Toch.ai is an AI-driven platform that uses cloud-agnostic and deep learning algorithms to interpret content featured in videos automatically. Their state-of-the-art technology helps process content on the fly, including automatically meta-tagging it, understanding the context, identifying key moments, and processing video content automatically and instantly. Through its proprietary technology Toch.ai helps its partners to drive engagements, increase interactions, and grow revenue across their video content while managing risks and reducing costs.
In conversation with Medianews4u, Vinayak Shrivastav, Co-founder and CEO of Toch.ai, spoke about TOCH’s slice and dice technology, involvement and adoption of technologies in the media space, growth strategies and more.
Excerpts:
On the launch of Toch.ai
We live in a video dominated world with an increasing demand for democratizing content. The genesis of Toch was to recognize the inefficiencies in the video editing and processing area of such content. At Toch.ai, we leverage the latest technology to empower creators & enrich content making it more digestible and monetizable.
More video content gets uploaded in 30 days than what the major US television networks have broadcast in 30 years, and quite frankly, there is a need to optimize this video tsunami. We launched Toch.ai to solve the problem of video optimization. Established in 2016, we are an AI-based SaaS company. We provide a cloud-agnostic platform that transforms how some of the world’s biggest broadcasters convert their live sports and other content to critical moments, enabling them to provide ease of access to the end customer, all in real-time. Our focus is to optimize video content to be more engaging, more interactive, and more monetizable.
Our journey so far has been quite enriching as we have been able to partner with some of the world’s biggest broadcasters and OTT platforms. It has also been humbling at the same time as we continue to evolve, creating new growth opportunities. Within the short span of our operations, we have been nominated as the fastest growing ML Start-up in India, validating our efforts.
On TOCH’s slice and dice technology
Through Toch’s innovative AI and ML technology, you can automate your video curation process, identify critical moments in real-time from long-form video content or live videos, and build short videos, teasers, or highlights with just a click of a button.
These videos are created according to parameters which include character-based tagging, emotions tagging, speech recognition, tone recognition, and many more. Our AI engine can analyze the video feed and contextualize all content to make it more usable for the content creator/broadcaster. As the self-learning AI engine comprehends the video content, it can find specific information and use it to build bite-sized snackable content for our partners to use. Our technology reduces production and distribution costs and time by more than 80% while speeding up go-to-market for broadcasters from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.
On how businesses change once the Toch.ai model is adopted
We help our partners unlock the real potential of content. Our technology enables faster production of short-form content from long-form content, all in real-time, which changes the process flow for the creation of assets in a value chain. Traditionally such post-production requires high calibre editors to sift through the content and edit it, using up precious person-hours in the process. Toch.ai helps transform the quality of content that hits the editor’s table, providing them with bite-sized, monetizable and social platform ready content. This frees up their time to explore more creative ideas and build better stories with a deeper focus on the personalization of the content.
Recently, we have worked on some of the most significant sporting events and made a marked difference for our clients.
We received an opportunity to work with an international OTT platform to successfully produce events like the Australian Open, Champions League Football, amongst many others, by increasing their engagement rates and simultaneously reducing cost and time by 80% with the incorporation of our technology.
On the technology behind the services of Toch.ai
Toch.ai is uniquely placed with our first-mover advantage to revolutionize the industry by leveraging its proprietary AI and ML-based technology. Our AI engine uses new age self-learning algorithms to categorize and curate content.
Over time, we have added many new technologies to our engine that include:
- 2016: Content Moderation
- 2017: Speech Analysis
- 2018: Facial Mapping
- 2019: Object Tracking
- 2020: RTMP Server Stabilization
As a young start-up, we are constantly evolving and augmenting our capabilities to add user preference, video mapping, training and data labelling to our systems.
On the pandemic involvement and adoption of technologies in the media space
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an inevitable surge in technologies due to the social distancing norms and nationwide lockdowns. Organizations, especially in the media tech segment, have seen this as an opportunity to build and create awareness of their brand digitally by personalizing the content and providing content that relates to their audience with the incorporation of AI technologies in the form of predictive AI, incorporation of chatbots for more personalized interaction and many more. To keep up with the competition, the media companies are continuously evolving and developing interactive content which can keep their users engaged for a longer time.
On TG and strategies
The Target groups for our technologies in the current phase are:
- OTT platforms
- Social media platforms
- Short-form video creators
- Broadcasters
- Entertainment companies
Our strategy, quite simply, is to ‘add value.’ We are hoping to expand geographically to the US, Europe and South-East Asia in our future endeavours.
Growth Strategies and plans
The Global video AI Market is growing rapidly and is expected to be a 169.4bn USD industry by 2025. Being a niche player in this segment, tapping into the prospective market and delivering them the possibility of incorporating AI into their work mechanism to make their workflow easier was undoubtedly the foremost ideology in the growth of a start-up like Toch. Considering our plan, we are expecting to grow at a compounding annual growth rate of 200%. Our focus is to target specific industries of:
- Sports
- Entertainment
- News
In addition, we are exploding geographically with a clear focus on the European and North American continents.
On Toch.ai’s performance during the pandemic period
The Covid-19 pandemic gave us an unprecedented opportunity to dive further into the content space. In 2020, the global streaming market grew from 104.11 billion to 161.37 billion. With the increase in content consumption, the attention span of audiences also went down, and it became increasingly challenging for broadcasters and OTT platforms to keep the audiences engaged. The solution was to develop new forms of content and catch eye-balls by highlighting key moments, promos and teasers. Our technology can deliver this and more to our clients, and we were able to grow on our strengths.
On marketing strategies for a broader audience
As Toch.ai is an AI-based company, our primary focus is to showcase tech implementation in the real world. One of the strategies we use to accomplish this is content marketing. A well-articulated data-backed content strategy helps show the value of our product to our prospective customers. We understand that we are grappling with a problem of awareness when it comes to AI and our focus is to make the industry aware of the advantages of using AI in their workflows.
