What we talked about
Yash Chaturvedi, Head of Product for Live Sports Ads at Amazon, joins Federico to unpack how AI, computer vision, and product management are reshaping streaming and advertising. Yash traces his path from early OCR projects at Staples to Prime Video, where he helped build long-form video understanding to automate global compliance and power features like maturity ratings and content descriptors. That same foundation inspired his work in virtual/brand placement:seamlessly inserting context-aware brand assets into scenes:leading to multiple U.S. patents and a new, non-interruptive model for monetization.
Show notes
Yash Chaturvedi got his first product management job because his hiring manager at Staples needed someone cheap:he openly admits it:and was willing to bet on a driven candidate from a tier-B school. Twelve years later, Yash holds seven approved US patents, leads live sports advertising at Amazon Prime Video, and jokes that filing a patent is like standup comedy: “you say something wild and crazy, and then you just try to justify it with your science and engineering team before the lawyers cut you off.”
What we covered
- When Yash joined Amazon, Prime Video was streaming across 200 territories, each with its own content regulations, and operators in multiple countries were still manually reviewing titles one by one against local standards. He built the long-form scene understanding platform that replaced that process:teaching a model to describe what is happening in any given scene or frame:which directly produced the maturity ratings and content descriptors that now appear on every Prime Video detail page before you hit play.
- The same scene-understanding capability led him to the insight behind virtual product placement: if a system knows there is an empty table in a scene, it can place a Coca-Cola can on it and charge Coke for every viewer who sees it. He described it as a win-win-win: content creators get an additional revenue stream, viewers avoid interruptive ad breaks, and advertisers reach audiences who are actually engaged with the content rather than leaving the room.
- The virtual product placement patent:which Yash describes as the one closest to his heart:is written not just to describe where the technology is today, but where it needs to go: seamless insertion, pixel-perfect compositing, audio-video QA, and the full pipeline from advertiser asset delivery to on-screen rendering. He treated the patent as a product vision document, identifying building blocks and their connections before the engineering team fleshed them out.
- On live sports, 30 to 40 percent of sports content airtime is currently dedicated to advertising breaks. Yash’s charter at Prime Video is to rethink that structure:replacing interruptive ad loads with formats that are more native to the viewing experience, including digitally augmented brand logos placed directly on the field of play. These virtual placements can already be personalized by audience segment or geography, meaning a viewer on the East Coast and one on the West Coast could see different brands on the same field simultaneously.
- Yash described the evolution of the PM role in the AI era not as a replacement of job functions but as a compression of timelines during the discovery phase. A sprint that once took two weeks can now take three to four days because PMs can prototype ideas themselves using tools like Cursor and Lovable, show something concrete to engineers and stakeholders, and get real feedback before committing to a full build cycle. He called this a shift from roadmaps to versioning:committing to a mini proof of concept first and deciding on the next iteration only after seeing how it performs.
- His parting advice to product managers: “Don’t be scared of AI taking your job. Be scared of the PM who knows how to use AI better than you.”
About Yash
Yash Chaturvedi is Head of Product for Live Sports Ads at Amazon Prime Video, where he has spent the past several years building AI-powered products at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and streaming monetization. He holds seven approved US patents, primarily covering virtual product placement and long-form video understanding, with additional patents pending around generative AI applications.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yashchat
- Website: https://amazon.com
Episode 68 of the PreVetted Podcast.