Samira Bakhtiar, director of global media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services (AWS), explains how the company is seeing the industry truly embrace end-to-end productions in the cloud, and how it’s helping customers prepare for the next wave of production activity.
   

What industry trends have particularly stood out for you in 2023, and why?

Looking back on 2023, the biggest trends that our customers were interested in included cloud production, monetisation, and generative AI (artificial intelligence). While cloud production isn’t new, we are now seeing the industry truly embrace end-to-end productions in the cloud with a desire to incorporate the ISV (independent software vendor) Partner tools they know and love. From enabling remote teams for productions to moving live productions to cloud environments, 2023 showed how far cloud adoption for media and entertainment (M&E) productions has come. Similarly, our customers continued to explore more ways to better engage with their audiences and create more personalised experiences for viewers. We are incredibly focused on how we can help our customers use generative AI to help solve the technical challenges they face. Our goal is to help uncover new ways of automating processes in productions that may be manual, outdated and take time away from valuable creative ideation.

What impact are you seeing those trends having on the media and entertainment industry?

Let’s start with generative AI. Different forms of AI tools have been used across the M&E industry for decades, but today, many of AWS’s M&E customers are at the beginning of their journey using generative AI. Many of the use cases our customers are exploring involve applying generative AI to areas that already use some form of AI, such as monetisation, upscaling, media supply chain, and search. 2023 has been a year of exploration for many in the M&E industry, which will set the foundation for how generative AI tools will be used in years to come. That said, like any tool, generative AI needs to be used responsibly. It will be up to the industry to agree on what the use of generative AI will look like.

When it comes to cloud production, especially live productions like sports, we are already seeing huge advancements in how content is able to reach a wider audience. For example, the National Hockey league (NHL) is using AWS Elemental Link UHD and AWS Elemental MediaConnect to transmit 4K video from arenas seamlessly to partners across the globe to stream games and archive footage. We also just saw Bardel Entertainment optimise their animation pipeline for cloud production, which helps them take on larger projects by being able to scale their resources to remote teams.

With monetisation, we have also seen a steady increase in M&E customers looking to find new ways to simplify and modernise their advertising and marketing technology strategies. This year, we are seeing more companies combine their linear and digital advertising strategies and turn to tools like generative AI to develop solutions for hyper-personalisation, audience segmentation, and ad creative generation. Additionally, customers are using our generative AI solutions to help with hyper-localised ads and to modernise their distribution contract inventories. This ultimately unifies the ad sales, fulfilment, and measurement stacks – unlocking new opportunities for our customers, as well as the advertisers they serve.

How do you see those trends developing further in 2024?

The demand for content is by no means slowing down heading into 2024. In each of these areas, we are helping customers prepare for the next wave of production activity, which we believe will be incredibly high next year. How can we enable them to move fast? This means helping our customers get their productions optimised for incorporating talent in different geographies, removing unnecessary technical constraints, and ensuring that they can be more agile when integrating new monetisation products. Our goal is to enable studios, broadcasters, VFX, and production companies to move faster and bring in unique voices from all over the world. As a result, we must enable the many other teams involved in the production process to scale up quickly and have the right tools in place, whether from AWS or the 400+ media partners we work with, to accelerate production launches and see faster time to value.

Do you expect to see any new trends within the industry in 2024, and what will they be?

We have started to see this over the past few years, but I anticipate the M&E industry will continue to embrace more interactive and immersive experiences to add alongside passive viewing content. We already are seeing the demand for multi-screen experiences that provide valuable insights like analytics during sports, but now, we continue to see content extend into virtual and augmented experiences. For AWS, we have supported customers across M&E, gaming, and spatial computing for years, and our teams are aligning to help customers develop companion experiences for their existing content. Many of our customers are now asking us to accelerate the extension of physical experiences into virtual or augmented spaces, and thus we are seeing a demand for Digital Twins and Simulators – like using our Amazon SimSpace Weaver service combined with Unreal Engine – to create the next wave of bespoke experiences.

Additionally, I believe we will continue to see the M&E industry go “back to basics” and revisit how their core operations can be improved for the future. From supply chain systems to customer support, these areas remain increasingly important and present an opportunity to apply cloud and AI tools to increase both efficiency and production quality.