Has the media industry landscape become highly fragmented? The sector has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, driven by shifting consumer behaviours, emerging platforms, and evolving production and distribution models. With so many moving parts – from creative workflows to cloud infrastructure and data analytics – many industry stakeholders see the landscape as increasingly complex. But does Microsoft’s Simon Crownshaw agree?
Pausing with a thoughtful glint in his eye, Crownshaw lets out a knowing laugh and a smile spreads across his face as he replies “Oh yes”, clearly familiar with the complexities behind the question.
Much of this fragmentation is driven by long-standing legacy systems that trap data in siloes, a reluctance to disrupt existing business models and a shortage of in-house expertise to implement and manage the technologies needed for change.
“The media sector is the poster child for amazing experiences and technology,” says Crownshaw, worldwide lead for media and entertainment at Microsoft. “We like to pioneer new innovations, but we don’t adopt them very well. Adoption of new technology is poor because workflows have existed for up 25 years and been dealt with in real time. There are also not enough employees with the skills to implement new technology, so media organisations rely on partners to help fund or deliver that innovation. That’s why you see Microsoft form great partnerships with media organisations around those very same things.”
Simon Crownshaw is worldwide lead for media and entertainment at Microsoft
In fact, decisions made in the next 12-18 months will impact media workflows for the next 10-15 years, according to Devoncroft’s white paper AI Technology in Media. As the pressure to modernise intensifies, many forward-thinking organisations are turning to partners like Microsoft to lay the groundwork for scalable, cloud-based infrastructure.
One example is Microsoft’s five-year partnership with The Walt Disney Studios. Central to this collaboration is StudioLAB, Disney’s technology hub which is focused on advancing the future of storytelling. The division is developing new AI-powered workflows for content creation, production and distribution, all powered by Microsoft Azure.
This kind of innovation depends on a strong foundation. “Successful AI implementations in media require cloud-based technology as cloud environments provide the infrastructure to access and manage data,” notes the Devoncroft paper. It’s exactly this cloud infrastructure that underpins StudioLAB’s use of advanced AI tools.
“As part of our Disney StudioLAB partnership, we evaluate a variety of technical innovations,” says Crownshaw. “We’ve used model components to run asset analyses and explore ways to better understand Disney’s metadata related to content to enable faster asset search and analysis.”
Content Understanding is an AI-powered Azure service that helps extract structure, meaning and insights from unstructured content like text, images, documents and video. It is being designed to help businesses gain real-time insights and manage digital assets more effectively. While the tool shows strong potential, it’s currently part of a broader experimentation phase with multiple customers around the world.
Microsoft and StudioLAB are also collaborating with media technology provider Avid to demonstrate how high-performance workflows – including collaborative editing, content archiving and backup – can be securely deployed in the cloud. Tools such as Avid MediaCentral, Cloud UX and Media Composer are already helping Disney to streamline its operations.
Expanding on the challenges and opportunities in content marketing and production, Crownshaw highlights how AI-powered tools are accelerating traditionally time-intensive processes.
“Media professionals can use AI to identify which commercials to run without needing to review each one individually,” he says. “Plus, the time it takes to produce a movie (typically one to two years) can be influenced by AI-powered rendering tools. For example, while traditional frame rendering can take several minutes per frame, AI-enhancements to such workflows can reduce the time for each frame. Even saving a couple of minutes per frame across thousands of frames could have a meaningful impact on production timelines.”
And this is just the beginning – audio and video editing are expected to be among the areas most impacted by AI in the next two to three years, according to Devoncroft. However, media professionals will need to act fast to catch up and adapt if they want to capitalise on the potential of AI. To do so, they can look to other industries that have already overcome similar transformational challenges.
“Other industries have more resources than media to move faster and spin solutions to meet their individual needs,” says Crownshaw. “The media industry is fragmented by design but it’s important to take a step back and learn from other sectors.”
Financial services, for instance, is an industry experienced in managing security at scale, with lessons that media companies can readily apply to rights management.
“From an industry perspective, we don’t manage security or rights management as well as we should,” admits Crownshaw. “AI can be used as a rights management engine that enables us to make sure we’re automating protection of content and controlling who can use it. That means sports leagues, for example, aren’t having their content pirated.
“As part of the content creation process, we also need to know who owns the rights to a song or video and who can use it at any given time. However, firms are often using rights engines with poor data, so they aren’t sure what they can and can’t distribute. This means they take a risk-averse approach and just don’t put content out to avoid getting into trouble or giving out royalties. That’s why you see more media firms investing in AI to building their own rights engines to deal with those issues.”
Crownshaw suggests the media industry could accelerate this progress by learning from how other sectors handle complex, data-driven challenges. “Healthcare manages the storage of personal data amazingly,” he says. “The media industry can also learn from telecommunication providers on how to better distribute content through 5G or IP connectivity.”
By acknowledging their own operational gaps and becoming more open to learning from other industries, media firms can improve workflows and operate more cost effectively. Other sectors have much to gain from the media industry’s creative and content-driven expertise too, says Crownshaw.
“Media has proved that speed, personalisation and platform agility are not luxuries,” he says. “They are the new cost of relevance in the industry – and not just for our sector but for others too. If you can tailor content experiences to millions of individuals, it’s incredibly meaningful. Personalisation is key to success. The industry has gone from producing content that just goes to the movie theatre to publishing it on platforms where it can be watched anywhere. However, this has meant that media firms have had to embrace data-driven storytelling and cloud-native production. Many platforms – like Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Netflix – use AI for personalisation to make sure the right content is served to viewers.”
Doctor Who also exemplifies how the media industry is embracing more visual, data-driven storytelling to reach larger audiences
In order to provide personalised content experiences at scale, platform providers need to optimise their data by using Azure as a “creative engine room”, says Crownshaw. They can also use Microsoft Fabric to bring data into one platform and Copilot to turn that unified data into actionable insights.
“Whether you’re a creator or marketer, the ability to generate localised content faster than ever, and by yourself without needing to rely on a vendor, is really powerful,” says Crownshaw. “This is enabling the industry to overcome its fragmented history. The understanding of not just what content to make, but also which audiences are going to experience that content, is fundamentally different. Multiplatform publishing is a critical element in the media and entertainment industry. At least 70 per cent of the content from a movie is also being driven by short-form content. Firms use AI to tell different narratives to get the message in front of different customers to achieve goals such as increasing box office sales.”
This shift in content strategy is also reshaping who creates media and how it’s being used across industries.
“More than 90 per cent of content today doesn’t just come from traditional media organisations, it is seen across every industry in one form or another,” explains Crownshaw. “The media industry has done really well at taking the elements of creativity where AI and data come together to demonstrate new types of content. The healthcare sector has followed our lead to create a wealth of video content that explains medical procedures and processes – and there’s no reason other industries couldn’t do the same to educate, engage and inspire their audiences too.”
This evolution in content creation goes hand in hand with a broader shift in how media companies integrate enterprise systems to drive smarter, more connected workflows.
“The smartest media companies don’t treat enterprise or media as separate worlds, they unify them,” says Crownshaw. “If enterprise systems can connect with content workflows, organisations will be able to truly understand what’s going on. They will be able to optimise advert inventory, search for new talent or reduce production costs. If I were to summarise what I’ve seen over the past six months, it would be that enterprise is not just for those internal decision makers anymore – it is helping to fuel storytelling, audience strategy, personalised experiences and more. When you’re in such a competitive industry, every dollar counts, so enterprise systems need to be more integrated with the content workflow.”
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