At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. The media industry exemplifies this mission. We live in an age where more content is being created and consumed in more ways and on more devices than ever. At IBC 2019, we're delighted to share the latest innovations we've been working on and how they can help transform your media workflows. Read on to learn more, or join our product teams and partners at Hall 1 Booth C27 at the RAI in Amsterdam from September 13th to 17th.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox. Imagine no longer having to browse endless TV channels in a bid to find what you want to watch. How amazing would it be if your content provider knew you so well that it created dynamic TV channels especially for you, based on what it's learnt from your tastes and preferences? Thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), this scenario is now entirely possible.

Azure Media Services, Microsoft's collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows, is about to get a lot smarter. As the company announced at the annual NAB show in Las Vegas today, Media Services will now make use of some of the tools Microsoft developed for its machine learning services for video, as well. This means Media Services can now automatically select the most interesting snippets from a source video, for example, to give you a quick summary of what the full video looks like. In addition, Microsoft is building face detection into these tools and the company is including its ability to detect people's emotions (something the company's Cognitive Services already do for still images). Using this, you could easily see how people reacted to a speech at an event, for example.

At the annual NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced that Azure Media Services will be receiving a host of new features and will even be taking advantage of its machine learning services. Azure Media Services is a collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows and the company intends to make these tools smarter to help users create premium video content more easily. Microsoft will be adding face detection to Media Services through its Face API. The company has decided to go a step further though and will also use the Emotion API from Cognitive Services to detect the emotions of the people who appear in a video. This feature will be useful when it comes to discerning the level of interest of an audience during debates or keynotes.