Databricks Announces Lakehouse Offering for Customers in the Media and Entertainment Industries

The Databricks Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment launches with early support from AWS, Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2022 /CNW/ -- Databricks, the Data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse paradigm, today launched the first lakehouse platform for data-driven businesses in the media and entertainment industry. The Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment enables organizations across the media ecosystem to deliver better data and AI outcomes for consumers, advertisers and media partners with a single and collaborative platform for data, analytics and AI. Early adopters include Databricks customers like Acxiom, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SEGA. Databricks is also working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and industry partners like Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics.

With use case accelerators, custom Brickbuilder Solutions and a robust partner ecosystem, businesses will be able to deliver a personalized consumer experience, prepare for consumer analytics at scale, and empower greater collaboration and secure data sharing among media teams. The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment incorporates data solutions and use-case accelerators for critical industry use cases like AI-driven recommendation engines, customer lifetime value and churn, quality of experience, community toxicity analysis, advertising optimization and more.

With Databricks, organizations can leverage all of their data to build a holistic view of their audience and advertisers, make real-time decisions and drive innovation with advanced analytics. With support for real-time analytics, business intelligence (BI), and powerful AI capabilities on all data types, Databricks enables media organizations to use all of their data - including images, video and other unstructured data types - to develop a holistic understanding of their customers.

"Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment is central to how we engage with players and streamline our data science function here at SEGA. The lakehouse platform means that data sets are available all in one centralized environment, enabling us to track key metrics to create more personalized experiences for players, drive community activities and to build our own machine learning algorithm to tailor games to our players. " – Felix Baker, Manager, Data Services, SEGA Europe.

"With Databricks' Lakehouse Platform on AWS, Warner Bros. Discovery is powering the future of content discovery and audience experiences. By leveraging data to better predict consumer behavior and provide personalized content recommendations in real-time, we are able to customize the viewer experience and improve overall engagement for our customers." – Martin Ma, Group VP, Engineering at Warner Bros. Discovery.

"With a suite of data tools powered by Databricks and AWS, Acxiom is building data-driven strategies for clients that address the full marketing tech ecosystem and are designed to deliver actionable results that drive business impact. " — David Skinner, Chief Strategy Officer, Acxiom.

"Being able to deliver more value through big data, analytics and AI is one of the top focus areas for media and entertainment organizations around the globe. We are delighted to support Databricks' Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment on AWS, which will help customers produce smarter consumer experiences, better advertiser outcomes and an enhanced content lifecycle through the power of data." – Marc Aldrich, General Manager, Global Media & Entertainment at AWS

"Databricks is partnered with Cognizant to connect CSPs, content owners and OTT platform owners with extensive viewer experience insights, device usage and contextual awareness in real-time utilizing modern AIops capabilities. It unleashes advanced ad targeting, personalization and service enhancement based on aggregation en-masse not possible with single-purpose QoE solutions in the market." — Tiran Dagan, Cognizant's CDO and Industry Head for CMT.

Powerful industry solutions customized for the data lakehouse

Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment Solution Accelerators offer a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization's data engineers and data scientists. Popular solution accelerators pre-built for Databricks customers across the media and entertainment industry include:

• Recommendation Engines: Create more personalized experiences for customers with AI-powered content recommendations that drive engagement and monetization opportunities.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Easily identify and better understand the most valuable customers with CLV models that focus on spending patterns and retention to help guide better marketing investments and product development choices.
• Streaming Quality of Service: Increase viewer retention and analyze both streaming and batch data sets to ensure a performant streaming content experience that drives engagement and loyalty.
• Toxicity Detection for Gaming: Cultivate healthier gaming communities by leveraging natural language processing for the real-time detection of toxic language from in-game user comments and chats.

Databricks Partners deliver deeper functionality for M&E customers

Along with AWS and consulting partners like Cognizant and Lovelytics are accelerating the adoption of the lakehouse platform by developing Brickbuilder Solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry, tailor-made to combine the power of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform with the proven experience of partners. The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment launches with additional support and capabilities from leading technology partners Labelbox and Fivetran.

• AWS for Media and Entertainment: AWS aligns purpose-built M&E capabilities specifically for the data and analytics space. AWS and Databricks have a long history of helping M&E organizations transform their direct-to-consumer, advertising and content businesses with the power of big data, analytics and AI.
• Video Quality of Experience by Cognizant: Enables lakehouse customers to mitigate video quality issues that drive viewers to churn - whether it's playback failure, delayed time-to-first-frame, or a rebuffing issue. Cognizant's solution pairs fine-grained telemetry data with AI/ML to quickly identify and remedy video quality issues in near real-time.
• Sports and Entertainment Analytics by Lovelytics: Brings streaming data to life including optimizing baseball's Statcast data to help teams at every level analyze thousands of data points on player performance throughout the season. With AI and predictive analytics to predict and forecast performance, the Lovelytics solution enables sports and entertainment organizations to optimize strategy in-game as well as the fan and live event experience.
• Labelbox for Media: Labelbox is a training data platform used to produce high-quality training data from images, video, and text – a challenge for many media organizations given their businesses revolve around unstructured data. Combining Databricks and Labelbox gives customers an ideal environment for unstructured data workflows and deriving value from their media assets.
• 360 Views with Fivetran: A data integration service, Fivetran integrates over 180+ data sources across operational, ad and mar tech data sources. For media publishers, Fivetran automates ingestion from dozens of data sources into Databricks' Lakehouse allowing the business to build a 360-degree view of their customers that improves targeting and drives revenue.

"Executing on a strategy around data, analytics and AI is more critical than ever for media companies to remain agile, competitive and data-driven as audience demands change with the rapidly evolving media landscape," said Steve Sobel, Global Industry Leader for Media & Entertainment at Databricks. "We are thrilled to collaborate with industry leaders like AWS, Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics to bring the Databricks Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment to the industry, and enable media leaders to personalize, monetize and innovate in delivering smarter, 1;1 experiences for consumer and advertisers across the globe."

For more information, visit Databricks' Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment homepage. If you are attending the NAB Show 2022, visit Databricks with AWS at booth W3500.

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 7,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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SOURCE Databricks