• by Alex Weprin , April 10, 2019

As Viacom continues to expand its direct-to-consumer streaming video strategy, the company is turning to Google Cloud to enhance its content discovery capabilities.

Viacom, like many of its media competitors, is creating more content every year, increasingly for a global audience that may consume it on different platforms.

The company is using Google Cloud for its "Intelligent Content Discovery Platform.” The platform uses machine learning to automatically pull short clips from content as soon as it is ingested into the platform. It can highlight new content or segments, or identify commercials to optimize the viewing experience.

The company is using Google Cloud for automated content tagging, discovery and intelligence. Encompassing some 65 petabytes of content, the deal allows Viacom’s own teams to easily locate and understand the context of the content, while improving the efficiency of distribution strategies to consumers.

Viacom is also embracing Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) strategy, collaborating closely with Google engineers to develop and maintain applications.

The ability of Google Cloud’s solutions to scale across platforms and around the globe is seen as an asset.

While companies like Disney and WarnerMedia are betting on their own premium direct-to-consumer offerings, Viacom has taken a multi-pronged approach to digital content.

The company has created and launched a number of digital studios to produce original content for streaming services, like Netflix and Hulu, as well as social-media platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat, an Viacom’s own digital platforms.

At the same time, the company acquired Pluto TV to have a free, ad-supported streaming offering for consumers. Pluto TV has a rotating library of free programming, including from Viacom’s own stable of channels.