“We’ve got 40 million active users. If I open this up to all of them, I would be out of business in a week.”
Scott Olechowski, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Plex
Every M&E company says it uses AI and yet over 70% of enterprises are experimenting with it while fewer than 20% have taken it past two core functions. So I went looking for a streamer, a telco and the data layer underneath to understand where they actually use AI, how it impacts their teams and what reaches viewers.
Meet my speakers: Scott Olechowski, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder of Plex, Christofer Peilitz, Head of Product Area Pay TV at Telia, and Tyler Bell, SVP of AI Products at for Gracenote. I opened by asking for one word each: evolution or revolution and got a split panel.
Scott's answer starts with a discovery tool Plex has built for internal use. It plugs users’ viewing history, ratings and reviews with metadata and he uses it all the time: “It is amazing. It is unbelievable.” But at today’s running costs he can’t hand it to 40 million active users though.
Viewers aren’t waiting for the maths to work though. In a Gracenote survey of 4,003 US chatbot users, 57% said AI tools could become their preferred way to find something to watch and 49% of Gen Alpha already prefer chatbots for recommendations. So I asked the panel whether ChatGPT and Claude become the new gatekeeper between a platform and its viewers.
We also get into the week Plex stopped all other work to learn the tools, the top engineer who hasn’t written a line of code in three months, Gracenote’s sports MCP server, the coding tool that invented its own Gracenote data (sounds familiar?), why Christofer wants the content lawyers in the tech booths and where each of them expects to be a year from now.
At a time where AI doomsday headlines dominate, it feels good to bust some myths on what AI can and cannot do but more importantly to understand how us mere humans are trying to make sense of these new cards we’re being dealt with.
Hope you like it.
That’s it for today but before you go:
