Tilly Norwood was just the start.
Fastream Interactive, a group that designs Tech for interactive television channels, unveiled its new range of television presenters generated by AI-AI on Tuesday. The images generated by computer will be placed on the interactive TV music channel of Faststream, Roxi, imitating MTV style presenters by presenting musicians and clips. The free television interactive channel is broadcast on NextGen TV in 31 markets in the United States, including in Washington DC, Seattle and Las Vegas, via the distribution partners Sinclair and Gray, as well as on Sky services in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Fastream has been set up thanks to a management in management of ROIX earlier this year, where an investor union joined the founders of Roxi to acquire the technology and assets of the company. Investors from Faststream include Sinclair and Gray Media, bassist U2 Adam Clayton, former manager of U2 Paul McGuinness, Simon Cowell, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, the founder of Terra Firma Guy Hands and the British businessman Jim Mellon.
Faststream presented its new technology via a video (see below) demonstrating “virtual hosts” in action, featuring “presenters” of various ages, ethnic groups and regional accents (British, American, Australian). The announcement follows the presentation of Tilly Norwood, an “AI actress” created by the technological company Particile 6 productions, which sparked a fierce reaction of the unions of the actors and the creative community.
In a declaration, the CEO of interactive Faststream, Rob Lewis, praised the advantages of reduction in the costs of using virtual presenters.
“With AI, we can have Roxi presenters presenting Beyoncé with a favorite Caribbean island without having to hire and fly in a production team or charter the yacht,” he said. Lewis noted that “we understand why some actors and presenters are worried about AI”, but argued that the drop in the television industry finally needs to “embrace the talents generated by AI and interactive television experiences if we are to attract younger viewers to television”.
Answer questions from The Hollywood Reporter By e-mail, FastStream explained that Roxi’s offer includes “100 million musical clips and virtual clips, it would simply be impossible to have television presenters providing contextualized and personalized segments” for the entire catalog of videoclips “on this scale, using traditional production techniques”.
The company said that AI presenters will be identified as such on the screen. Lewis also noted that Roxi excludes “all the music generated by AI without license from his catalog”.
The company said that AI presenters had been developed “using a tailor-made virtual television presenter’s platform developed internally, integrated with Google VEO3, which generates videos”, but has not commented on the underlying data used for AI training. One of Tilly Norwood’s main criticisms is that the software that created the character would have been trained in the unpaid work of professional actors.
Reached to comment, a spokesperson for equity, the union of British actors, said: “Whether it is an AI player or a television presenter on AI, real human data entries are used to train AI systems and generate these digital assets. Used to create AI presenters.
