Devoncroft: Stalled Cloud, AI Surge Mark Broadcast Tech’s Next Stage

AMSTERDAM – AI’s paradigm-shattering potential is now at broadcast technology’s gates; it’s up to media companies to have productive, if difficult, conversations about how to embrace it if they’re serious about efficiencies, a leading analyst told the industry here on Thursday.

Josh Stinehour, principal analyst at Devoncroft Partners, said AI is poised to make production simpler and less expensive and do nothing short of reinvent content creation processes. “We’re talking about radical efficiencies,” Stinehour said, citing live production as an imminent example.

But first, media companies will need “the courage of our experience to stop doing things,” including asking questions as fundamental as what TV is, how it’s distributed and what’s truly acceptable to viewers, he noted, pointing to Sweden’s SVT as one of the few groups to do so currently.

Another group leaning into AI is Fox, whose CTO Melody Hildebrandt spends 95% of her focus on gen AI, Stinehour noted, reevaluating foundational models at the company every two weeks in response.

Devoncroft’s research finds the vendor community slightly to very positive about AI, gen AI and machine learning’s impact on business over the next two to three years (surpassing optimism over virtualization at its cusp back in 2018), even if AI’s representation in the IBC exhibit hall hovers at just over 20% of the business categories represented there.

But the groundswell is undeniable, said Joe Zaller, Devoncroft’s president and founder, noting that AI, gen AI and ML were solidly in second place in the company’s M&E trend index, falling only below IP networking and content delivery.

“We’re seeing a lot of projects happening in the market,” Zaller said, noting AI was second by project volume in 2024, even if the budgeting behind those projects still lagged well behind in ninth place based on resources allocated.

Broadcast technologists are also factoring AI into their prospective buys even if it’s not part of the products they’re looking at yet, Stinehour added. “Before it’s here, it’s impacting product decisions,” he said.

Stinehour was less sanguine about the cloud’s progress in M&E. “It is undeniable the cloud transition has stalled in the global media industry,” he said, adding the technology has been in a holding pattern since 2023, when transitions shifted from larger scale and simpler to smaller organizations with more complexities. “That’s when the wheels started to slow down,” he said, noting it isn’t so much that the cloud has gotten smaller as the growth rate has declined.

“We’re about to move into a different phase of cloud,” Stinehour said.

The new faces of that phase will be familiar vendors to the industry, he said, citing Amagi, which is readying an IPO, as one example, and Ross Video, whose $236 million investment in cloud — $49 million of which is being financed by the Canadian government — as another.

Elsewhere, Stinehour pointed to other harbingers the industry should heed, among them the trend of sports leagues taking their production and distribution back in-house after long relationships with media partners. He noted English Premier League’s relatively amicable parting with longtime partner IMG as one such example. “This is a stand in for where everyone in the media business is focusing their investment,” he said.

He pointed to La Liga’s much less amicable parting with Mediapro as a cautionary tale. “We don’t build service providers in this industry to ever imagine a day when they get smaller,” Stinehour said of Mediapro’s predicament.

And if there’s one new byword broadcast technologists should adopt, Stinehour said, it’s FinOps (an amalgam of “finance” and “dev ops”), an operational framework and culture practice geared at maximizing the business value of cloud and technology. An upshot is financial accountability via collaboration among engineering, finance and business teams and the likeliest route to see technology budgets increased.

FinOps is less about finance and more about culture, Stinehour said. He said it gives a better view of real-time resource allocation versus usage, enabling companies to better calibrate their scaling policies and yield cost improvements.

“There is nothing on this side of Jerusalem more important to get more investment” in tech than a FinOps approach, Stinehour emphasized.