This year’s IBC saw over 45,000 broadcast, media and technology professionals and 1,350 exhibitors come together to exchange ideas and shape thinking within the industry.
Organisers are keen to point out that attendance was up from last year. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and this apparent growth masks substantial industry structural challenges that have been building for some time.
Without significant change, it’s hard to see how the current fragmented ecosystem at IBC will retain its relevance, or how all media companies will navigate their path to scale and efficiency.
Such change rarely happens linearly, cleanly, and without shifts in the power dynamic in the market. Refreshingly, as an industry, we no longer expect audiences to move from broadcast to streaming in an orderly fashion. We now understand that they just want great content, at the right time for them – whether live or on-demand, with ads, through subscription, or both, bundled or a la carte. Freed from the technical constraints of the past, we can understand and serve an audience fragmented across languages and cultures, devices and time, and their appetite to pay.
Managing fragmented audiences demands broad organisational changes, to enable the flexibility and efficiency that’s now critical and to maximise value from technology and data.
We saw much more understanding of this at IBC. This is testament to media CTOs and other leaders in tech who increasingly succeed at embedding technology deeply within their businesses.
The efficiency drive
It goes without saying that AI was a major focus at IBC2024, but we felt that it wasn’t quite the all-consuming theme that many had predicted. Instead, a different story emerged from our conversations with industry leaders: the need for complete modernisation of their tech stacks and operating models to drive cost efficiencies and create nimble, future-fit media businesses.
In practice this means aligning and embedding tech into the business, delivering flexibly and technology fungibility – but also providing internal trusted advisory capabilities across their organisations, based on a deep understanding of the industry and business activities, to help drive innovation and advocate for what is now possible.
This push for efficiency depends on successful cloud management; although most major media companies have now migrated, there has been a tendency to “lift and shift” systems or apps that were never architected technically or commercially for cloud. This hasn’t been efficient and hasn’t always cut costs.
Instead, leaders need to ensure that their systems are effectively architected for cloud and that they’re integrating cloud native applications with matching more flexible commercial models; that their tech stacks are adaptable, strategic drivers of business growth. They must build effective CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) delivery pipelines, taking a forward-thinking software-centric approach. This also means a shift from legacy-style IT operating models to modern product-centric operating models.
Value from AI
As we’ve noted, AI was an ever-present but not wholly dominant theme at IBC2024. We were struck by the way many media organisations are now framing their response to AI, which is not regarded as the silver bullet to solve all their problems. Instead, it’s a significant part of the overall technology toolkit and the focus is on ensuring that this exciting and transformative technology drives maximum value.
This was the main discussion point at Cognizant’s Roundtable on generative AI, cost-hosted with Google Cloud. “Beyond the hype: how media finds true value in AI today” examined the challenges and opportunities for the industry and the need for effective metrics.
We found that only about 10% of gen AI pilots move into production within 12 months and only about 15 to 20% will reach production. One reason for this is poor availability of data; governance models are often not yet well tuned to the balance between data security and enabling secure, granular access to give teams the data they need. For years, organisational data owners were reminded of value derived from data. Now that this is understood, those controlling data can be quite protective of it, to the decrement of initiatives which require visibility and use of end-to-end data stacks. Other reasons we observe are pilot fatigue, unstructured approaches to evaluation of AI capabilities and unrealistic business cases.
There’s a growing realisation that large companies need a more strategic approach to piloting gen AI use cases; to understand what tools will help them meet their goals for growth, and what is just noise.
An example of a successful AI pilot was our demo on Microsoft’s booth to localise content. We showed how transcription is improved through gen AI-driven contextual analysis of a video’s content, and how new audio can be generated and reattached the video. Crucially, such workflows can be built within a framework that protects against intellectual property loss or infringement and ensures content and brand security – while adapting to a media company’s current technology landscape and tools.
Our award
With so much innovation on display, Cognizant was delighted to join our partners in winning an award for Ecoflow, our IBC Accelerator project to reduce the environmental impact of streaming. This important work reflects Cognizant’s commitment to sustainability and net zero, so the Best Carbon Footprint Initiative award was a particular cause for celebration.
The award recognises the pioneering development of metrics for energy consumption across the streaming supply chain. This is notoriously challenging to measure because there are so many variables and different parties involved. The project has already identified the impact of energy consumed in the home with broadband equipment and television.
We are developing evidence-based actions that streamers can take to reduce this, for example by adding an “eco” viewing mode to their apps that can in some cases reduce power used in the home by as much as 30% without materially impacting viewing experience.
Conclusion
We left IBC2024 with a powerful sense of the media industry’s priorities in a period of uncertainty, but also positivity and recognition that investments in technology and operating mode transformation are starting to bear fruit.
AI is, and will continue to be, a major part of conversations, but pragmatism will prevail and technology teams who are properly embedded in the business will support the delivery of business projects that just happen to leverage AI technologies rather than AI or technology projects.
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