalism, the term they use for the integration of human and machine in the creation of news stories, is not meant to take journalism jobs away from humans, it said. Augmented journalism should be standing side-by-side with traditional journalism to incorporate the data science required in contemporary journalism while complementing the investigative process and conclusive reasoning inherent in the job of the journalist.

There’s much more to this story. Read it in full at:

http://joeprocopio.com/automating-digital-video.asp

Read the AP report at:

https://insights.ap.org/uploads/images/the-future-of-augmented-journalism_ap-report.pdf

(C) Joe Procopio