MGM Taps AI to Make Its Archives More Accessible for Licensing

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is looking to make it easier for advertisers and media producers to license the likes of James Bond. Fresh off its acquisition by Amazon earlier this year, the nearly 100-year-old film distributor has a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that can locate clips based on search terms in lines of dialogue with a goal to add object recognition in the coming months. The goal is to make it easier for commercial video producers to find and license specific clips within the MGM library, which spans properties like the James Bond franchise, The Handmaid's Tale and the Rocky films. The team behind the system, called Clip Locator, claims MGM is the first Hollywood studio to make its archives accessible in this way. It's part of a larger effort to monetize the company's large trove of intellectual property and use technology to better mine the content for use by outside partners as well as for marketing, sales and public relations purposes. "It's really about exposure and discovery," said Jim Crosby, svp of digital at MGM. "So across all of our lines of businesses, for the licensing team to be able to expose this content and to be able to do deep discovery to find stuff that you would normally wouldn't find, I think that's invaluable." MGM director of advertising and licensing Ben Houston said the company sells clips, stills and character recreations from its media properties to everyone from advertisers and agencies to documentary filmmakers, scripted television producers, book publishers and concert venues. For example, cruise operator Direct Line insurance integrated the Robocop character into a campaign in 2020, and U.K.-based bookmaker Ladbrokes tapped the Rocky franchise for an ad earlier this year. "The advertising community, the filmmaking community--they're our core business," Houston said. "We want to make their lives a lot easier with a tool where they can go research our films and look up our assets fast and easy. And hopefully, in turn, make MGM that one-stop shop for any content needs." One challenge in making a tool like this in the past has been training an algorithm to pick up on the many different inflections, accents and volume levels in which a line of dialogue might be delivered. MGM has indexed its current AI on 300 of its top titles, but it plans on expanding that to thousands more as the tool rolls out. The team is also currently training the system to recognize people, objects and logos within a given frame and will make those searchable in the coming months. The company hopes that the tool will eventually surface lesser-known clips and properties that have now been rendered searchable for the first time, allowing the studio to flex more of its archival library. "Unless you were an expert of the IP, you might not necessarily know it," said Robert Marick, MGM's executive vice president of global consumer products and experiences. "Whether it's a licensed media clip or a recreation used in advertising, it's a significant opportunity for us to ensure that the brand—our brands and our properties—stay fresh in the minds of consumers." MGM has also partnered with blockchain company Eluvio on the project to use the startup's decentralized system as a data storage ledger for its catalog. The two companies first inked a multi-year agreement on licensing and data storage in early 2021.