IBC2025: Supply Chain Efficiencies Won’t Save Sinking Legacy Media
One word dominated conversations at broadcast equipment show IBC this week – and it wasn’t AI.
Efficiency is on everyone’s lips. With little genuine tech innovation around the legacy media business and the vendors who supply it are battling to survive by stripping cost and speeding processes. Applying artificial intelligence to pretty much everything seems to offer the only hope for broadcasters needing to balance the books before their audience is vaporized by streamers, social media, and YouTube.
Delegates arrived at IBC this year in a state of flux, unsure of the direction to turn as tumbling economics and AI frenzy turn the industry inside out.
Broadcast kit trade body IABM set the scene: “This marks the second year we see a progressive decline, with a softening in market confidence and an increase in negative sentiment following a peak in 2023,” said IABM Head of Knowledge and Insight Chris Evans.
The impact of COVID, global conflict, and tariffs (real or threatened) have put media into a tailspin – but arguably these macro forces have only hastened the inevitable.
'Netflix Won'
“The streaming wars are over. Netflix has won. Let’s move the fuck on,” media cartographer Evan Shapiro told IBC.
The IABM highlighted French broadcaster TF1’s first of its kind "partnership" with Netflix (to allow the streamer to distribute its programming) as a strategy that could be replicated.
“Limiting content distribution alienates the next generation of audiences, for whom content is more important than platform,” said Evans.
The traditional media market is “stagnant” according to Shapiro “while Netflix has doubled its value from $200bn to over a half a trillion dollars.” He was referring to the challenge faced by studios like Disney and WBD which retain (currently) the weights of a linear business.
For Shapiro, the real battle is no longer between streamers but between traditional media and what he called the “big tech Death Stars” - YouTube, TikTok, Amazon. “Big tech is big and it’s in a dominant position, but it’s not in control. The audience is.”
Will Cloud-Native Agile Production Cure Broadcast Execs' Headaches?
Reaching that audience before it deserts entirely to social and streaming is the headache facing broadcast media executives.
“Media production has been done the same way for 60 years,” said Lewis Smithingham, EVP at strategic consultancy Monks (formerly Media.Monks). “The biggest change has been the way we have to deliver. Audiences are more fragmented and they are across a wide number of locations. We cannot use a straight line of sight any more since there is no primary platform.”
Monks EVP Lewis Smithingham on IBC's Cloud to Collaboration panel (Image credit Adrian Pennington)
His prescription is "Cloud-native agile production": “We can use software running in the cloud to get to these new audiences – because software moves at a much faster rate. There is a misconception with cloud that it is expensive. Well, yes, if you leave it on the whole time. If you leave your aircon on the entire summer it is expensive. What we need to do as an industry is take the efficiencies in traditional IT and bring it into production.”
It seems strange that we’re even talking about a reticence to move to cloud but it only demonstrates the huge lift-and-shift operation that most broadcasters and studios are still going through.
“We now have real world experience of helping broadcasters navigate the shift from satellite and fibre to an IP first infrastructure,” said Stephen Stewart, Executive Member, IET Media Technical Network. “We’re not just talking about cloud-based disaster recovery - now cloud is beginning to redefine broadcast.”
Vendors like Imagine, Avid and Grass Valley have shifted their hardware-based products of a decade ago into cloud. Noting this, Marc Aldrich, CEO, Zixi said, “The elements that were once purpose built are now into the cloud. The industry is going through a massive transformation but cloud introduces a level of agility that allows you to achieve greater efficiency than ever before. “
Martins Magone, CTO at Latvian-based SaaS cloud playout vendor Veset, warned against co-opting existing hardware into the cloud. “It will not work. Microservices are the key.”
AI Drives Streaming Infrastructure Efficiencies
Anastasia Melnikova, Solutions Architect, Gcore which offers CDN, hosting and edge cloud services said if broadcasters wanted to stay competitive they needed not just cloud but AI.
“The AI infrastructure and the streaming structure is converging,” she said. “The direction of travel is that broadcasters will have one cloud provider that can do CDNs, encoding and all the digital AI models for subtitles and content moderation.”
Examples of how AI is now delivering efficiencies in the media supply chain abounded at IBC. Warner Bros. CTO Avi Saxena was among those talking up the impact of AI in-house at the company.
AI is deployed to scale subtitling. Tech built on Google’s Vertex AI development platform is automatically converting video content into text to make HBO Max’s captions more accurate. This cuts costs relating to generating captions by up to 50%, while creating new file captions can also take up to 80% less time, he revealed.
“If we did ten languages before now we can do 20 languages without blowing up the cost and without taking two years to do it," Saxena said. "We are using GenAI in very carefully chosen approaches where it makes sense but still keeps the core of our business safe.”
Warner Bros. CTO Avi Saxena at IBC 2025 (image credit Adrian Pennington)
Tubi Says Multi-Modal AI for Scene-Based Metadata > Third-Party Data
Tubi is doing something similar by using multi-modal AI to extract rich semantic scene-based metadata from its catalogue of 300,000 titles.
“Folks spend a hundred hours a year on streaming services finding something to watch,” said Blake Bassett, VP of Product for Tools & Infrastructure, Tubi. “Humans are hit by 7GB of information every day – this is the same amount that people used to consume in a lifetime. But if you know a lot about your content and a lot about your audience you can then accurately infer what other content they might like using AI and surface fresh content.”
In tests this using AI to tag and surface content outperformed third-party data. “We’ve seen double-digit increases in watching, conversion, and retention,” he said.
Tubi are using similar multi-modal AI to match the right ad to the right person at the right time. “Do that in a way that works for brands and audiences and we can charge an elevated rate to advertisers.”
Emphasizing Supply Chain Efficiency
All of the talk about AI at IBC concerns efficiencies in the supply chain. Very little concerned GenAI’s ability to create content itself. In fact, this issue was studiously avoided as a "no comment" by vendors like Adobe when asked. That’s because GenAI and content creation is a sensitive issue.
It’s kind of deemed okay if captioning and translation teams lose their jobs under the mask of "AI efficiency benefits." Such folk fly under the radar. No-one here is yet grasping the nettle of front line artist redundancies even though the freelance market is being decimated.
“Using GenAI for final pixel content creation is the biggest dilemma" at Warner Bros., said Saxena. “We build around content creators. We have IP, we work with actors, and we want to be very respectful of that. We're moving very cautiously so as to not alienate the bread and butter of this business. We still think generative AI is not going to replace talent.”
Yet making film and TV is as expensive or even more expensive than ever. Mike Darcey, former COO at Sky TV-turned-industry commentator highlighted this is the next big bottleneck.
“The cost per hour of big shows is getting beyond the budgets of many ad-funded broadcasters There are still powerful commissioners who decide what to greenlight and what risks to take which means many creative ideas do not see the light of day,” Darcey said in an IBC keynote.
“We need to consider the possibility that it will no longer cost $100m to make a movie, or $10m an hour for high end TV. It might soon be $10k or less, which would seem to mean it would be open to almost anyone with a good idea. It’s brave to exclude that possibility entirely.”
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