What is the basic idea behind the algorithm to target ads? Also, doesn’t this weigh down streaming?
It does not weigh down streaming at all. If our servers were to go offline, the streaming doesn’t get affected at all. This is because our code works in such a way that it is not in the data path of the streaming content. The basic idea behind the solution is understanding the video content. We index the video using audio and speech recognition, visual analysis and metadata crawl. We then use a lot of machine learning-type algorithms to figure out what the video is about. Machine learning is a type of advanced statistical technique that allows us to relate a word or a set of words to other sets of words. For example, for a word like ‘Kobe Bryant’, which is a proper noun and meaningless to a computer, that we might see in the metadata of a video, our system is able to correlate that to other words like ‘NBA’, ‘basketball’, ‘sport’. This allows advertisers to target their ads granularly and this is all done without any human intervention. The beauty is that we don’t touch the actual cont
