Media & entertainment organizations are wrestling with a converging set of issues that can potentially transform every aspect of their operations. At the top of nearly every company’s priority list is a mix of technology and business topics, ranging from emerging workflows and an evolving media supply chain to increasing budget pressures and the efficient allocation of resources. Companies are getting more creative about identifying effective ways of working that not only make the most sense for their business, but also meet the needs of their changing audiences and customers.
Resourcing: Are we in or out?
Traditionally, our industry has gone back and forth between a fully-outsourced/managed-service model and a fully in-house model for media processing and distribution. But now as more companies realize the cost efficiencies over a fully-outsourced model, we’ll see a continued shift toward hybrid models, in which much of the media supply chain infrastructure and workflow — from ingest to processing to distribution — exist in-house. The staffing to support that supply chain (e.g., developers, media engineers) will be outsourced.
This approach offers flexibility and predictable costs for maintaining and iterating a company’s supply chain at a time when full-time employee headcount is closely scrutinized.
For most media companies, moving to cloud-based workflows is a matter of “when, not if.” If they haven’t already, they are certainly planning it. The first target for modernization would likely have been a company’s enterprise media supply chain, fulfilling the central need for ingest, QC, processing and distribution of content for broadcast, VOD and OTT platforms.
With many studios’ enterprise supply chains up and running, the focus is now shifting to expand that workflow modernization to other internal teams with similar needs, such as marketing, digital and social media creatives. Additionally, companies are now looking to extend their supply chains and infrastructure to previously siloed parts of the business, such as international teams around the world.
Artificial Intelligence
It seems like new Generative AI startups and services are popping up every day. Continuing into 2025, media companies will be looking for ways in which they can integrate this new toolset into their supply chain workflows. The best AI use cases to start with are those that eliminate time-consuming but less critical manual tasks, such as descriptive metadata generation and formatting. For example, AI tooling can both generate new content synopses and reformat existing synopses to different standards as needed (e.g., creating a 50-, 100-, and 200-character synopsis to meet different platform requirements).
Moving into 2025, it’s a certainty that studios and content creators will continue to navigate tumultuous and unpredictable times in the industry. However, many of the challenges they’ll likely face should instead be viewed as opportunities — to reinvent their operations, refine their offerings, sharpen their competitive edge and expand their audiences while also reaching new demographics.
Chris McCarthy is VP Media Solutions at TMT Insights (https://tmtinsights.com), which offers a range of services, including product ideation & design, software development, and cloud strategy & optimization.