Some people still ask me, 'should we call you traditional or digital content?'

'Just call me content,' I answer.

Mediacorp's Chief Content Officer Cheek (Cheah Chee Kong) told conference delegates at Broadcast Asia 2017:

“To be successful in the current environment your original content is your only differentiator… It’s not about having better technology, what gets people listening and watching is your original content.”

There have been four waves of digital.

First there were brochures, then the web came along and people put their basic brochures on the web.

Stage two was the 'always on' web.

The third stage was 'the everywhere web.'

And now we are in the fourth stage , the 'embedded web.' “In the embedded web the internet is connected to everything, internet functionality is embedded in many devices.”

“Anyone in the content creation business can now make and distribute their content themselves, so how content is distributed is no longer unique to broadcasters. Now it is the experience that is more important than how you package it.”

How can content creators use the stage four embedded web for their benefit?

And will the embedded web create new challenges for content creators?

“We have to produce high quality content, because artificial intelligence can easily create lots of poor quality content. The thing that will differentiate good content in future is high quality human content,” he said.

To illustrate his point he demonstrated poetry created by bots and humans, at BotPoet.com (try it and guess which poems are created by people or bots).

Simple news reports are now being written by bots, videos are now being made by bots, film trailers are created by bots, for example, the film Morgan used a bot to make its trailer.

But how creative can machines be?

While machines can create content automatically now, they can't be creative like human beings. This will be the edge for broadcasters, says CheeK.

Yes, content is king, but it is only great content that will differentiate professional broadcasters from what is created by artificial intelligence.

Another trend CheeK has noticed is the move from snack sized content on small mobile devices to long form content.

“A while ago I would be standing in the coffee line and people would fill their time by looking at short content via social media platforms. Now they are watching/listening to longer form content because there is more bandwidth and the app interfaces are better.”

Can you tell the difference? The film trailer below was created by a bot.