Canadian video-tech company Quickplay has partnered with Google Cloud to introduce a new generative artificial intelligence tool for streamlining content search.

Unveiled Wednesday at the Google Cloud Next 2024 show in Las Vegas, the so-called Curator Assistant is designed to streamline content search for programmers, creating a “storefront” of rails that contain titles targeted to engage consumer interest.

“OTT providers’ programming teams are the unsung heroes of content search,” Quickplay co-founder Paul Pastor said. “Curator Assistant gives them increased power to put the greatest assortment of relevant titles front and center before viewers.  Programmers will no longer be limited by their own or licensed metadata — they can literally leverage the entire internet, with conversational search, to program their service and drive more discovery opportunities that are personalized to the user or cohort.”

Quickplay said Curator Assistant’s modular, cloud-based architecture allows programmers to conversationally engage with the new AI tool in order to create topical, seasonal or passion content verticals that align with viewers’ personal interests.

In addition to creating content carousels based on individual consumption patterns, Curator Assistant will also augment existing metadata with additional tags, determine breakpoints in titles to identify binge markers and ad-breaks, and ease the process of catalog browsing through its natural language interface.

It’s the second time this year Quickplay has introduced an AI tool to drive engagement. Last fall at IBC 2023, the company unveiled Media Companion, a voice-based AI tool that also helps viewers find content that aligns with their desires.

“Our partnership with Quickplay emphasizes not only cutting-edge technology through Generative AI use cases but also thought leadership and expertise in optimizing the viewer experience,” Anil Saboo, director of industry independent software vendor partnerships at Google Cloud, said. “Together, Google Cloud and Quickplay are setting new standards for the future of OTT, pushing boundaries and shaping the landscape of content delivery.”

Firstlight Media said Tuesday that it will rebrand under the Quickplay name, about two years after the company purchased the cloud-agnostic OTT platform company from AT&T. 

Toronto-based Firstlight partnered with Highland Capital in March 2020 to purchase AT&T’s Quickplay for an undisclosed sum. Firstlight founder and CEO Andre Christensen had earlier  served as Quickplay’s chief operating officer and head of product development for AT&T.  

In a press release, the company said it expects to leverage its new moniker as it makes the rounds at the IBC 2022 show in Amsterdam next month, where it plans to preview new tools that can help accelerate OTT’s shift to platforms like:

“As we’ve extended our leadership in cloud-native streaming, it’s become clear to the market that the platform we’ve created is truly differentiated from anything that has come before it,” Quickplay co-founder and CEO Andre Christensen said in a press release. “Just as it did more than a decade ago, Quickplay today is making huge technology leaps that are enabling operators to capture leadership positions in an increasingly crowded streaming environment.”

AT&T said it has completed its acquisition of Toronto-based multiscreen video vendor Quickplay Media from Madison Dearborn Partners.

AT&T and Quickplay announced the deal in May.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but AT&T said it plans keep Quickplay’s team of more than 350 employees and contractors.

Quickplay’s platform, which ingests, encodes, transcodes and stores video, currently supports AT&T’s U-verse TV Everywhere service, and will also help to underpin a set of OTT services that AT&T is expected to launch in Q4: DirecTV Now, DirecTV Mobile, and DirecTV Preview.

Quickplay, they said, will also continue to seek new business and support its other customers, which include Singtel, Bell, Bloomberg Television, Sony Pictures, Rogers Communications, Verizon, Samsung, Vodafone, and Telus, among others. 

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BOSTON – AT&T Entertainment Group CEO John Stankey said recent moves to acquire digital content and technology are part of an overall plan to meld long-form, short-form, mobile and premium content into a new category, a so-called digital bundle that could help draw consumers who have been reluctant to participate in pay TV into the fold.

At Tuesday’s INTX Show General Session, Stankey pointed to AT&T’s joint venture with former 21st Century Fox chief Peter Chernin – Otter Media – and other moves including its purchase of Quickplay, are all part of that overall plan.

The Quickplay deal, he said, fulfills a desire the company has had almost for the dozen years it has been in the TV business – to won he full stack of technology behind its services. Quickplay, a multi-screen video firm for managed and over-the-top video that currently supports AT&T U-Verse’s TV Everywhere service, is a move in that direction.

“[Now] we own the entire technology stack to deliver to end users,” Stankey said. “Most people are going to play in the full stack approach,” Stankey said, adding he feels good about what the moves does for the company.

Related:Behind AT&T’s Cross-Platform Video Moves: Q&A With Tony Goncalves [subscription required]

Stankey said that in the next two or three years, he envisions a world where AT&T has fused its products in the mobile, premium content with other short-form and long-form programming from Otter and other sources, creating a new category where the two are blended together.

“If we’re successful, it’s also an opportunity to start pulling folks who haven’t moved into; subscriber services into subscriber services,” Stankey said. “I don’t know what precisely that is going to be, but mobile allows you to try a lot of different things.”

Stankey stopped short of calling AT&T’s moves an attempt to create a gateway product for younger consumers, and added that some consumers will never be coaxed into the pay TV model.

“I definitely believe we need to have a set of training wheels,” Stankey said. “And I do believe that some will never come into the ecosystem. But we’re starting to see where different sized bundles allow you to address different parts of the market.”

He added that building the right architecture, providing connectivity and helping consumers move the “tonnage” of bits for entertainment or what have you while maintaining a proper return on investment, “that’s OK as a business too.”

Stankey also joined the chorus of pay TV operators in opposition to recent proposals by the Federal Communications Commission to unlock set-top boxes and xx, addingthat the current environment that encourages investment in infrastructure “seems to be a winning  combination.”