AVA Discovery View: Surfacing Authentic Moments

At Netflix, we have created millions of artwork to represent our titles. Each artwork tells a story about the title it represents. From our <a href="https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-videos-through-a-b-testing-f6155c4595f6" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">testing on promotional assets</a>, we know which of these assets have performed well and which ones haven’t. Through this, our teams have developed an intuition of what visual and thematic artwork characteristics work well for what genres of titles. A piece of promotional artwork may resonate more in certain regions, for certain genres, or for fans of particular talent. The complexity of these factors makes it difficult to determine the best creative strategy for upcoming titles. Our assets are often created by selecting static image frames directly from our source videos. To improve it, we decided to invest in creating a <a href="https://netflixtechblog.com/building-a-media-understanding-platform-for-ml-innovations-9bef9962dcb7" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Media Understanding Platform</a>, which enables us to extract meaningful insights from media that we can then surface in our creative tools. In this post, we will take a deeper look into one of these tools, AVA Discovery View. <h1>Intro to AVA Discovery View</h1> AVA is an internal tool that surfaces still frames from video content. The tool provides an efficient way for creatives (photo editors, artwork designers, etc.) to pull moments from video content that authentically represent the title’s narrative themes, main characters, and visual characteristics. These still moments are used by multiple teams across Netflix for artwork (on and off the Netflix platform), Publicity, Marketing, Social teams, and more. Stills are used to merchandise & publicize titles authentically, providing a diverse set of entry points to members who may watch for different reasons. For example, for our hit title “Wednesday”, one member may watch it because they love mysteries, while another may watch because they love coming-of-age stories or goth aesthetics. Another member may be drawn by talent. It’s a creative’s job to select frames with all these entry points in mind. Stills may be enhanced and combined to create a more polished piece of artwork or be used as is. For many teams and titles, Stills are essential to Netflix’s promotional asset strategy. <a href="https://netflixtechblog.com/ava-discovery-view-surfacing-authentic-moments-b8cd145491cc">Website</a>