AWS for M&E Blog
PBS enhances search on digital platforms using Amazon Bedrock
Generative AI is transforming how audiences discover and consume content across streaming platforms, unlocking more personalized viewing experiences. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the beloved network behind popular US programs like Sesame Street and Frontline, recognized the value of using generative AI to provide enhanced search results to viewers on the PBS App and PBS LearningMedia platforms.
To do this, PBS teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) science and strategy experts from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. They developed and launched its new generative AI-powered search engine powered by the AWS managed generative AI service Amazon Bedrock. Working backwards from their problem with the AWS team, PBS envisioned the updated search engine, trained and tested models, then cataloged and tagged metadata for more than 700,000 assets in less than six months. As a result, PBS viewers can now search the entire PBS library based on their interests—across subgenres, topics, themes, and even moods.
Figure 1: Search on the PBS App, shown on a Mobile Device and TV.
“If we did manual metadata-tagging for this project, it would have taken years,” theorized Mikey Centrella, Director of Product at PBS, Digital Innovation. “With Amazon Bedrock, we were able to do it quickly, at a fraction of the cost and within the secure AWS environment we already have. In just a few months, we built a proof-of-concept, tested and successfully scaled it into production. By greatly improving our search tools, we’re delivering a better experience for viewers and showing them different parts of our catalog that they might not have found otherwise.”
Laying the foundation with AWS
The relationship PBS has with AWS spans more than a decade. The organization leverages AWS across nearly every aspect of its operations, which enables it to cost-efficiently scale and deploy new technology. With innovation as their north star, Centrella and his team evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities where PBS can enhance or grow its offerings.
“One of the great things about building on AWS is that we can easily explore ways to modernize our operations, without impacting what’s already in production,” said Centrella. “Our assets are already in the cloud, so it’s a safe way to play, figure out what we might want to invest in and then apply it across the business. As a nonprofit, we must be smart about our choices and use our dollars efficiently. AWS helps us protect the value of what we’re creating for the American public.”
Centrella’s team wanted to create a solution with generative AI that would add value and have an immediate impact for viewers. After connecting with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center in late 2024, the team began to explore how best to augment the existing search engine of PBS—built on AWS and cloud-native tools from PBS—using generative AI.
“The table stakes [for streaming services] have changed because of technology,” noted Centrella. “Our users wanted a more robust search engine, so that’s what we created.”
Building with Amazon Bedrock
After defining the project scope, PBS began an eight-week engagement with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. The mission of the Generative AI Innovation Center is to help organizations, like PBS, accelerate their adoption of generative AI to unlock mission-changing outcomes. They accomplish this through bespoke generative AI proof-of-concepts, designed in collaboration with customers. Together with AWS, Centrella’s team began building the new search engine framework and testing different models. The existing search engine implementation of PBS had basic logic functionality. It could pull title or rudimentary keyword matches, however, the team integrated generative AI for extensive metadata tagging to enable the new search engine to offer much more specific results.
Each area of search classification encompasses hundreds of options and dozens of metadata tags that can be applied to any given project. For example, a viewer can search heartwarming in the PBS App and receive a result such as All Creatures Great and Small, a charming series about a veterinarian in 1930s Northern England.
“Generative AI is great at pattern recognition and summarization, and metadata—set up correctly—provides a solid foundation for success,” Centrella explained. “We found that the show descriptions and transcripts gave us the most value for the price for analyzing content. We narrowed down four areas of classification internally, then used models on Amazon Bedrock to analyze the content and apply the most appropriate metadata.”
AWS and PBS established a sandbox environment to collaboratively evaluate model performance using Amazon Bedrock, ultimately determining the Anthropic Claude Sonnet to be the best fit. The PBS team then ran parallel workstreams on 50 shows, with PBS colleagues manually creating metadata tags based on show scripts to compare with the results created using generative AI. Looking at the outcomes, they found that the model produced data sets as good as or better than the ones that were created manually, and doing so in minutes. Based on those promising results, PBS moved the model into operation, generating metadata tags for its entire content library of 700,000 assets and incorporating this new metadata into its search engine.
Planning the next generative AI implementation
With the updated search engine successfully launched, the PBS Innovation Team is working again with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to evaluate other ways to incorporate generative AI into its infrastructure. The most likely next step is to extend enhanced search recommendations to the network’s kid’s catalog.
“PBS understands that the audience and their behaviors are changing, across all the available streaming options, gaming platforms and mobile devices. We live in a multiplatform, multimedia world, and we want to meet people where they are,” shared Centrella. “It can be challenging to address all the new technology and distribution types that seem to emerge daily, and at the same time, linear still matters. AWS makes it easy for us to evolve and experiment, while maintaining our core values.”
Learn more about building scalable generative AI applications on AWS, or connect with an AWS AI expert.