“Media companies now favor hybrid cloud workflows for flexibility, speed, and cost-efficiency. Open standards ensure interoperability, while strong security protects valuable IP. Experts stress aligning cloud use with business goals, maintaining control and visibility, and using cloud strategically—not universally—to optimize collaboration, performance, and infrastructure investment.”
AI is transforming media and entertainment, reshaping workflows and automating the tedious. This shift isn’t new—it’s an evolution already well underway. While concerns about disruption persist, AI is proving to be a powerful tool that enhances efficiency, making content more accessible and refining quality. From metadata enrichment to streamlined production, AI empowers professionals by eliminating the mundane and allowing more focus on creativity. Rather than replacing jobs, it shifts how work gets done, seamlessly integrating with existing processes to unlock new possibilities in storytelling, production, and distribution. The industry is adapting, and AI is at the heart of that transformation.
Target Audience Titles:
Chief Technology Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, Chief Digital Officer
Chief Data Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Content Officer
Head of AI and Machine Learning, Data Scientists
Product Managers, Content Managers, Sound Engineers, Distribution Engineers
Production Technologists, Streaming Platform Developers
Chief Technology Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, Chief Digital Officer
Key Takeaways
AI is transforming workflows, automating the tedious, and reshaping media and entertainment.
Efficiency gains let creators focus on storytelling while AI enhances accessibility and searchability.
AI isn’t replacing jobs—it’s evolving how work gets done, integrating seamlessly into production processes.
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the Technology experts gathering at NAB Show 2025. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding how can AI and machine learning transform media and entertainment?
As DeepDub’s Oz Krakowski stated, “We see is a lot of the work that was done before is now done in different.” These changes have already hit the headlines for as Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns pointed out, “Everybody’s all concerned with Gen AI but of course the writers and actors strikes were all about that.” Thus this AI transformation is not new but rather is currently underway. Latakoo’s Jade Kurian offered this perspective. “The question now is how do we do this thoughtfully? How do we do it in a way that we don’t compromise ethics – where we don’t compromise people’s jobs? How do we make it flow back and forth where we take advantage of AI and machine learning to make our lives easier, make our lives better, and make entertainment and media better.” Cinnafilm’s Dom Jackson suggests we take another step back to gain a larger perspective, “There’s a lot of fear around AI and those technologies and in that sense, I see those as part of a continuum of ongoing automation processes that have been going on since the industrial revolution. Everyone’s always scared when something new comes along and then very quickly it becomes normal and it empowers us to work in new and different and usually more efficient ways.” See Figure 1 for the Cornucopia of AI use cases suggested. Let’s explore some of those new, and different, more efficient ways.
One thing is for certain, there is no shortage of opportunity for AI to positively impact the media and entertainment sector. The favorite use case among all users, as Strada’s Michael Cioni put it, “AI is best for our industry as a utility form to do the mundane tasks .. we need AI that automates mundane tasks like color correcting sound noise reduction, video audio noise reduction, face tagging, locations, objects, emotions – those are all the things that no one wants to sit and log footage. AI can log it for us.” Or per Ross’s David Green, “AI is going to make us more efficient and more effective and let us focus on what we love doing which is creating amazing content.” No matter which perspective you prefer – the elimination of the mundane or the freeing up to do the fun parts – AI is here to stay in media workflows. As Dell’s Tom Burns observed, “Machine learning has already transformed media and entertainment in so many invisible ways from security to fixing single pixel defects to all kinds of low-level network functions and automated provisioning.”
When it comes to all that stored media, there are plenty of suggestions of how AI can assist as well. Per SNS’s Alex Hlavaty, “It actually can be an incredibly helpful buddy to sort through the stuff we don’t want to do parse through petabytes worth of information. Help us find assets more quickly and just interact with our data in a much more meaningful way while reducing man hours doing things that are laborious.” . Eon Media’s Greg Morrow observed, “our customers have large libraries of video files that only have a file name or have just a a small title. We really enriched those assets with information to make those assets more usable by identifying people places things emotional sentiment um ethnicity as part of those assets.” Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns denoted, “One of the GEN AI things that is proving to be useful is for companies that have large archives or studios that have that have the rights holders to a lot of content, using AI to extend the metadata and inform them of what they actually have in their archive allows them to make that more searchable and therefore more monetizable on.” Increasing metadata for the purpose of search and the related business cases that come from having truly searchable content is a common theme. As Axle.ai’s Sam Bogoch simply stated, if, “they can’t find it they can’t reuse it.”
In some of the use cases such as sound editing, it has completely transformed the task at hand. As DeepDub’s Oz Krakowski observed, “just like you cannot imagine a graphics designer not using Photoshop it’s unheard of right however 20 years ago this was extremely questionable nowadays thinking of doing voice design and editing dialogues without using AI.” Ross’s David Green offers additional suggestions, “things like camera tracking so instead of having to every single second manually figure out where things are and do manual keying you know markers and those sort of things we can use AI to automatically be able to do those things .. instead of having to flip through a manual.” Dell’s Tom Burns observed, “when you render your VFX AI upsampling has gotten so good now that you can render at 2K and up to 4K and it looks better than if you rendered at 4K in the first place.” Wow! Upsampling rendering better than if it was 4k in the first place – now that is an improvement – by definition. Localization is another area that has been drastically impacted by AI. Today, with AI tools such as Yella Umbrella are, “making content accessible to users that wouldn’t have access to it normally either because there’s no one to localize that content or just because the content that they want to access is not available in the accessibility form that they prefer.” If the form you prefer isn’t about language but more about duration, Magnify’s Ken Ruck shares today one can, “edit automatically (and) create clips automatically.” Clients may recall our coverage of Conference Whispers: NAB Show 2023 when automated shorts were first highlighted.
One of the most treasured advancements is that of workflow automation. As Eon Media’s Greg Morrow stated, “workflow automation to improve the efficiency of a media organization in order for the people in the organization to create higher value content and less of the drudgery work.” In other words, AI can transform Media and Entertainment by enabling all to do more with less. But if you are worried about your job, Cinnafilm’s Dom Jackson assured, “strangely ultimately people always end up having jobs they’re different jobs but people always end up with plenty of work.”
Published to clients: April 14, 2025 ID: TBW2070 Published to readers: April 15, 2025
Published to Email Whispers: July 16, 2025
Publicly Published with video edition: July 16, 2025
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): D. Doreen Galli
Abstract:
After over 40,000 steps, 20 flights of stairs, 8 Vegas Loop rides, 140 minutes of video content spanning education sessions, main sessions and exhibition highlights, our coverage in NAB Show 2025 closes. NAB Show 2025 hosted 55,000 attendees with 26% from 160 countries and 53% being first timers. Various vendors showcased AI-driven media solutions, storage innovations, and advanced workflows. Key technologies included AI for speech translation, video captioning, media format transformation, and virtual production. The event emphasized the importance of secure media storage and collaboration tools, with a focus on AI-enhanced search and metadata creation. Next year’s conference will be held at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
Data storage, data virtualization, identity and access management, networking, cloud computing, hybrid computing, AI vision and audio, metadata, compression and search were all popular technologies found within the solutions.
Cautions
This year’s NAB Show featured an alarming trend for those with corn allergies. Specifically numerous booths in every hall were popping corn throwing the corn protein into the air. Studies show up to 6% of the population potentially have such an allergy with some segments of the population measuring at 15%. Perhaps the LVCC should consider restricting such items in booths for future events.
Just because a storage solution holds your media and makes it easy to access does not mean it is secure and appropriate for the intellectual property for which it is used. Identity and access management must be a part of the storage solution.
While not unique to the Media industry, most data storage solutions have no method to keep track of all the various copies created of a given file therefore potentially leaving the door open for information leaks or data thefts.
Despite also catering to the growing creator economy, ad servers for social media could not be found at this event.
While at NAB Show, we conducted research for three forthcoming Whisper Reports for our clients. The playlists are unlisted but available and will eventually fill in with the video version of the report so you may wish to bookmark these playlists.
NAB has a full schedule of sessions and educational talks for attendees. Main stage in West Hall always has some of the biggest headliners. This year we were able to capture DJ Delilah’s story that she shared as she won her award. It was interesting that early in her career that her merit of achieving exceptional ratings with the audiences was rewarded with a layoff. Main stage also featured an interview with Stephen A. Smith who recently signed the largest contract for a sports commentator that wasn’t a pro-athlete.
We were also able to briefly capture two training sessions by the ever-engaging Luisa Winters. The first session taught drone pilots how to get the best shots to make amazing content. Wishing to learn more about drones and running a drone business? The answer is in our coverage of the commercial drone event, Conference Whispers: CUAV Expo. The second session by Luisa Winters was her event on additional methods to monetize YouTube. Unfortunately, what we captured seemed to be the same advice commonly found online.
Many vendors also had specialized stages such as this partner talk on the AWS Stage. This session focused on the AI content delivery workflow for a multimodal media stack. Finally, we captured the main stage event featuring the Bluemoon AI use case with Dell and NVIDIA on the topic of AI Advanced workflows. The big advice was to train your models locally.
One of the largest problems found in media is where to put all the media! Media is not only voluminous, but it is the Intellectual Property that gives media companies value. The first problem is where to store it so those that need to work with it can. Strada agents allow one to share their hard drive with collaborators turning it into a private cloud. Studio Network Solutions, SNS, gave us an overview of the various methods it enables media professionals to share their media storage for collaboration. As a word of caution, just because a product is at a conference and organizations use it does not mean it is secure. Particularly, there was an alarming lack of identity and access control technology protecting many media storage solutions. For more research on this topic see Conference Whispers: Identiverse.
Some of the solutions exhibited adds in AI for additional capabilities. For example, Axle.ai works with your storage BUT adds AI and search capabilities so one can maximize monetization of their content. Likewise, Eon Media also focuses on adding value to raw media assets leveraging various forms of AI to create the metadata to enable such powerful searches. Interestingly, their solution also enables and facilitates the licensing of such content for the full digitization to monetization spectrum. There was an abundance of solutions that applied AI to your data in your storage as well. For example, Magnify immediately searches your live video including sports video adding critical metadata to the field to reduce production costs and increase content usability.
The next largest group of technologies involves those that go beyond storage or storage and search into the production workflows. TBW Advisors LLC is excited to share that we were able to capture a demo of Latakoo, popular in end-to-end workflow in broadcasting. Furthermore, we had an exclusive interview with Latakoo’s Founders right before they found out they won Best in Show NAB25! This award recognizes their generative video coding to transcribe live video.
Dell had a large display sharing all their latest and greatest in hardware, software, and solutions including those with some of their biggest partners. Dell has always been known for their ability to understand what is required to scale out – something the crowd really seemed to appreciate at NAB. Simple and easy was the goal with the new capabilities highlighted by Ross. Where the solution leverages their components or an industry standard, just drag and drop into the workflow and you are set. As with
While many different terms are used to describe the capabilities derived, the base functionality of many solutions involved artificial intelligence analysis of speech. From the video owner’s perspective, they often seek to have the video translated from one language to another. From the business’ perspective this is called localization. YellaUmbrella provides a pay-as-you-go translation capability for all your content. If you want the video to not only have its sound in another language but attempt to make it look like they are speaking it, also known as dubbing, DeepDub supports 130 languages and is one of the solutions you should evaluate. Another AI use case with speech is to provide in-room captioning for live events. This capability is critical for those seeking inclusive events and is available via MediaScribe.
Additional technologies we found include the critical capability of changing formats – Europe and USA do not use the same formats. Broadcast and streamers do not use the same formats. Cinnafilm is known for high quality media transformations. Cinnafilm’s flagship product, Pixelstrings can even make something 1080p to 4k! If the only transformation you are seeking is clipping it into shorts along with some intelligent search, Opus clips was in the creator’s lab. Another technology from the creator’s lab is the amazing ability to create a 3d augmented reality virtual background by AR Wall. Nominated for product of the year, AR Wall also offered a package with Sony for a huge screen to install for its realization. Keeping on the theme of virtual production, Riverside offers virtual podcast capabilities. Interestingly, all recording is executed locally in order to remove any network delay or contamination in the media. Last but not least, for all those editors and producers using these amazing products, there is KB Covers and Keyboards. Mac or windows or even laptops, editor or producer tools or even analytics, CRM or ERP tools – KB Covers and Keyboards vast array is likely to have a keyboard or cover to assist.
NAB Show 2026 conference will once again be held in Las Vegas, Nevada April 18-22, 2026.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
