Using Google's Video AI To Estimate The Average Shot Length In Television News

Television news coverage brings to mind images of newsreaders in studios, reporters in the field, previously recorded footage and rapid-fire barrages of vivid advertising imagery. This raises the question of just how long a typical "shot" lasts and whether there are substantial differences between television news stations. Using the "Shot Change" detection feature of Google's Video AI platform to analyze a week of television news, what new insights could we learn about the speed at which television news narratives move? Google's Video AI API brings the company's image analysis algorithms to the world of video. While in the past videos had to be split into frames and analyzed as still images, the Video AI API enables videos to be analyzed natively, enabling time-based analysis like detecting shot changes.