Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that it is working with its preferred cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop next-generation advertising experiences built with AWS agentic AI.

As part of the effort, WBD is expanding its advertising technology stack on AWS and deploying an agentic AI-driven approach to how premium inventory across its U.S. linear and digital channels is planned, activated, optimized, and monetized.

By rebuilding its longstanding traditional internal workflows from the ground up with automated, data-driven processes on a single platform, WBD reported that it is reimagining its infrastructure for advertisers in ways that unify "the buying experience across previously siloed business units and enable automated campaign optimization."

"We're embarking on the next frontier of advertising where convergence brings linear and digital together on a single platform – each retaining its own essence, yet with the fluidity to plan, package, and optimize across both — all measurable and optimizable at cloud scale with agentic, AI-native decisioning," said Dr. Nage Sethu, senior vice president of technology - converged advertising and linear systems, Warner Bros. Discovery. "Building with AWS has been critical to streamlining the buyer’s experience across linear and digital, powering critical layers of our data, forecasting, and next-generation agentic advertising stack."

In 2026, WBD began rolling out a new generation of capabilities, including agentic automation for direct response and commercial workflows, advanced audience forecasting, and enhanced measurement and attribution.

Building on those rollouts, WBD said it will introduce unified media planning in Q3, followed by a phased rollout of composable order management, pricing, and stewardship in Q4.

"AWS is proud to deepen our relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery at such a transformative moment in media and advertising," said Samira Panah Bakhtiar, general manager, media, entertainment, games & sports, Amazon Web Services. "By combining WBD's iconic content portfolio and rich audience signals with AWS's cloud and agentic AI capabilities, we're enabling a new era of intelligent, automated advertising that delivers better outcomes for brands and viewers alike."

More specifically, WBD’s new platform features autonomous AI agents for intelligent planning, dynamic forecasting, real-time optimization, and closed-loop measurement. These agents continuously self-optimize, learning from outcomes to drive better results for buyers and sellers alike with every campaign. The system enables flexible targeting approaches, allowing buyers to focus on specific brands or audience segments across linear and digital, with WBD providing optimal inventory allocation recommendations.

The platform streamlines the ad buying process for WBD inventory so that advertisers can more effectively allocate budgets across multiple platforms and brands. Additionally, advertisers can more easily leverage new ad formats, including interactive ads, while viewers receive more customized ad content.

Underpinning WBD's new advertising technology implementation is a composable data and interoperability layer that gives WBD's AI agents the real-time context they need to act, integrate seamlessly across the ecosystem, and deliver buyer transparency. Key AWS services powering the platform include:

Amazon Bedrock hosts the various foundation models employed in WBD’s closed instance

Amazon SageMaker provides the tools for training custom machine learning models for WBD’s exclusive use and in compliance with WBD data protection, segmentation and security controls

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores data in the Apache Iceberg format for the underlying data lake.

In addition, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) powers application hosting and Amazon Quick provides a personalized, proactive AI assistant that enables Ad Sales teams to interact with data through natural language, uncover actionable insights, receive proactive recommendations, and make faster, data-driven decisions.

LOS ANGELES—In a notable example of how major Hollywood studios are embracing AI-powered production tools, Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the GenAI Creators' Fund and its first green-lit projects.

The initiative aims to give creators of all styles and backgrounds access to professional-grade AI tools and funding, bringing together established filmmakers, digital creators, and technology startups to produce high-quality cinematic entertainment.

Amazon MGM Studios also revealed three green-lit animation projects originating from the fund: “Cupcake & Friends” from BuzzFeed Studios; “Love, Diana Music Hunters” from creator Albie Hecht, now chief content officer at pocket.watch; and “Punky Duck” from creator Jorge R. Gutierrez. All three series will premiere on Prime Video at a future date.

The production will use Project Nara, Amazon MGM Studios' purpose-built AI production platform for cinematic storytelling, built on AWS.

Project Nara is used exclusively by Amazon MGM Studios and by creators selected for the GenAI Creators' Fund.

As a collaborative production workspace in which creative teams can generate video, make edits, provide feedback, and track progress in real time, Project Nara supports both animation and live-action production workflows. Amazon MGM Studios says the the technology reflects one of the company’s core beliefs: human creativity leads, and AI supports.

“Creative breakthroughs happen when visionary storytellers are given access to transformative tools,” said Albert Cheng, head of AI Studios, Amazon MGM Studios. “The GenAI Creators’ Fund and Project Nara position human creativity at the center of our efforts to integrate generative AI into our production processes at Amazon MGM Studios. We’re proud of the work that these filmmakers have accomplished and look forward to sharing these creators’ visions with the world.”

The fund is backed by Amazon MGM Studios and AWS to assist professional filmmakers in developing GenAI workflows. It provides grants for proofs of concept and shorts from creators who have built massive audiences on digital platforms but have not had access to professional production tools. Finally, it also gives startups building production solutions access to expertise from Amazon MGM Studios and AWS, who can judge the technology’s usefulness in actual cinematic workflows.

Amazon MGM Studios describes the first round of greenlit projects originating from the fund as follows:

• “Cupcake & Friends”: A relatable cupcake and her friends face the hilarious and thrilling challenges of a sleepover, with unexpected twists at every corner. Created by BuzzFeed Studios.
• “Love, Diana Music Hunters”: Based on pocket.watch creator partner Diana, the most-followed girl in the world on YouTube, this young band of K-pop space-traveling musicians races to Planet Goo, where they must perform a concert to restore the music and save the aliens. Created by Albie Hecht at pocket.watch, former president of entertainment at Nickelodeon and developer of  “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
• “Punky Duck”: A lovable punk duck and his best friend, Smiley Cat, tear through a wildly exaggerated Los Angeles, hilariously stumbling into alien invasions, giant monsters, robot criminal conspiracies, telenovela-style family drama and supernatural mayhem—all while trying (and usually failing) to do the right thing. Created by Emmy-winning Jorge R. Gutierrez, writer/director of the animated feature “The Book of Life” for 20th Century Studios and creator of “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” for Nickelodeon and “Maya and the Three” for Netflix.

Project Nara is an end-to-end collaborative workspace that integrates AI production agents with professional tools already used by creators, such as Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Adobe Suite, Amazon said. It combines best-in-class third-party video models with a proprietary model portfolio trained on Amazon MGM Studios' existing IP, solving complex cinematic challenges like character consistency, smooth motion between shots, and cross-shot continuity that no single model can address alone. AWS’s cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities enable storytelling at scale, according to Amazon.

Project Nara’s key features include: a model-agnostic architecture that routes each task to the optimal AI model; compounding intelligence that makes every subsequent production faster and more efficient; production-aware AI agents that carry full creative context across titles; a camera-to-cloud data bridge preserving on-set data end-to-end; and complete provenance tracking for IP protection, Amazon said.

AWS provides Amazon MGM Studios with global cloud infrastructure and services that enable end-to-end AI content creation.

"Amazon has quietly and methodically assembled the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry, spanning from infrastructure to creative tools to distribution and funding of creative content,” said Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports, AWS. “Project Nara illustrates how AWS can help filmmakers of all kinds bring AI to the full creative pipeline, from concept to screen, using a wide range of familiar models and tools on a cloud trusted by the entertainment industry. With investments like the GenAI Creators’ Fund, our collaboration with Innovative Dreams around hybrid filmmaking, and partnerships with leading generative AI providers like Luma and fal, AWS is building an ecosystem for human creativity powered by AI.”

When most people talk about artificial intelligence (AI), they usually mean Generative AI (GenAI). While this has brought a great deal of flexibility and freedom to video, audio and text creation, it is also responsible for a substantial amount of ill-conceived or poor-quality material. This has not only sullied the reputation of AI but also overshadowed the potential of a more practical form of the technology, agentic AI.

More of a background technology than GenAI—which has also been around a lot longer, the modern iteration being formalized between 2014 and 2017—agentic AI is less generally known, even though it began to appear around three years ago. The crucial difference between the two is that while GenAI reacts to prompts or triggers to create content, agentic AI is intended to autonomously establish and control a function or situation.

AUTONOMOUS WORKFLOWS
In the context of broadcasting, agentic AI is regarded as key to the development of applications—known as “agents”—to run specific technical tasks, such as monitoring, dealing with system faults or failures, and manage a variety of functions across production and distribution chains.

"Unlike GenAI, which creates content on demand, agentic AI orchestrates entire content workflows autonomously," explains Stephanie Lone, global leader of solutions architecture, Media and Entertainment, Games and Sport at AWS. "This means systems can coordinate complex multi-step processes without constant human intervention at each decision point."

The basis for this, Lone adds, is multiple "specialized agents" working together proactively to natural language requests. This combination—and simultaneous operation of applications— forms the basis of systems from other developers, including Witbe's Agentic SDK, which was launched in February this year. Intended as a "test automation framework" to run and scale monitoring, testing and validation over video workflows, Witbe chief executive Mathieu Planche describes it "a suite of different agents" designed to automate test processes.

"Test automation used to be a script that people had to develop," he says. "We have moved away from this manual process into something that is, while not human-less because we still have [a] human to control what the Agentic SDK is doing, but it's a process that is largely simplified."

The first of the agents in the suite is Test Designer, which was developed to understand the testing strategy of the video service being analyzed and then write test cases based on that. "Agentic AI technologies can observe inputs, plan… actions and do most of the heavy lifting in different workflows that are otherwise taken care of by people," Planche adds.

As with previous methods of automation, the developers of agentic AI systems are quick to emphasize that the aim is not to replace human operators. Fares Birke, principal practice lead for Applied AI at Qvest, comments that the goal is to enable people to "work better, faster and with fewer interruptions" by automating tasks that are either repetitive or require a lot of coordination.

"Agentic AI is about achieving outcomes, while GenAI is primarily about creating outputs – text, audio, video—in response to prompts," Birke says. "This makes agentic AI far more relevant for complex media environments where speed, reliability, compliance and coordination matter as much as creativity."

‘ENRICHED METADATA’
Agentic AI-based systems are now proliferating in the broadcast sector for a variety of applications. These include: searches of archives, transcripts and live feeds; managing ingest, logging, review and delivery; triggering MAM, newsroom, post-production and distribution systems; and ensuring operational and editorial rules. This can be seen in the number of recent system launches, including ThinkAnalytics' ThinkMetadataAI. Launched at IBC 2025, with a U.S. debut at last month’s NAB Show, it uses agentic AI to automatically create "enriched metadata" for content catalogs.

ThinkAnalytics co-founder and chief technology officer Peter Docherty comments that over the past 20 years the company had focused on deep metadata enrichment for personalization and viewer engagement but in the last three to four years has moved into targeted advertising.

"A lot of agentic processes enable automation and operational efficiencies that weren't there before," he says. "That's obviously quite different from GenAI because agentic AI helps streamline operations. What we've done with our Metadata AI is combine GenAI with Agentic and other capabilities to automate processes that were previously manual. This enables huge automation at scale but with intelligence behind the decision-making."

At the NAB Show last month TVU Networks showcased “TV Cortex,” a service that uses Agentic AI to aggregate and manage the audio and video content used to create news stories. TV Cortex has the power to act autonomously and purposefully to achieve an outcome independently of our interaction with it. In theory, operating this way may involve less “human shading” of events and more factual coverage.

According to TVU Networks President Paul Shen, TV Cortex is intended to augment human productivity, not to replace it. If used effectively, the system frees up producers and editors to focus more on the creative aspects of news production, like crafting compelling stories and providing more human context.

“TV Cortex leverages agentic AI, deploying a hierarchy of master and subordinate agents that dynamically scale to handle the volume and complexity of incoming stories,” Shen said. “These agents automate the retrieval, categorization and scoring of stories based on factors such as recency, relevance, market size and customizable editorial priorities.”

KEEPING QUALITY—AND THE TRUTH IN CHECK
A crucial area of broadcast and streaming distribution that has undergone a high level of automation and streamlining in recent years is compliance and Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring. AI—and agentic in particular—is now offering the potential to take this further through new systems such as Bitmovin's Observability, which was introduced last October.

"We're leveraging AI in different areas of our product range, including the Observability product for looking at sessions, playback, QoS metrics, root cause analysis and error debugging," explains Jacob Arends, product manager for playback at Bitmovin. "AI is really good at summarizing data, for example, so we are using that in our Observability products to make it easier for customers to understand complex datasets [and] what actually went on in a session."

In the last year or so, doubts have arisen surrounding GenAI chatbots, especially with systems “hallucinating”—basically making things up— or just agreeing with a question. Because compliance monitoring is a crucial failsafe in the broadcast distribution chain, there can be no such doubts; any automation technology must be 100% trustworthy.

"Our Agentic SDK is not creating bugs within our customers' platforms," states Witbe's Mathieu Planche. "They detect errors and flag them for people to review and analyze. Then people decide if they are escalating them internally or if they just discard it."

As for the future, Planche acknowledges that agentic AI technology for broadcast is still "new for everyone" and that media control rooms, staffed by operators, are "not going away right now."

At AWS, Lone observes that the potential for Agentic AI in media production "is massive" but says the broadcast sector does have to be careful with it. "The industry still needs to establish strong guardrails around data governance, transparency, content provenance and responsible automation practices," she comments. "Once these are firmly in place, companies can have more confidence in AI-driven decisions and feel comfortable deploying the technology on a broad scale."

Standards and oversight are absolutely necessary for such an autonomous technology as agentic AI could be. But, right now, the broadcast sector appears to be weighing up whether there is already enough automation in key processes or if these new agents are the key to more efficient and fault-free operations.

As more major media and entertainment companies jump on the vertical video bandwagon and tech providers launch products to streamline its creation, analysts at LightShed Partners are pouring cold water over Hollywood’s approach to the format.

In a note to investors, LightShed analysts Richard Greenfield, Brandon Ross and Mark Kelley said, “We believe the strategy behind almost all of these products, including Netflix, is dead wrong and misses the far larger opportunity in mobile vertical video content.”

In recent days, Netflix launched a vertical video feed in its mobile app, joining Disney+ (Verts), ESPN (Verts), Peacock (Clips), Paramount+ (Clips), and CNN (Shorts). All are responding to the growing popularity of vertical video particularly among younger audiences.

At NAB Show earlier this month, AWS launched new AI-powered tools to automate vertical video creation creation of vertical video, with data showing Gen Z viewers consume 88% of the streaming content they watch on their phones, and that users are spending more time watching vertical video than content from Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video on their phones.

While some companies like The New York Times and CNN have been creating compelling original vertical video content, “none of the major media companies are willing to take a small portion of their massive content budgets to attack original vertical programming for mobile devices,” the LightShed analysts said.

“While it is great to see so many media companies launching vertical content for mobile devices, creating clips of existing content is underwhelming at best,” they argued. “We doubt users spend meaningful time watching short clips of long-form content, and these feeds certainly do not make you want to come back regularly the way dedicated mobile entertainment apps do.”

“Only CNN is making its own original programming specifically formatted for vertical mobile viewing,” they noted. Worse, the analysts argued, some of the repurposed content for vertical video is badly done. “ESPN and Paramount+ are simply reformatting horizontal content into a vertical feed, and it looks awful, with text impossible to read,” they said.

Read the full post, along with examples of vertical video being produced, here.

As the entire media sector, from broadcasters and streamers to emerging content creators, faces another year of rapid change, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering a wide variety of demos, solutions, educational sessions and hands-on training at NAB Show that it says will help attendees capitalize on rapidly changing consumer habits.

Many of these AI- and cloud-based tools are designed to help broadcasters, creators and streamers address some of the thorniest challenges they face, said Stephanie Lone, global leader, Solutions Architecture, Media, Entertainment, Games and Sports Industry at AWS.

“We’re at this amazing inflection moment” of rapidly changing consumer habits that are roiling the M&A sector, she said. “There is research showing that 88% of the streaming content consumed by Gen Z viewers is on their phone” and “users are spending more time watching vertical video than the time they spend time watching Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video on their phones … That puts pressure on broadcasters and streamers to reach these viewers on the devices and with the formats they want to see.”

One example of how AWS helps companies adapt rapidly to a “mobile-first” world, she said, is AWS Elemental Inference, being demoed in the AWS booth (W1701).

This fully managed service applies AI in parallel to live video encoding so that broadcasters and streamers can automatically deliver a vertical feed of live action with only a six- to 10-second delay. “We already have customers like Fox and NBCUniversal that are benefiting from those real-time creation capabilities,” she said.

AWS is also addressing technologies and workflows for the creator sector, which has a much-expanded presence this year.

“Every live broadcast isn’t just competing with their traditional competition; they are also competing with TikTok, Instagram and YouTube,” Lone said, citing a February study from Omdia that found global microdrama revenue will hit $14 billion this year and top $20 billion by 2030.

At the same time, AWS is showcasing technologies to help creators.

“We will have demos in the Builder Space [at the back of the AWS Theater, W1333] where people can go and get hands-on experience with various models,” she said. In addition, AWS is leaning into the creator space with an “AI Studio Startup Spotlight” at the AWS Theater on Wednesday (April 22).

Partnerships on Exhibit

AWS is also providing a host of demos from partners like AMC Networks, Sinclair, FanDuel, the NBA, Graham Media Group and Amazon’s Prime Video, as well as sessions where executives from Fox, Gray Media, Sky and others discuss how they use AI and cloud technologies in their operations.

“Most of our demos at the show are what I call the art of the real, not the art of the possible,” Lone said.

Other practical experiences include the new Builder Lab at the back of the AWS Theater, a place where attendees can see how easy it is to deploy these tools and play around with some of the AI models.

AWS is also hosting the Cloud Court Challenge, a collaboration with Toronto Raptors parent Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) that lets attendees put their basketball skills to the test while they learn how the cloud and AI can influence athletic performance and fan engagement.

Participants in the challenge, located in the West Hall lobby, will receive performance insights through detailed data analysis and computer vision and take home their own player card and social video.

Visitors to the Amazon Entertainment Loft (W235LMR) can see how emerging AWS technology powers Amazon Luna, Prime Video and Fire TV under the hood. The loft also offers opportunities to network, play the latest games, and talk with Amazon subject-matter experts.

The AWS Theater (W1333) is offering more than 20 sessions showing how companies are using Amazon’s cloud and AI solutions to improve operations.

© 2026 NAB

BURLINGTON, Mass.—At the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas, Avid will demo its new Avid Content Core running on AWS, providing a “cloud native” foundation for connected media workflows built on AWS for news organizations, broadcasters, studios, and streaming services.

At the same time, Avid said it is “renewing its focus” on Avid NEXIS and Avid Media Composer on AWS, which are already supporting large‑scale international productions, including working with Amazon MGM Studios to enable cloud-based Avid workflows on the global cloud platform.

Highlights will include:

• Cloud and hybrid production at scale – enabling teams to collaborate globally without compromising performance, location or security, powered by Avid NEXIS and Avid Content Core.
• Modern newsroom and post‑production workflows – delivering speed, flexibility, and resilience through Avid Content Core.
• A unified foundation for AI and automation – helping organizations extract greater value from their content via Avid Content Core.

Avid says its collaboration with AWS “reflects the MovieLabs 2030 Vision, where cloud, automation, security, and data form the backbone of modern storytelling.”

“Avid is the intelligence layer for professional media, combining proven workflow expertise with AI-powered automation and agentic capabilities,” said Wellford Dillard, Chief Executive Officer of Avid. “Through deep collaboration with AWS, we’re enabling organizations to connect their content, teams and workflows as one – driving faster production, greater creative flexibility, and more informed decision-making.”

Central to the strategic collaboration is a fresh emphasis on Avid NEXIS, the industry’s trusted shared media storage platform. Leveraging the Virtual File System (VFS), Avid NEXIS can expand from fixed, on-premises hardware into a software-defined, cloud-enabled environment that supports on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployment and access.

This flexibility allows teams to:

• Run Avid NEXIS Cloud and Media Composer directly in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for full cloud-enabled post-production.
• Unify cloud-based Avid NEXIS storage with on-premises environments using Avid NEXIS | Remote for hybrid workflows.
• Combine AWS with Avid’s proven controls for media workflows with a shared security foundation.

Building on this collaboration, Amazon MGM Studios has worked with Avid on AWS to deploy Avid Media Composer and Avid NEXIS on AWS, enabling production teams to launch editorial environments globally in minutes and support distributed creative teams working seamlessly across multiple locations.

Avid will be in Booth N2226 in the North Hall of the LVCC.

TV Tech: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trends at the 2026 NAB Show?

Steph Lone: I expect we’ll continue to see AI reshape the media and entertainment industry in nearly all regards. Just as cloud-based approaches and IP networking standards have created more flexibility across the content chain, AI can supercharge those gains when used responsibly and effectively. Agentic AI in particular stands to transform workflows by automating and accelerating multi-step processes, such as metadata extraction, localization, captioning, summary generation, and formatting, among others.

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

SL: Among the many services and solutions that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be highlighting at NAB Show, we’ll be showcasing AWS Elemental Inference, the industry’s first fully-managed service that applies AI in parallel with encoding of live video that released in February. It represents an important milestone in pioneering the next generation of entertainment and reaching audiences where they are—on their phones, and without needing AI expertise to implement.

TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

SL: Gen-Z viewers consume 88% of streaming content on smartphones and discover most content on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. However, until now, vertical video production has required a dedicated team and producing 16:9 video from live feeds has been a massive pain point. AWS Elemental Inference enables broadcasters and streamers to shift to mobile-first, AI-powered distribution. It uses AI to automatically detect the action in a live video feed and optimizes it for vertical viewing in 6-10 seconds. Customers like NBCUniversal and Fox Sports Digital, which reports 90% of its digital content is viewed vertically, are already using it with great results.

TVT: What is it about NAB Show that brings you back every year?

SL: NAB Show provides a unique opportunity to connect with customers, partners, colleagues and friends while also learning about the latest trends and advancements influencing our industry. The scope of the event is so expansive. I always find myself learning something new and leave inspired. It’s also great to meet so many collaborators face to face, plan for what’s next and even find a little time to celebrate our collective achievements.

Over the relatively short history of television broadcasting, archives have developed both technologically and in importance. There has been a progression from reels of film or telerecordings to videotapes—all on shelves— to the digitized deep storage of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) and disk drives, with solid-state flash memory and servers later bringing even more choice.

The cloud is now seen as a viable alternative to these methods in a media market that finally recognizes the financial value and potential of its assets, both historic and recent. Some broadcasters have made a wholesale move into the cloud for archiving, but others prefer a hybrid approach. This is highlighted in the 2025 annual report from the Active Archive Alliance (AAA), which promotes “active archives” that provide quick access to secondary storage systems, with the data always available online for fast recovery and review.

Stop Start
“I had seen many companies gravitating towards the cloud when it first came out, and then there was a bit of pulling back and potentially even repatriating data out of the cloud,” said Eric Polet, co-chair of the AAA and director of product marketing at software platform developer Arcitecta. “What I’m seeing now is a lot of hybrid cloud for distribution and sharing content, oftentimes bringing long-term preservation back on-prem.”

Polet’s co-chair, Rich Gadomski, director of channel sales and new business development for data- storage solutions with Fujifilm North America Corp., added that the AAA is “technology-agnostic,” with all main archiving media represented: optical, Savartus; solid state drives (SSD)/hard disk drives (HDD), Western Digital; tape, IBM, Fujifilm and Spectra Logic; and the cloud, Wasabi.

“Regardless of where the data is being stored, it can be accessed on-prem or in the cloud,” Gadomski said. “The volume of data, and its importance and value, has increased tremendously, so nobody wants to delete anything.”

From the cloud perspective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing many of the world’s leading broadcast and media and entertainment organizations commit their archives to the platform. But Stephanie Lone, global leader of solutions architecture for media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS, acknowledged that, in some cases, there is a hybrid element to the setup.

“The demos we give at the NAB Show and IBC often have the workspaces on physical hardware,” she said. “This means people have the tactile response they love, but don’t know if it is happening on the cloud or a hard drive under a desk. We’ve worked well in these hybrid environments with broadcasters and continue to do so.”

In addition to this, Lone added, full cloud transfer is also being undertaken by leading broadcasters. “Warner Bros. Discovery has an entire secure media supply chain on AWS, migrating petabytes of content to serve its customer base, which is approximately 95 million [HBO] Max subscribers alone,” she said. “Without the cloud, media companies can’t deliver or monetize their content across the digital landscape they’re in today.”

Have a Clear Roadmap
Avid produces cloud-compatible tools, including the MediaCentral workflow-management system and NEXIS storage platform, which can also connect with LTO archives. “Many broadcasters are still exploring the best use of cloud for their workflows,” observed Craig Wilson, product evangelist for artist relations at the company, with archiving a growing area.

“Cost of egress remains an issue, so broadcasters are focused on studying the total cost of ownership to ensure full value for their investment,” he said.

James Fraser, vice president of U.S. sales at content discovery platform developer Moments Lab, observed that most broadcasters are either actively migrating their archives to the cloud or running a hybrid model.

“But they have a clear road map over time to push more content into the cloud because of accessibility,” he said. “On-premises systems have done a tremendous job over the years, but cloud technology has allowed organizations more global access to their content, both from within the business and for third parties.”

Ease of access and moving away from physical in-house libraries would appear to be compelling arguments in favor of cloud-based archives, but SSD, HDD and tape systems are still used by on-prem setups. Other World Computing (OWC) is known for its range of internal SSD and RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) systems, but last year launched the Archive Pro Ethernet network-based LTO backup and archiving system.

“We were not an LTO company and I wasn’t an advocate for it,” OWC Founder and CEO Larry O’Connor said. “But from large organizations to individual producers, there is a desire to have what is ultimately cost-effective storage that’s air-gapped and has longevity without requiring ongoing maintenance.”

O’Connor called the cloud “an amazing tool,” but said the cost of uploading and then accessing content can be “exorbitant.” That hasn’t been AWS’ experience, Lone said, citing public broadcaster Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), which has moved all of its digital media services into the cloud.

“This has allowed them the flexibility to support its surging traffic and maintain security but [also] save more than 50% on event services,” she said. “When thinking about the cost implications of moving broadcast archives, each customer’s implementation varies.”

What About AI?
As part of this, Lone said, many broadcasters and media-related organizations are utilizing AI and machine learning (ML) to automate tagging of assets transferred to the cloud “for better discoverability.” A recent report on the archive market confirms this, showing AI-driven media archives are now “a top priority across nearly every M&E segment.”

The State of Media Archiving survey from object-based storage specialist Pixitmedia by DataCore revealed that of the 330 M&E professionals questioned, 30% of studios and 46% of enterprises are embedding AI/ML “to enhance content operations.”

The survey also reveals that only 6% percent of M&E companies have moved to a single platform for media archiving. The overall feeling, as shown by the AAA report, is that hybrid operations are now more the norm, with older technologies, including LTO and drives, still part of the picture for secondary storage, if not the amain archive.

Either way, it is reassuring that preserving TV programs—by whatever means—is now a major consideration for broadcasters and streamers alike.

LOS ANGELES—Vubiquity said it has achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media & Entertainment Competency as part of the AWS Partner Network (APN). This designation recognizes Vubiquity’s technical expertise, customer success, and innovation in delivering cloud-native media solutions built on AWS.

The AWS Media & Entertainment Competency is one of the most rigorous validations within the AWS Partner Network. It recognizes APN members who have demonstrated proven customer success, deep technical proficiency, and operational excellence in media workflows.

Vubiquity, which is owned by Amdocs, said this milestone reflects 18 months of cross-functional collaboration, culminating in validated business outcomes and measurable customer impact across its portfolio of AWS-powered media solutions.

“This recognition from AWS affirms our leadership in cloud-native media services and the tangible results we’re delivering for customers,” said Dana Forte, senior vice president of product management, Vubiquity. “We’re proud to help media organizations transform their supply chains and realize new value from their content through secure, intelligent and scalable AWS-powered workflows.”

The competency achievement follows a rigorous third-party audit conducted by ISSI, validating the company’s technical excellence, architecture design and operational maturity.

Vubiquity delivers end-to-end cloud solutions that power global media operations. It described those solutions as follows:

• Scalable Asset Management for global catalogs, enabling efficient organization, versioning, and delivery of content across markets.
• AI-Powered Metadata Enrichment to enhance discoverability, personalization, and monetization.
• Secure, Cloud-Based Delivery helping customers distribute content with agility and confidence.

“Our AWS accreditation validates the strength of our products and the impact they deliver every day for the world’s leading media companies,” Forte added. “It underscores our commitment to helping customers modernize the media supply chain and realize the benefits of cloud-native, AI-enabled operations. We’re incredibly proud of our teams for achieving this milestone and grateful to AWS for their collaboration.”

This recognition places Vubiquity among a select group of AWS Media & Entertainment Competency Partners within the AWS Partner Network (APN), strengthening its role in enabling customers’ transformation with AWS, the company said.

STAMFORD, Conn. and NEW YORK—Charter Communications, Inc. has announced a major deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that establishes AWS as one of Charter's strategic GenAI providers.

Charter reported that the “comprehensive agreement will transform Charter's software development capabilities and operational efficiency through advanced artificial intelligence solutions.”

As part of the new agreement, Charter has standardized its software development processes to leverage GitLab Duo with Amazon Q Developer, AWS's generative AI-powered assistant for building, operating, and transforming software development.

The platform features agentic coding experiences and advanced capabilities for managing data and AI/ML workloads. GitLab Duo with Amazon Q Developer will enable Charter to accelerate new features and software development, directly enhancing experiences for Spectrum Internet, TV and Mobile customers.

“Innovative technology from AWS provides opportunities to both leverage developer tools and build agentic solutions across the company,” said Jake Perlman, executive vice president, chief technology and information officer at Charter Communications. “AWS technology enables us to develop AI-powered solutions that enhance our capabilities, ultimately improving customer experience, employee experience, and the overall performance and reliability of our services. We look forward to continued collaboration with AWS applying AI across our business.”

Charter also reported that its strategic collaboration with AWS extends beyond software development. Both companies also plan on working together to implement agentic AI solutions across Charter's operations. These initiatives are designed to deliver exceptional experiences, reliability, and connectivity to Spectrum residential and business customers as well as employees.

"Q Developer represents the cutting edge of AI-powered software development, enabling developers to build faster and more efficiently than ever before," said Jan Hofmeyr, vice president of telecommunications at AWS. "We're excited to see Charter leverage Amazon Q Developer's capabilities and access to Claude Sonnet 4.5, and we look forward to introducing them to additional solutions like Kiro, our AI companion offering that further enhances the development experience. This collaboration demonstrates how generative AI can transform enterprise software development at scale."

BRUSSELS—Mediagenix has announced that it has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program (ISV). This acceptance follows the successful completion of the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) across Mediagenix platforms that underpin the company’s Content Strategy and Budgeting, Content Value Management for title and rights metadata, and Content Scheduling solutions.

“Joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program connects Mediagenix to the AWS sales organization, and enables frictionless procurement of our solutions through the AWS Marketplace,” said Emmanuel Müller, CPO, Mediagenix.“Successfully completing the AWS Foundational Technical Review is a powerful validation of our platforms and business. Together, these achievements reinforce our commitment to delivering secure, reliable, and innovative solutions while expanding opportunities to work more closely with AWS to serve customers worldwide.”

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program connects independent software vendors directly with AWS field teams, enabling streamlined engagement with customers worldwide. Mediagenix will be able to simplify procurement through AWS Marketplace, align more closely with AWS go-to-market initiatives, and accelerate the delivery of its solutions to enterprise customers, the company reported.

Passing the AWS FTR validates Mediagenix platforms for their adherence to AWS Well-Architected best practices in areas like security and reliability. The process requires proactive risk analysis and mitigation, ensuring Mediagenix solutions are designed to perform at scale in alignment with AWS standards, the company explained.

Building on the integration of Spideo personalization and recommendations technology and the introduction of the Self-Optimizing Content Monetization Flywheel, Mediagenix also reported that it continues to expand the intelligence across its solutions and bring value to its customers.

With recent high marks in security credentials, including SOC 2 Type II compliance and the recertification of ISO 27001, Mediagenix further demonstrates its dedication to safeguarding customer trust. Achieving AWS FTR and joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program underscores Mediagenix’s commitment to technical excellence while enhancing opportunities to deepen customer engagement, the company said.

Mediagenix’s Humanized Semantic Search was recently awarded IBC2025 Best of Show by TV Tech, while its Scheduling Automation solution captured two IBC2025 Best of Show honors, one from TV Tech and one from TVBEurope.

PBS will use generative AI from Amazon Web Services to provide enhanced search results to viewers on the PBS App and PBS LearningMedia platforms, the network and AWS said.

PBS said it teamed up with science and strategy experts from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to develop and launch a new generative-AI-powered search engine fueled by Amazon Bedrock, the AWS-managed Gen AI service, the network said. Working backwards from its problem with the AWS team, PBS envisioned the updated search engine, trained and tested models, then catalogued and tagged metadata for more than 700,000 assets in less than six months. As a result, viewers can now search the entire PBS library based on their interests across subgenres, topics, themes and even moods.

“If we did manual metadata-tagging for this project, it would have taken years,” said Mikey Centrella, director of product at PBS, Digital Innovation. “With Amazon Bedrock, we were able to do it quickly, at a fraction of the cost and within the secure AWS environment we already have. In just a few months, we built a proof-of-concept and tested and successfully scaled it into production. By greatly improving our search tools, we’re delivering a better experience for viewers and showing them different parts of our catalog that they might not have found otherwise.”

The deployment and the technology used for the improve search systems was laid out by AWS in a blog by Zach Dugan, senior industry product marketing manager for Media & Entertainment.

The deployment builds on a relationship between PBS and AWS that goes back more than a decade. PBS already uses AWS across nearly every aspect of its operations, which enables it to cost-efficiently scale and deploy new technology.

“One of the great things about building on AWS is that we can easily explore ways to modernize our operations, without impacting what’s already in production,” said Centrella. “Our assets are already in the cloud, so it’s a safe way to play, figure out what we might want to invest in and then apply it across the business. As a nonprofit, we must be smart about our choices and use our dollars efficiently. AWS helps us protect the value of what we’re creating for the American public.”

Dugan explained that Centrella’s team wanted to create a solution with generative AI that would add value and have an immediate impact for viewers. After connecting with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center in late 2024, the team began to explore how best to augment PBS’s existing search engine—built on AWS and cloud-native tools from PBS—using generative AI.

“The table stakes [for streaming services] have changed because of technology,” Centrella said. “Our users wanted a more robust search engine, so that’s what we created.”

After defining the project scope, Dugan reported that PBS began an eight-week engagement with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center.

The mission of the Generative AI Innovation Center is to help organizations like PBS to accelerate their adoption of Gen AI to unlock mission-changing outcomes. They accomplish this through bespoke generative AI proof-of-concepts, designed in collaboration with customers, according to AWS.

Using their expertise at AWS, Centrella’s team began building the new search engine framework and testing different models. The existing search engine implementation of PBS had basic logic functionality but the use of generative AI for extensive metadata tagging enabled the new search engine to offer much more specific results.

For example, each area of search classification now encompasses hundreds of options and dozens of metadata tags that can be applied to any given project. For example, a viewer can search “heartwarming” in the PBS App and receive a result such as “All Creatures Great and Small,” a charming series about a veterinarian in Northern England in the 1930s, AWS explained.

“Generative AI is great at pattern recognition and summarization, and metadata—set up correctly—provides a solid foundation for success,” Centrella explained. “We found that the show descriptions and transcripts gave us the most value for the price for analyzing content. We narrowed down four areas of classification internally, then used models on Amazon Bedrock to analyze the content and apply the most appropriate metadata.”

In addition, AWS and PBS established a sandbox environment to collaboratively evaluate model performance using Amazon Bedrock, ultimately determining the Anthropic Claude Sonnet to be the best fit.

"The PBS team then ran parallel workstreams on 50 shows, with PBS colleagues manually creating metadata tags based on show scripts to compare with the results created using generative AI," the blog noted. "Looking at the outcomes, they found that the model produced data sets as good as or better than the ones that were created manually, and doing so in minutes. Based on those promising results, PBS moved the model into operation, generating metadata tags for its entire content library of 700,000 assets and incorporating this new metadata into its search engine."

Looking forward Dugan noted in the blog that “the PBS Innovation Team is working again with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to evaluate other ways to incorporate generative AI into its infrastructure. The most likely next step is to extend enhanced search recommendations to the network’s kid’s catalog.”

“PBS understands that the audience and their behaviors are changing, across all the available streaming options, gaming platforms and mobile devices. We live in a multiplatform, multimedia world, and we want to meet people where they are,” shared Centrella. “It can be challenging to address all the new technology and distribution types that seem to emerge daily, and at the same time, linear still matters. AWS makes it easy for us to evolve and experiment, while maintaining our core values.”

More information about building scalable generative AI applications on AWS is available here or here.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services (AWS) will feature 56 AWS Partners making various demos that showcase the technologies and use cases shaping the future of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

AWS will demonstrate the latest cloud and AI technologies helping users with broadcast, streaming, media supply chain and monetization requirements. This includes a Builder Zone and Generative AI Zone.

Attendees will learn how M&E companies can adapt to a shifting entertainment environment at scale and within budget by using the latest generative AI and cloud-based tools from AWS and its partners.

Reuters will join AWS in demonstrating live content being captured from the floor of the United Kingdom (UK) Parliament and replicated in near real-time to multiple news organizations at the same time.

The news agency will use the open-source Time-Addressable Media Store (TAMS) API specification and AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Elemental MediaConvert and AWS Step Functions.

Reuters and AWS will show how cloud-native collaboration and interoperability can transform the way news is created, exchanged and monetized. AWS will also show how TAMS can be integrated with Amazon Bedrock and the TwelveLabs video understanding models to enable embedding news content.

For M&E companies wanting to leverage generative AI to unlock revenue from their existing content libraries and intellectual property while reducing operational costs and enhancing viewing experiences, AWS will feature demos showing practical use of generative AI workloads. The company will present examples of how to use services like Amazon Bedrock, featuring Amazon Nova foundation models, and Amazon Connect.

AI agents are also helping M&E companies support new engagement features, streamline operations and enhance advertising and monetization opportunities. The AWS booth will include agentic AI demos, showcasing capabilities like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Q, and Kiro to support M&E use cases. This includes demos featuring the latest update to the Guidance for a Media Lake on AWS, which has added agentic AI capabilities from AWS Partners MASV and Nomad Media.

Attendees can explore how AWS services can support their unique needs alongside experts in the Builder Zone. This includes learning to deploy infrastructure across multiple availability zones and regions using Amazon CloudFront and capturing detailed video quality metrics for every frame in your output with AWS Elemental MediaConvert.

The Builder Zone will also feature experts who can discuss Digital Sovereignty at AWS. This includes the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Sept. 3, 2025, marked the 10 years anniversary of AWS acquiring Elemental Technologies, now known as AWS Elemental.

The AWS stand will feature a dynamic timeline mapping out a decade of milestones and industry breakthroughs. It will give attendees a look back on the hundreds of features released since the acquisition.

See AWS at IBC2025 Stand 5.C90.

More information is available on the company’s website.

As news organizations and broadcasters face more pressure than ever to capture, verify, and distribute real-time access to breaking news, Reuters and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced that they will demonstrate what they are calling a next-generation news distribution system during IBC2025.

The demo involves live content captured from the floor of the United Kingdom (UK) Parliament that is replicated in near real-time to multiple news organizations simultaneously, the two companies said.

Using the open-source Time-Addressable Media Store (TAMS) API specification and AWS services including Amazon S3, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, and AWS Step Functions, Reuters and AWS will showcase how cloud-native collaboration and interoperability can significantly reduce of the time need to share content, lower associated costs, and transform the way news is created, exchanged and monetized. Additionally, AWS will show how TAMS can be integrated with Amazon Bedrock and TwelveLabs video understanding models to enable embedding of news content.

In a live demonstration, Reuters will ingest UK Parliament feeds produced by the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit, transmitted using TAMS to AWS, and then provide the content near instantly to broadcasting and distribution partners.

“Speed, accuracy, and trust are the pillars of Reuters visual journalism. By working with AWS, we’re turning camera-to-cloud from a concept into a working reality—moving high-quality footage from the field to our producers and customers in seconds,” Mahesh Ramachandran, head of technology, Reuters. “This isn’t just faster; it’s a fundamental shift in how we gather, edit and distribute video. With AWS’s TAMS-based cloud architecture, Reuters producers and Reuters News Agency customers can instantly access breaking news content, getting verified visuals to audiences sooner, at lower cost and with the flexibility to scale for any story, anywhere.”

“Our cost modeling suggests that TAMS can significantly reduce fast-turnaround workflow costs for organizations like Reuters, on top of time savings,” shared Chris Swan, principal solutions architect for content production at AWS. “Since content in these frameworks is moving between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets in short segments, transfers can be done in parallel instead of linear. What took two hours can be done in seconds, and metadata updates happen instantly.”

Spearheaded by the BBC Research and Development (R&D) team, TAMS is based on the idea of storing short segments of media in an object storage service like Amazon S3, with an API to describe the segments and how they are inter-related, AWS explained.

AWS noted that TAMS solves the challenges of taking a lift-and-shift approach to running fast-turnaround media workflows in the cloud. Adoption of TAMS means shifting away from file-based workflows that lead to content duplication and are difficult to scale. Using timing and identity as key primitives to describe media in the store allows organizations to build more content-centric workflows.

The solution is also designed to address the fact that when news agencies and broadcasters cover the same big story, they must deploy separate teams and resources. With unified interoperability on TAMS, one reputable organization can be the source of truth for content, increasing efficiency and freeing time and resources for elements that differentiate programming.

The open-source standard can be quickly adopted, with the API-driven functionality shaving weeks if not months off development timelines. It also helps reinforce audience trust and expands reach through broader, faster distribution of verified video content and reliable information. The real-time demonstration from Reuters and AWS marks a significant step forward for practical TAMS applications, which are quickly gaining traction in the broadcast industry, AWS explained.

“With TAMS, broadcasters can make more content available to end users faster, using the same internal resources,” added John Biltcliffe, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. “TAMS can also help revolutionize the viewing experience by supporting self-serve features and deeper personalization, while making it more intuitive for media organizations to use AI for richer audience experiences.”

TAMS was first implemented by AWS for a fast-turnaround workflow at IBC 2024 as a proof-of-concept supported by the Cloud Native Agile Production (CNAP) project. CNAP is a collaboration between companies (including BBC, Sky, Adobe, Cutting Room, Drastic Technologies, Techex, and Vizrt) to advance the development and adoption of the TAMS open-source framework.

After experiencing the demonstration at IBC 2024, Reuters decided to test out TAMS with its own implementation for real-time intercompany distribution.

Reuters and AWS began collaborating in February 2025, and then enlisted BBC, CNN, Sky, and Elliott Media. The resulting setup enables Reuters to make content available almost instantly to any broadcast or distribution partner.

“News broadcasters record everything just in case, and much of this content will be discarded,” explained Swan. “There will still be a need for live contribution for certain events, but using a TAMS approach with the cloud is much more efficient. Reuters records once, then its broadcast partners can access what they need after the event. Moving this workflow to the cloud also enables Reuters to produce more, or less, content as the news cycle dictates. It brings true flexibility and scalability to fast-turnaround workflows.”

The demonstration will leverage TAMS to store, query and access segmented media over HTTP.

Working closely with the BBC, AWS teams built an interoperable framework that provides a single virtual store for live content. This makes it faster and seamless for creators to craft video highlights clips and packages for integration into live content, social sharing and other applications using their preferred toolsets and the AWS Cloud. Visitors to the AWS stand will be able to see a complete, fast-turnaround media workflow spanning low-latency video ingest through to playout—with file import and export, and web-based editing, AWS reported.

For the demo, live video feeds from UK Parliament, Reuters live feeds and Reuters produced short-form video on-demand (VOD) content will be ingested directly into the Reuters TAMS store. From there, content is instantly and securely federated with an AWS TAMS instance, acting as a customer of the Reuters store.

The demonstration also features AWS Partners Mimir, Adobe, Techex, Matrox, and CuttingRoom. The TAMS on AWS implementation is also integrated with video understanding models from TwelveLabs, in Amazon Bedrock, to create embeddings of news content in real time.

“TAMS is foundational for helping the broadcast industry advance AI understanding for live video,” noted Biltcliffe. “It brings all the pieces together by providing the customer with one ingest for all purposes, whether for social media, content production, archive or syndication.”

On Sunday at 12:45 PM in the AWS IBC Showcase Theatre, Reuters, BBC, Sky, and CNN will be speaking on a panel. AWS said that session attendees can hear from technology leaders about:

• Challenges the TAMS approach solves for their organization
• How they are collaborating with AWS to redefine news workflows
• What new opportunities are being unlocked by adopting a cloud-native, open and interoperable approach

Organizations looking to learn more about the CNAP initiative and TAMS, can find additional resources by reading Guidance for Cloud-Native Fast-Turnaround Media Workflows on AWS. Included are a detailed implementation guide, reference architectures, sample code for use in TAMS workflows, and related content.

Attendees can get more information at the AWS IBC Booth (Hall 5, Stand C90). They can also schedule time with AWS at IBC2025.

Ten years ago this week, Amazon Web Services announced the acquisition of Elemental Technologies, a pioneer in video processing technology. Founded in Portland, Ore. by Sam Blackman, Jesse Rosenzweig, and Brian Lewis in 2006, Elemental had already established its role as an influential player in the rapidly growing video streaming market.

Elemental was instrumental in accelerating live and on-demand video processing using GPU-based appliances, and in 2014 launched Elemental Delta, a video delivery platform providing next-generation TV services.

Brought into the AWS fold a year later, Elemental began its evolution as a cloud-based video processing company. In 2017, AWS Elemental Media Services was launched, introducing a purpose-built suite of tools that changed the way media companies create, produce, monetize, and deliver content. Originally comprised of AWS Elemental MediaConvert, MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaStore, and MediaTailor, the services were expanded with the release of MediaConnect in 2018.

Since then, AWS Elemental Media Services has played an important role in tackling some of streaming’s biggest challenges, including an NFL Christmas doubleheader in 2024 livestreamed on Netflix to 65 million United States (U.S.) viewers tuning in for at least one minute of action. It also helped Tubi deliver the most-streamed Super Bowl in history, to a peak audience of 15.5 million, and helped NBCUniversal insert personalized advertisements across 5,000 hours of Paris Olympics content on Peacock also in 2024.

In 2017, AWS made history when it hosted a live chat from the International Space Station during the NAB Show using Elemental's technology to produce the first-ever live 4K video stream from space.

Manish Rao, who joined the company as GM of AWS Elemental in 2024, spoke with TV Tech about his evolving relationship with AWS Elemental, which began years before.

“I was running all of the video technologies for Prime Video for about seven years, so I worked very closely with the Elemental team in building a lot of these products, because Prime Video is always the first tester, first reference customer,” he said. “So I've been working with Elemental through the evolution of their cloud journey. Prior to the acquisition, Elemental was primarily an on-prem hardware video processing platform.”

New products or services rolled out over the past decade include MediaConvert, which processes video files to prepare high-quality on-demand content, MediaLive, which encodes high-quality live video for broadcast and streaming, while MediaPackage prepares and protects content. MediaStore stores and originates video assets, MediaTailor creates and monetizes personalized linear channels with dynamic ad insertion, while MediaConnect transports live video reliably and securely. Quality-defined variable bitrate (QVBR) encoding, a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award winning feature, was introduced in 2018 to help customers save on storage and distribution costs while increasing video quality.

Automated adaptive bit rate (ABR) configuration was added to MediaConvert in 2020 to pick ideal renditions for the ABR configuration of video. Soon after, AWS Elemental Link, a device that simplified cloud connectivity via linking live video sources to MediaLive was released with a UHD version to follow. Also launched in 2020, AWS Cloud Digital Interface (AWS CDI), helped spur the growth of live cloud-based production by providing network technology for reliably transporting uncompressed live video between applications in the cloud.

In 2017, the company suffered a tragic loss with the untimely passing of Sam Blackman. Although he wasn’t with Elemental at the time, Manish met Sam several times prior to joining AWS Elemental and remembers him for his dedication and enthusiasm.

“Sam was very down to earth,” he said. Reflecting on the first time he met Sam, ”I arrived early at an executive briefing conference, and Sam was already there, and he spoke about his family and Portland. He was a very charismatic person, and very in tune with what was going on in the market.”

Manish says that the changes in the streaming market and AWS Elemental’s technological milestones over the past decade have positioned AWS Elemental to thrive in the years ahead.

“The media industry is undergoing a generational shift from broadcast to streaming; I think, over the last two years, streaming has outgrown terrestrial broadcast,” he said. “And so our customers are looking to us to develop new products to make that transformation a lot easier. And with Gen AI coming into the landscape, I think customers are looking to us to both Elemental and AWS to help them through deliver better new viewing experiences to the Gen Z audience, increase audience reach globally, optimize costs through workflow automation and improve ad revenue.”

As part of the ten-year anniversary celebration, AWS will showcase a timeline of Elemental history at Stand 5.C90 during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam. AWS Elemental experts will also be on hand to answer questions in the Builder zone.

MELVILLE, N.Y.—Chyron said its Chyron LIVE cloud-native live production solution has successfully completed the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Foundational Technical Review (FTR).

The AWS FTR helps developers identify and mitigate risks, focusing on a well-architected framework and best practices for cloud-native applications. The review process is thorough, requiring an initial self-assessment against a list of stringent requirements, followed by expert review and additional requests for clarification and information.

Chyron LIVE is built natively on AWS Cloud. It comprises Chyron’s broadcast-grade graphics, camera and video input switching, illustrated replay and audio control, all operable from a single user interface. Functionalities that would typically be implemented on server-grade devices in a brick-and-mortar control room or from an on-site broadcast truck are easily accessible from anywhere via an HTML browser with Chyron LIVE, without major infrastructure and hardware investment.

“Chyron LIVE has attracted the interest of everyone from major broadcasters, who need agility, scalability, and more content across more channels, to smaller educational institutions and businesses, and others who want the look of a professional broadcast at a fraction of the cost, Kristy Weir, Chyron LIVE product manager, said. “We are excited about completing the FTR, as this unlocks various AWS co-selling opportunities that will be a win-win for Chyron, for AWS, for our technical partners, and for our customers.”

Said Chyron CEO Mike Truex: “I am really proud of the entire Chyron LIVE team for this achievement. It demonstrates adherence to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, a key consideration for our customers in entrusting their core operations to the cloud. Chyron has a strong commitment to quality, reliability, and efficiency, and meeting the standards set forth by the FTR for security, reliability, operational excellence, domain expertise, and risk mitigation highlights the successful maturation of Chyron LIVE. Cloud workflows and the efficiencies and cost savings that they can provide are a key part of our initiative to serve customers well today and help them transition easily to the broadcast workflows of the future.”

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid today announced an extended agreement with Amazon MGM Studios to integrate Avid’s Media Composer and Avid NEXIS on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new integration enables the studio’s customers to deploy Avid’s editing and storage solutions via the cloud to fit their specific production needs, Avid said.

Amazon MGM Studios and Avid began a strategic collaboration three years ago that will continue as the companies explore ways to integrate other Avid tools via the cloud. The launch of the Amazon MGM Studios integrations follows the unveiling of the Avid on AWS production framework at NAB Show 2025.

“Amazon MGM Studios’ continued relationship with Avid underscores our confidence in the role Avid NEXIS and Avid Media Composer play in the cloud-powered post-production future,” said Raf Soltanovich, VP of Technology, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios. “Today, through the Studio’s own offering with AWS, we can deploy Avid NEXIS to our productions around the world in minutes, which helps us ensure we have best-in-class tools to support our productions.”

Amazon MGM Studios is driving a cloud-first vision for the industry that enhances global collaboration, the companies said. The deployment of Avid tools in AWS empowers distributed creative teams, accelerating turnaround times while cutting complexity through flexible, software-defined workflows.

The collaboration strengthens agility and efficiencies through cloud automation in AWS, enabling new editorial environments to be launched globally within minutes, the companies said.

This agility was demonstrated with a recent feature shooting in India, running dailies in Mumbai and completing editorial in London and Spain. This flexibility enables seamless editorial changes during production while supporting creative flexibility and international collaboration. By leveraging this technology, production teams can maintain workflow continuity across borders, adapting swiftly to evolving creative customer needs.

“We are meeting the pent-up demand of enterprise-class customers for a secure, scalable, and high-performance post-production solution on AWS,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO at Avid. “Amazon MGM Studios’ integration of Avid Media Composer and Avid NEXIS not only shows the critical role our technology continues to play in media production workflows, it also proves that cloud-native post-production is empowering successful creators everywhere, today.”

On Air, a 26-hour global live broadcast will take place on Oct. 16 2025, delivering a continuous stream of original and pre-recorded content managed entirely by university and college students.

The project has been put together by the Global Media and Entertainment Talent Manifesto, with backing from ITV Studios, SMPTE, AWS, Vizrt and Deluxe.

Each participating institution will contribute at least one hour of live programming to the broadcast. Confirmed universities/locations include: Auckland University of Technology (SMPTE), Baltic Film and Media School, Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart (SMPTE), Hong Kong Design Institute (SMPTE), Lycée René Cassin – Biarritz, Medieklyngen – Media Cluster Norway, University of Sao Paulo in partnership with Faculdade Casper Libero, University of Surrey, University of Texas (SMPTE), and York University with Ravensbourne University London as the central hub for master control room, playout control and operations.

The aim is for On Air to give participating students real-world experience, international exposure, and networking opportunities, as well as offering media and entertainment organisations direct access to a diverse pool of future-ready creatives and technologists.

“On Air exemplifies the power of collaboration between education and industry by providing an opportunity to connect with and support the next generation of talent,” said Carrie Wootten, founder of the Global Media and Entertainment Talent Manifesto. “By giving students real-world experience, hands-on learning and visibility among potential future employers, we can help ensure the future of our sector is more innovative, inclusive and sustainable.”

Tim Guilder, head of production technology – ITV Studios at ITV, added: “ITV is committed to helping foster the next generation of talent and we’re proud to be supporting On Air and providing technical support and studio access to this exciting project. The scale of this project will give creatives and technologists more global opportunities to shine.”

The On Air team is looking for a distribution partner and any platform integrators to take the project further. More details about the project are available here: http://mediatalentmanifesto.com/on-air

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

MONTREAL—Matrox Video has announced that it has successfully completed the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) for Matrox ORIGIN.

Matrox ORIGIN is a media-aware development framework designed to empower developers to create software-defined broadcast infrastructure running on generic IT equipment, whether deployed on-premises or in the public cloud, the company said.

“Completing the AWS Foundational Technical Review is a significant milestone for Matrox ORIGIN, validating our framework's exceptional performance, scalability, and security in cloud environments,” said Daniel Robinson, product manager at Matrox Video. “Working closely with AWS helps us deliver advanced broadcast infrastructure solutions with powerful APIs and intuitive controls, enabling our customers to rapidly innovate, scale efficiently, and confidently transition toward software-defined workflows.”

The AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) is a comprehensive assessment that allows AWS partners like Matrox to identify and remediate risks within their software or solutions. The review ensures that solutions are aligned with AWS Well-Architected best practices, emphasizing security, reliability, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

Successfully completing the FTR demonstrates Matrox Video’s commitment to maintaining high standards and provides customers with added confidence in the robustness, security, and efficiency of solutions deployed on AWS, Matrox said.

Matrox ORIGIN is designed to replace traditional broadcast hardware interconnected with clocked, synchronous protocols such as ST 2110 or SDI. It leverages distributed Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) environments interconnected via asynchronous, uncompressed fabric. This unique architecture, combined with comprehensive control capabilities, frees media processing from hardware limitations, delivering unmatched scalability, agility, an redundancy.

More information is available here.

LONDON—7fivefive said it will expand its work for BBC Studios’ Global Media & Streaming team and that it is helping the U.K. public broadcaster’s studio arm scale its virtual infrastructure.

As part of that effort, 7fivefive is delivering the remote editing backbone that supports postproduction and content-based workflows. In addition, 7fivefive is working in tandem with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the selected cloud provider, to help BBC Studios realize its cloud-first strategy.

7fivefive’s cloud expertise now underpins the Global Media & Streaming teams’ postproduction process, enabling creative teams to manage resources efficiently and collaborate across different time zones. Throughout the project, 7fivefive has provided strategic consultation, designing and implementing solutions that maximize responsiveness and reduce overheads, the integrator said.

The system is designed to dynamically scale active resources, with automated controls enhancing productivity. Virtual workstations can be provisioned and optimized based on real-time requirements, empowering users to self-serve without compromising on performance. Different teams receive customized resources that are best suited to specific creative tasks, across editing, graphics, color grading, compliance and branding.

The latest phase of the project harnesses the capabilities of Adobe and AWS within a unified cloud environment. Regional departments can seamlessly transition between projects, access secure content from anywhere, manage allocation and act on data-driven insights. Predictive cost metrics and automated budget management are based on detailed analytics. This ensures that business objectives are met without compromising on creative quality or operational goals.

“7fivefive's cloud expertise and practical insight has been key in helping us modernize our creative technology stack and post-production workflows, allowing us to implement meaningful optimizations with confidence and efficiency,” said Emma Ellis, creative services technology manager, Global Technology, at BBC Studios. “These enhancements have increased flexibility across our creative teams, allowing seamless access to remote editing resources and global media content from anywhere. This shift has not only introduced additional operational efficiencies, but has ensured we can continue delivering high-quality, engaging content to our audiences worldwide.”

Added 7fivefive Managing Director Tim Burton: "We are extremely proud to continue our long-standing partnership with BBC Studios, providing the technology, insights, and strategic support that helps to power its cloud-first approach to post-production infrastructure. These workflows enable creative teams to focus on the task at hand, whilst the complexity of integrated cloud resources is handled via an intuitive interface. Our shared commitment to innovation ensures that hey are well-equipped for the challenges of tomorrow’s media landscape.”

Adam Jakubowski, vice president of technical operations, Global Technology at BBC Studios, said: “The collaboration with 7fivefive has played a key role in our cloud trajectory. We have scaled virtual post-production workflows over the past five years, and adaptive resource allocation continues to provide significant cost and workflow efficiency gains. The flexibility of this solution means we can respond to evolving business and industry needs and enhance the autonomy and agility of our creative teams.”

More information is available here.

LONDON—Fremantle has announced it has selected Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build what the companies are calling "a future-proof, scalable, global content supply chain platform that adapts to the evolving demands of the industry."

In announcing the deal, Jens Richter, CEO of Commercial and International at Fremantle explained that “a robust content supply chain that will cater to the dynamic business requirements of monetizing content is paramount, and we look forward to working with PFT and AWS to see what we can achieve together. This collaboration will provide us with the agility, visibility, speed and scalability required across Commercial and International, Digital and Global channels to streamline our media supply chain and digital processes.”

The platform will seamlessly unify Fremantle’s operations across markets, provide real-time visibility into content workflows, and enable faster time-to-market and commercialization of assets.

The companies said that the platform, which is being built on AWS, will use the latest cloud technologies, and will benefit from the scalability, security, and flexibility enabled by cloud computing. Fremantle will also use PFT’s flagship solution, CLEAR Smart MAM, as part of the platform, which is also built on AWS. CLEAR’s agentic AI capabilities will help Fremantle enrich content with contextual metadata, streamline workflows, and enhance efficiencies across its content operations.

“Our offering is designed to meet the most demanding needs of global content studios like Fremantle,” explained Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. “We’re thrilled to partner with them on this transformative journey and enable their vision of a modern, AI-powered supply chain that fuels creativity and revenue.”

Andy Stephenson, head of broadcast, media, and sport, UK, at AWS added that: “We are proud to support Fremantle on its digital transformation journey. By harnessing technologies like cloud computing and AI, Fremantle will be able to drive innovation across its business, scale quickly, easily, and securely, and extract new value from its content.”

The project will be overseen by Thalia Crone, global head of Media Supply Chain Operations, Fremantle. Fremantle’s Commercial and International division is responsible for maximizing the commercial value of Fremantle content. From selling content to international broadcasters and platforms, selling Fremantle formats, publishing content to digital platforms, and setting up and managing all Fremantle direct-to-consumer channels.

In a notable example of how AI is transforming sports coverage, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Sports Europe has announced the launch of Cycling Central Intelligence (CCI), an innovative generative AI-powered platform developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The platform debuts at the 2025 WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series season opener in Araxá, Minas Gerais (Brazil) on April 5. Designed to transform how mountain bike events are covered, it marks a significant advancement in sports broadcasting technology AWS and Warner Bros. Discovery said.

As part of this initiative, AWS becomes the Official Cloud Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Provider for the WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series..

The two companies said that CCI will dramatically improve efficiencies for cycling commentators by mitigating the challenges of accessing comprehensive information about riders, venues and race histories within a live broadcasting environment. By providing instant access to a wealth of data points, it will allow commentators to deliver even richer storytelling to better connect fans with their favorite sport.

"What makes CCI truly revolutionary is how it enhances and complements the human expertise that makes sports broadcasting special," said Chris Ball, VP, Cycling Events at WBD Sports. "Our commentators and producers bring unmatched levels of experience and passion for the sport, and through our partnership with AWS, CCI ensures they can expertly craft the compelling stories and insights that our viewers love and that will keep them engaged.”

"This collaboration represents a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to innovation in sports broadcasting," Ball continued. "By combining cutting-edge AI technology with our leading production expertise, we're setting new standards for how mountain bike events are brought to life for viewers around the globe."

"AWS is helping Warner Bros. Discovery enhance the art of sports storytelling through the practical uses of generative AI," added Samira Panah Bakhtiar, general manager of media & entertainment, games, and sports at AWS. "This collaboration showcases how AWS’ generative AI services can amplify human expertise. By handling time-consuming research and data synthesis tasks, CCI frees up WBD's talented commentary teams to focus on their passion and ability to capture the excitement of live sports."

The CCI platform leverages advanced generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 on AWS to create a unified knowledge base that processes and analyzes hundreds of documents about riders and events, along with vast databases of results, race times, and athletic performance data.

This comprehensive system enables commentators and production teams to access information through natural language queries, dramatically reducing research time and enabling more engaging, data-driven storytelling. Working backwards from the needs of its broadcasting teams, WBD Sports Europe collaborated with teams at AWS to envision CCI, develop a proof-of-concept, and build the solution.

CCI's technical architecture carefully balances AI capabilities with human expertise. The platform utilizes Amazon Textract for document processing, Amazon Translate for breaking down language barriers across international content, and Amazon Comprehend for organizing and structuring information. Amazon Bedrock integrates with these services while ensuring broadcasting professionals maintain complete control over the storytelling process.

WBD and AWS stressed that the platform will continue to evolve throughout the season, with plans to incorporate additional features that will enable WBD’s commentators and production teams to serve mountain bike fans with the best possible live content and viewing experiences.

The 2025 WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series begins in Araxá, Minas Gerais (Brazil) this weekend with the first of 16 rounds. Live and on-demand coverage of every race is available through WBD’s channels and platforms including Eurosport (Europe) and TNT Sports (UK & Ireland) with streaming on Max and discovery+, as well as around the world through WBD’s broadcast partners.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), to deliver a cloud-based production framework that helps film and television production companies address key industry challenges, including rising costs, reduced budgets, and increasingly complex workflows, the two companies said. The new collaboration will be showcased at the 2025 NAB Show 2025 in Las Vegas April 5-9.

The new Avid on AWS production framework gives studios, broadcasters, and streaming services unparalleled access to Avid’s post-production solutions—offering the award-winning Avid Media Composer video editing software and Avid NEXIS storage on AWS, Avid said.

Unlike traditional on-premises post-production models, which require heavy upfront investment, the new Avid on AWS production framework delivers enterprise-class security, compliance, and seamless scaling, according to the company. The framework empowers TV and film production companies and post-production facilities to reduce infrastructure complexity, cut operational costs by as much as 40%, and shrink deployment time by roughly 60% through automated workflows. The framework also addresses the skills shortages many production teams face by providing remote access to global talent.

The new Avid on AWS production framework enables rapid deployment of production environments—in hours rather than days or weeks – by utilizing templates for specific project needs. This turnkey solution transforms traditional production workflows by enabling efficient, scalable, and secure cloud-based operations.

“Moving post-production to the cloud means we give creative teams faster, more efficient workflows and real-time collaboration, making it easier than ever for them to view and access media, and eliminate wait times that interrupt the creative process and flow,” Wellford Dillard, CEO at Avid, said. “At Avid, we know that every timeline tells a story, and we are committed to powering creators to craft and tell their stories, and capture inspiration anytime, anywhere.”

The Avid on AWS production framework will be available in AWS Marketplace and expanded offerings for film, TV, and enterprise production companies, including advanced training programs, will roll out throughout 2025.

“The collaboration between Avid and AWS helps set a new standard for efficient, global content production,” said Chris Blandy, Global Leader, Strategy and Business Development for Media & Entertainment at AWS. “Together, we are empowering the media and entertainment industry to accelerate the pace of implementation and content delivery. The Avid on AWS production framework will eliminate costly operational burdens and help maintain professional management standards for post-production.”

Also built on AWS and showcased at NAB Show 2025 is Wolftech News. Wolftech is an Avid company that enables newsroom teams to easily manage story-centric workflows. Wolftech News will be presented at the AWS Theater, Stand W1343 on Sunday, April 6 at 12:45 – 1:15 pm.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—SDVI has signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate cloud-based media supply chain innovation, the company said today.

“We have been part of the AWS Partner Network since the beginning of the company, and with the SCA we are elevating our relationship to a new level,” said Lawrence Kaplan, president and chief executive officer for SDVI. “We look forward to both technical and commercial collaboration that will enable us to grow our product offering and market adoption significantly with AWS.”

Together, the companies aim to deliver solutions that simplify content supply chain deployment and operations, making media operations more agile and efficient for companies of all sizes, it said.

SDVI will leverage AWS services to automate and accelerate the exchange of content through the AWS cloud, making it easier and faster for media companies to move content between suppliers and distributors, it said.

The collaboration will also lead to the expansion of SDVI’s addressable market and the availability of its supply chain tools for any media company through AWS Marketplace. SDVI will work with AWS to integrate AWS GenAI tools into its core platform, providing next-generation capabilities for their joint customers, it said.

“SDVI and AWS share a commitment to being customer-centric, and we are excited about this collaboration as a mechanism to bring even more media supply chain innovation to our joint customers,” said Chris Blandy, global leader of strategy and business development for media and entertainment at AWS.

“This collaboration agreement builds on an already strong relationship between our organizations, and I look forward to executing on the plans that SDVI has laid out for its expanded offerings.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—TVU Networks, a global provider of cloud and IP-based live video solutions, has appointed Mike Cronk as vice president of strategy.

Cronk has more than two decades of experience in media tech, most recently as head of product for live media services at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Prior to that, he was with Grass Valley for much of the past 25 years, most recently as vice president of core technologies. He is also founding chair of the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS).

In his new role, Cronk will focus on scaling TVU’s award-winning software-as-a-service (SaaS) product line, expanding its adoption among media organizations worldwide and enhancing the company’s offerings for customers, partners and the broader media community, T said.

“Mike Cronk joins TVU at a time of unparalleled innovation and momentum for our company,” TVU CEO Paul Shen said. “His deep expertise in cloud transformation, media workflows, and product strategy will enable us to continue redefining how broadcasters engage their audiences. With Mike’s leadership, we will further strengthen our position as the trusted partner for media supply chain transformation worldwide, turning our customers’ most ambitious projects into reality.”

Reflecting on his new role, Cronk highlighted TVU’s commitment to innovation: “TVU has been at the forefront of live video production for nearly two decades, forging strong partnerships with media organizations worldwide. This year alone, TVU has enabled groundbreaking cloud-based workflows, from leveraging AI-assisted production during major sports events to powering fully cloud-based workflows for this year’s biggest elections. The opportunity to contribute to such a visionary company at this pivotal moment is truly exciting. Together with our customers, we have the potential to achieve even greater milestones and transform the industry further.”

“Mike’s vision and expertise align perfectly with TVU Networks’ mission to transform the broadcast industry,” Shen said. “His addition to our leadership team marks an exciting chapter for TVU as we continue to innovate and collaborate with our clients to redefine what’s possible in live media production.”

For more information about TVU Networks, visit tvunetworks.com.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services (AWS) said Comcast has moved its 5G wireless core from an on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-based network using its technologies.

The new cloud-based network is designed to provide Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business Mobile customers with next-generation 5G wireless services using Comcast’s licensed spectrum across the U.S.

The two companies said AWS’s global infrastructure and telecom automation framework is helping Comcast provide wireless customers with an even more scalable, secure and cost-effective service.

AWS technologies, including analytics, telecom-specific features, and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), provide a platform that enables Comcast to innovate and deploy new features, autoscale network capacity and perform lifecycle management, the companies added.

Looking ahead, Comcast and AWS also said they are exploring new ways to work together to improve customer service, optimize network performance and automate additional 5G operations.

“AWS’s extensive cloud infrastructure, together with their understanding of telco network requirements and ability to support production-grade 5G networks, will help us to continue delivering the highest quality service to our wireless customers,” said Tom Nagel, executive vice president, wireless strategy at Comcast.

Jan Hofmeyr, vice president of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Edge at AWS, said: Moving Comcast’s 5G core to the cloud will enable greater resiliency, faster innovation and enhanced security, leveraging AWS's secure global cloud infrastructure. We’re excited to work with Comcast to power this state-of-the-art 5G network that will give their customers a better wireless experience, as well as meet the needs of future applications running in this new environment.”

LAS VEGAS—Among the many AI-themed announcements made at the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon introduced Amazon Nova, a new generation of foundation models (FMs) that includes Amazon Nova Reel, which generates studio-quality videos.

The launch highlights Amazon’s increasingly aggressive push to compete with artificial intelligence video solutions from the likes of OpenAI and Grok.

The new Amazon Nova models will be available in Amazon Bedrock, and include Amazon Nova Micro (a very fast, text-to-text model); Amazon Nova Lite, Pro and Premier (multimodal models that can process text, images and videos to generate text); Amazon Nova Canvas (which generates studio-quality images); and Amazon Nova Reel (which generates studio-quality videos).

“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, said. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic capabilities.”

The company is billing Amazon Nova Reel as a state-of-the-art video generation model that allows customers to easily create high-quality video from text and images.

Amazon Nova Reel currently generates 6-second videos and will support the generation of videos of up to 2 minutes long in the coming months.

Nova Reel is designed for content creation in advertising, marketing or training, Amazon said. Customers can use natural language prompts to control visual style and pacing, including camera motion, rotation and zooming.

In announcing the product, Amazon said it outperforms comparable models in quality and consistency, according to side-by-side human evaluations conducted by a third party that preferred Amazon Nova Reel-generated videos over those generated by Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha. Like Amazon Nova Canvas, Amazon Nova Reel comes with built-in controls to support safety and responsible AI use, including watermarking and content moderation.

Amazon also announced that a number of companies are already using Nova Reel. They include:

• Dentsu Digital, a digital marketing company, is integrating Amazon Nova Reel into its creative process, enabling its team to improve and accelerate the development of its campaigns from briefing to concept development to creative video content generation. Amazon Nova Reel reduces the overall time it takes to generate new assets from weeks to days.
• Musixmatch is the world's largest lyrics platform with over 80 million users and a database of more than 11 million unique lyrics. Musixmatch is including Amazon Nova Reel in Musixmatch Pro, which helps creators distribute lyrics across all the major digital streaming services and social networks. Emerging artists can use Amazon Nova Reel to produce high-quality music videos using their songs’ context as inputs, and customize them with natural language prompts.
• 123RF, a stock photography and video portal with a library of over 200 million images and videos, is using Amazon Nova Canvas and Amazon Nova Reel to simplify the design process with smarter, faster and easier-to-use tools for visual media creators. Amazon Nova’s leading price-performance, speed, cross-language reasoning and content moderation at scale helps deliver these new capabilities to customers and creators around the world, Amazon said.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —Evergent, a provider of customer management and monetization for streaming and digital subscription businesses, has announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media & Entertainment Competency status.

The AWS Competency designation recognizes that Evergent’s media and entertainment subscription management services follow architectural and operational best practices, is being actively used by customers in production environments, and customers advocate for these services.

“Evergent is proud to achieve this AWS Media & Entertainment Competency status, which solidifies both our industry expertise and proven success in delivering value for our customers in this space,” said Vijay Sajja, Founder & CEO of Evergent. “This achievement strengthens our commitment to helping media and entertainment organizations achieve their critical business transformation goals by leveraging AWS for its breadth of services, agility and speed.”

The AWS Media & Entertainment Competency recognizes Evergent for helping customers address these changes by optimizing and streamlining monetization across global digital media offerings while providing tools to target offerings and services to specific customers; integrate different languages and currencies; and accelerate revenue across markets, the companies reported.

Achieving the AWS Media & Entertainment Competency differentiates Evergent as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member with validated expertise and proven customer success delivering transformative media workloads for companies ranging from established global studios, streamers, and production companies to those nascent in their cloud journey. To receive the designation, APN members must possess deep AWS expertise and distribute solutions seamlessly on AWS.

For more information, visit www.evergent.com.

BERGEN, Norway—Vizrt today said its cloud-ready TriCaster Vectar and TriCaster Now are now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog for software that runs on AWS. Making TriCaster video production tools available in AWS Marketplace streamlines the testing, purchase and management of those products within customers’ accounts, Vizrt said.

“AWS Marketplace provides a centralized portal for access, testing and billing of cloud-based TriCaster video production tools, making it easier than ever for content creators to take their first step in achieving truly remote live productions,” Davide Cortassa, product manager for Cloud Live Production at Vizrt, said.

“AWS customers can leverage their committed cloud spend and enjoy the reduced travel and transport costs and carbon emissions that cloud live productions provide,” he said.

TriCaster Vectar (previously Viz Vectar Plus) is a video production system for larger news and sports productions that supports up to 44 external sources. It can be deployed in customers’ AWS accounts for free as a fully functional watermarked version for testing, Vizrt said, with customers responsible for managing AWS costs.

TriCaster Now supports up to 8 inputs and caters to smaller seasonal or entry-level productions and corporate town halls. It provides a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) with a simple usage-based credits pricing model, Vizrt said.

To support the AWS Marketplace launch, Vizrt said it has qualified as a certified AWS Media & Entertainment Competency partner, a program that validates and promotes AWS Partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and customer success in specific areas.

This builds upon last year’s AWS ISV Accelerate accreditation, ensuring customers that Vizrt’s live production and media asset management (MAM) solutions meet the strict standards and best practices of AWS, it said.

Both TriCaster products are now available in the AWS Marketplace.

More information is available on the company’s website.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced today that it plans to unveil what it calls the “Cloud Native Agile Production (CNAP)” project, an open-source initiative aimed at accelerating the creation and delivery of media during live production. Developed in collaboration with BBC’s research and development (R&D) team, Sky, and AWS Partners, including Adobe and CuttingRoom, CNAP debuts as more news, sports, and entertainment productions look to develop ancillary content for live programming. CNAP’s interoperable framework provides a single virtual store for live content, making it easier to migrate production to the cloud so that creators can work with their preferred toolsets to rapidly create video highlights clips and packages for integration into live content, social sharing, and other applications, AWS said.

AWS will spotlight an end-to-end CNAP workflow at IBC on its Stand (5.C90). The demonstration includes partner technologies from Adobe, CuttingRoom, Drastic Technologies, Techex, and Vizrt, which collectively support essential fast-turnaround media workflows demands spanning low-latency video ingest through to playout, file import/export, and web-based and craft editing. The project will be highlighted at the live panel, “Reinventing fast-turnaround news and sports workflows for the cloud,” in the Innovation Village on Sunday, September 15 at 11:15 AM.

“By providing an open interoperable approach to fast turnaround media workflows, the Cloud Native Agile Production project is breaking down workflow silos, bringing the technology to support live broadcast and streaming, social media publishing, archive/record, VOD streaming, and more into one cloud-native environment. This convergence unlocks incredible new efficiencies, flexibility, and operational benefits for content providers,” explained Chris Blandy, Director of Strategic Business Development for Media & Entertainment, Games and Sports at AWS. “We’re thrilled to collaborate with our customers and partners on this project, which will ultimately help content providers produce content in the cloud for fast turnaround workflows while also extending growth opportunities for AWS Partners.”

Cloud Native Agile Production
For the project, BBC R&D provided its open-source Time Addressable Media Store (TAMS) specification, which is publicly available on github, and stores, queries, and accesses segmented media over HTTP. AWS then began building on top of the modern open, API-driven architecture to ensure AWS customers and partners could leverage the CNAP framework to deploy custom TAMS implementations in AWS.

Presenting a cost-efficient alternative to the lift-and-shift, file-centric workflows deployed today, CNAP limits time spent processing content, according to AWS. It supports a serverless, chunked media store approach with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) providing the underlying storage layer. Amazon S3 enables a ‘store once, use many’ approach to repurposing media, so simple edits can be expressed as a metadata ‘publish’ rather than a new asset or exported file. This strategy reduces storage duplication, time spent processing storage, and the volume of space required for the same workload.

“Based on our experience and the data we’ve collected, the costs related to running an ingest 24/7 with the Cloud Native Agile Production project are impressively low,” explained Chris Swan, Industry Specialist Solutions Architect for Content Production at AWS. “Running a workflow on CNAP for three months costs the same as running a similar workflow on incumbent solutions for only a week.”

“Many M&E customers still run operations on premises and want to move into the cloud but require seamless interoperability between their preferred creative toolsets and AWS services. The Cloud Native Agile Production project introduces a solution with a cloud-native framework that enables industry-standard tools to work better together,” Blandy added. “Maintaining an open, interoperable approach is key to making progress on this front. The more AWS customers and partners that lean into this project, the higher the level of interoperability we can achieve so customers can work with a broader range of tools, which benefits the entire industry.”

“The Cloud Native Agile Production project is an exciting framework designed to optimize rapid media workflows in the cloud, and a significant milestone in promoting cloud adoption and enhancing workflow efficiencies,” shared Simon Williams, Vice President, Digital Media Strategic Development, Emerging Solutions and Partnerships at Adobe. “Adobe Premiere Pro is now the first desktop video editing software capable of directly accessing, playing, and editing growing video files on Amazon S3 – and we’re excited about the new capabilities and workflow efficiencies this will unlock for customers.”

The AWS CNAP demo at IBC provides an end-to-end workflow from ingest, through editing content, to gallery playback through a vision mixer. The tx darwin live media processing platform from Techex ingests feeds from the nearby Newsroom in the Cloud demo, including a live camera on the stand. Once registered in the open source implementation of the TAMS store, the chunked media is stored on Amazon S3, and a React web application hosted on AWS Amplify visualizes the content.

All content in the TAMS store is accessible to view and edit via the CuttingRoom video editing platform web user interface. A Drastic Technologies plugin then enables content editing on a virtualized Adobe Premiere Pro workstation. Using a Vizrt Vectar Vision Mixer, content from the store can be played back and mixed with live feeds. Showcasing the different ways that TAMS store content can be distributed, the demo also illustrates a TAMS store content stream to a mock news site.

CNAP’s Beginnings and Future Roadmap
AWS says its CNAP project originated out of an alignment between the BBC and AWS on the BBC’s TAMS chunked media store concept. As the two companies collaborated, they realized that the TAMS store framework could solve a larger industry challenge and set out to build CNAP with the help of multiple AWS teams. The goal was to build an open-source implementation to deploy the TAMS store in AWS, enlist partners to join the effort in April 2024, and demo an end-to-end workflow at IBC.

Prior to IBC, AWS and BBC R&D held a special event to brief partners on the project and ideate what an end-to-end IBC demo might look like. They encouraged participants to experiment with the API during a hackathon, which resulted in new capabilities such as the ability to import existing media from TAMS into the CuttingRoom web-based editing tool. “The Cloud Native Agile Production project is the answer to standardizing what we already are doing, making interoperability so much easier and cost-effective for us, partners and customers,” explained CuttingRoom CEO and Co-Founder Helge Høibraaten.

CNAP is still in early development, and the team behind it is exploring how they might apply live AI analysis to the workflow in the future, in addition to other improvements, according to AWS.

John Biltcliffe, Senior Solutions Architect for Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports at AWS, explained just how important partner collaborations will be to CNAP’s continued evolution, “Embarking on a long-term project like CNAP, with so many stakeholders, requires time, attention to detail, and strategic communication. We’re grateful to BBC and Sky and all of our partners on the project thus far, as well as the many AWS teams who have helped us realize our vision. With IBC around the corner, we look forward to demonstrating the possibilities of CNAP to the community and gathering even more input to continue advancing the project in the greater interest of the M&E industry.”

PARIS—Ateme has announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring their compression expertise to the Graviton platform with their Titan product line. The integration of the Graviton processors into Ateme’s Titan product line highlights the two companies' shared commitment to technological innovation and industry leadership, Ateme said. 

By adopting AWS Graviton processors, Ateme will bring the benefits of ARM-based CPU architectures to AWS media customers with up to a 60% gain in energy efficiency. This integration will significantly improve processing efficiency, performance per watt and lower the barrier to entry for cloud computing for media workloads with a lower total cost service. "Integrating AWS Graviton processors into our Titan product line is a milestone for Ateme," said Remi Beaudouin, Chief Strategy Officer of Ateme. "Together, we are leading the charge in delivering high-quality, efficient, and scalable video solutions."

Looking forward, Ateme and AWS reported that they plan to continue their collaboration, exploring new avenues for innovation. 

The scalability and flexibility of AWS Graviton processors make them ideal for Ateme's diverse applications, from live streaming to video on demand. "Our goal is to push the boundaries of video compression," added Remi Beaudouin. "With AWS Graviton, we deliver greater value to our customers through our Titan product." As demand for high-quality video content grows, this partnership demonstrates Ateme commitment to driving technological progress and setting new industry benchmarks.

PARIS—Dalet has announced it has completed the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Foundational Technical Review (FTR) for Dalet Pyramid, the company's cloud-native news workflow solution. 

This major milestone follows the successful FTR completion of the Dalet Flex media asset management and supply chain platform in June 2023. The pair of achievements, along with participation in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, reinforce Dalet’s global relationship with AWS and accelerate its efforts to offer customers who seek to run cloud-native media operations with enhanced performance and security standards, the company reported. 

"Dalet Pyramid enables modern, story-centric news workflows promoting wide-scale collaboration across sites, systems, and teams. With support for cloud, hybrid, and on-premise deployment, it provides customers with full scalability and flexibility," stated Lincoln Spiteri, CTO at Dalet. "Our successful completion of the AWS Foundational Technical Review ensures our customers that Dalet Pyramid provides a secure, resilient, and efficient infrastructure.”

Dalet said that it is working with AWS to offer a whole new way of thinking about news production with 360 storytelling in a virtualized environment. 

The AWS Foundational Technical Review ensures that Dalet Pyramid adheres to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, providing a robust, secure, and seamless cloud experience. Dalet News customers can dynamically scale resources to confidently manage complex, large-scale news events such as the upcoming Paris Olympics and 70-plus elections happening near-simultaneously worldwide. All this can be achieved while maintaining optimal performance and security standards, Dalet reported.

Dalet also stressed that its focus on security and long-standing ISO/IEC 27001 certification, combined with a mature global cloud operations team that’s recognized for its best practices, can keep customers’ data secure and operations online when migrating to the cloud.   

DENVER—Wowza has announced that Wowza Streaming Engine, its highly flexible, on-prem video streaming solution, is now compatible with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) VT1 instances from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is available in AWS Marketplace. 

The move will strengthen Wowza’s ongoing efforts to promote faster and greener streams.

Wowza announced their collaboration with AMD in 2023 involving Wowza Streaming Engine and AMD’s Xilinx Alveo U30 accelerator card, resulting in highly efficient transcoding for low-latency and large-scale video streams. 

That same card now powers Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, which are designed to accelerate real time video transcoding and deliver low-cost transcoding for live video streams. Now Wowza Streaming Engine is compatible with these Amazon EC2 VT1 instances.

“Collaboration powers innovation,” says Dave Stubenvoll, CEO of Wowza. “What we’re seeing here is next level streaming technology resulting from the combined efforts of major industry players, namely AWS, AMD, and Wowza.”

In announcing the compatibility, Wowza noted that efficiency is paramount for many organizations looking to process large volumes of streams and that reduced server load can lead to lower carbon footprints and lower costs for companies that need scalability on a budget. It can also increase stream reliability as servers are at a lower risk of being overloaded. Finally, even organizations that already operate at high demand need to consider how that demand might continue to grow.

By working with AMD and AWS, Wowza said that it is addressing those needs. Through high-density transcoding, customers will enjoy scalable low-latency streams without sacrificing quality. They can also save costs not only through reduced server demands, but also thanks to the price performance offered by Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, Wowza reported. 

“Organizations with high processing demands are feeling the pressure relative to sustainability – not only when it comes to the environment, but also when it comes to the sustainability of their infrastructure as their transcoding needs increase over time,” says Ashique Anwar, chief product officer at Wowza. “With Wowza Streaming Engine and the Alveo U30 on Amazon EC2 VT1, we can take a lot of that pressure off via better performance, healthier CPU usage, and considerable cost savings.”

More information about the Wowza Streaming Engine on Amazon EC2 VT1 instances is available at the AWS Marketplace. 

LOS ANGELES and LONDON—Virtual production studio provider Dimension has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Arch Platform Technologies to scale the company’s global visualization, virtual production and content creation services in the cloud.

Dimension is making the move as part of its global expansion plans. 

Dimension has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider to scale virtual production workflows in the cloud, along with the Arch platform to streamline the orchestration of its advanced performance virtual desktop infrastructure, storage, and real-time capabilities.

Last month, visual entertainment services company DNEG launched a new division, DNEG 360, which is operated by Dimension and which regularly collaborates with Apple, Sony Pictures, Amazon MGM Studios, Netflix, and others on virtual production for film and episodic projects. 

Dimension and DNEG 360 operate two of the world’s largest state-of-the-art LED volumes, alongside performance, vehicle and volumetric capture stages, and build bespoke studio setups around the world, Dimension reported. 

“As our business becomes ever more global, the AWS Cloud and the Arch platform empower our business to rapidly adapt to changing business demands,” Callum Macmillan, CTO of Dimension and DNEG 360, commented. “It is imperative to our business that we can work with talent around the world. With AWS’s global footprint and Arch’s infrastructure platform, we can collaborate remotely with filmmakers who are using real-time to block out scenes, or our team can work across multiple locations on shared assets, in conjunction with demanding virtual production environments. This is an efficient, secure, sustainable solution that’s a game-changer for our offering.”

Dimension uses a number of AWS services that support the company’s compute, storage, and remote workstation needs. Additionally, Dimension is leveraging AWS Deadline Cloud to support cloud-based render pipelines.

Earlier this year, Dimension and DNEG 360 collaborated with AWS for “Cowgirls on the Moon”, a demo to showcase the possibilities of generative AI-assisted virtual production, VFX rendering in the cloud using AWS Deadline Cloud, and a holistic production in the cloud, the companies reported. 

“Dimension and DNEG 360 are proven leaders in virtual production and we couldn’t be more delighted that they have chosen to move their pipeline to AWS to support their global operations,” said Katrina King, global strategy leader for Content Production at AWS. “Working with AWS and Arch, which is part of the AWS Partner Network, Dimension and DNEG 360 now have the infrastructure and bespoke services to support production needs, which will help them embark on their next chapter of growth.”

Using Arch’s platform, the team can create and deploy secure global VPC facilities in an hour, and any number of customized cloud workstations in five minutes. Arch also supports on-prem resources. The solution is scalable with variable cost.

Leveraging Arch’s platform, the Dimension team effortlessly scales and manages demanding creative workflows across global locations via a single-pane-of-glass portal. This includes the ability to create high-performance virtual private cloud facilities to support hybrid remote and office collaboration, powered by AWS’s reach and advanced performance infrastructure, the companies reported. 

Dimension and DNEG 360 are deploying Arch for their forthcoming slate of independent films, including the recently announced “HUMANOID” (Cambridge Picture Company), “2040” and “Campbelltown ‘69” (both Virtual Circle).

“We are honored to be part of Dimension and DNEG 360’s vision for the future of creative content production,” Guy Botham, CEO of Arch Platform Technologies, commented. “Our platform for demanding end-user and team workflows and supporting cloud infrastructure is a perfect match.”

More information is available at www.dimensionstudio.co. 

The broadcast industry’s accelerating transition to cloud-based production of sports, news and other live programming is proving far more disruptive to the evolution of video services than seemed likely not so long ago.

The impact came into dramatic focus at the NAB Show, where the paradigm shift was revealed as the inevitable result of industry-wide adoption of SMPTE 2110 in support of the SDI-IP transition. “The whole explosion around cloud production wouldn’t have happened without 2110,” noted Steve Reynolds, president of Imagine Communications.

Widespread adoption has driven costs down to where “2110 has become cheaper than SDI on a per port basis,” leading to experiences with on-premises IP-based news, sports and other live productions that have made workflows “a lot better,” he said. As a result, producers are now comfortable with exploiting the cost savings and collaborative flexibility that comes with moving production to the cloud.

Remote Production
NAB Show exhibit halls teamed with cloud production-related solutions aimed at enabling a streamlined, cost-saving approach to launching linear TV channels combining any mix of live and file-based content for any distribution model, whether it be free-to-air broadcast, pay TV, SVOD, AVOD, or FAST. Now, as Reynolds put it, “FAST is just TV.”

An unavoidable testament to the significance of the cloud-to-live broadcast production was the expanded show floor presence of AWS. The superscalar has been benefiting from broadcast industry demand for cloud support for many years, including in the live production arena, but the pace and scale of developments now are unprecedented, said Chris Blandy, director of strategic business development for M&E, games, and sports at AWS.

“There are now more than 4,000 linear channels originated over AWS around the world,” Blandy noted. Much of this activity revolves around collaborations in linear channel development involving combinations of live and file-based content. These AWS customers’ workflows “are bringing in editors, graphic artists, colorists wherever they happen to be while relying on us to maintain tight security in their operating environments,” he said.

AWS demonstrated live news production from the show floor as a way to call attention to what’s happening in the rapidly evolving broadcast news arena. “We’ve seen a lot of innovation in this space, and now we’re seeing it mature into stable production workflows,” Blandy said.

Indeed, as Imagine’s Reynolds noted, cloud production is a big boon to TV stations looking to leverage their unique opportunities to build audiences by streaming local news and other live content. “Station owners can take advantage of remote production using their subchannels to deliver local live content,” Reynolds said. “It gives them new capabilities to differentiate their programming.”

Hybrid Transition for Sports
In the sports world, the shift to cloud production has been slower than in other M&E segments, but now producers are increasingly implementing hybrid transitions that are pushing ever more processes to the cloud while retaining a significant on-prem production presence, noted Deon LeCointe, director of networked solutions at Sony Electronics. With a focus on SE’s Networked Live product portfolio, LeConte has a bird’s eye view of how the company’s preparations for this phase in live sports production is paying off.

SE’s Networked Live solutions come into play with transitions to cloud production anchored by the Nevion VideoIPath media orchestration platform, which Sony acquired in 2020 and has since enhanced to work with SE’s broadcast control solutions. The result, LeCointe said, is a highly scalable, ultra low-latency platform that uniquely combines broadcast operations, orchestration, and monitoring capabilities in hybrid workflows across SDI and IP LAN, WAN. cloud, and 5G networks.

At the NAB Show, SE demonstrated seamless hybrid production through a control panel managing the firm’s software-based M2L-X switcher for cloud operations and the modular MLS-X1 switching appliance for premises-based operations. “We think this is the best approach for sports operations that are pushing the envelope toward the cloud,” LeCointe said.

The National Hockey League made news at the NAB Show as the first big pro league to take the plunge into full cloud production mode. This is enabling the league to deliver personalized experiences to connected devices in and beyond game arenas along with traditional TV broadcasts while substantially reducing costs, said Grant Nodine, senior vice president of technology for the NHL. “With the ability to spin up and rent resources as needed, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be putting big production trucks in venue,” Nodine said.

The transformation in user experiences across all locations is enabled by a partnership with Verizon as provider of 5G connectivity to in-venue audiences and between the game arenas and the AWS cloud, where productions for in-venue audiences are returned for viewing in sync with live action and productions for external distribution are sent out over the usual channels. “We’re using the cloud as the router of the future,” Nodine said.

FAST Goes Live
The implications of cloud production as the center of gravity for streamlining the supply of linear content across all business models and distribution outlets were top of mind across the playout ecosystem in Las Vegas. “FAST and broadcast used to be separate,” said Dan Marshall, executive vice president for worldwide sales at Amagi. “Now we’re seeing the integration of live content into FAST channels.”

Amagi, like many suppliers, is reconstituting itself to take advantage of the transformation. Traditionally positioned as a provider of playout services, Amagi for some time has been responding to the FAST phenomenon by helping customers with insertions of ads, graphics, QR codes and other elements in live production, according to Marshall. Now the company has gone all the way into support for live production with acquisition of the Polish cloud production supplier Tellyo.

Amagi, in response to the emergence of high-value live programming in the FAST channel mix, has teamed with digital rights management platform supplier Intertrust to enable implementation of license-mandated security in its playout workflows. 

With the success of FAST, which now accounts for 25% of TV ad views in the U.S., according to Comcast’s Freewheel unit, Marshall and others said it’s just a matter of time before major sports become part of the FAST lineup, and, sure enough, just before press time, Roku announced that, in a new deal with Major League Baseball, it was becoming the first FAST channel producer to be carrying games from a major pro sports league.

Disrupting Norms
The move of live production to the cloud has realigned the interplay between production and playout in new workflow configurations that rely on ultralow latency connectivity for synchronized execution of tasks wherever they occur. The disruption to past norms is pushing some vendors in new directions and playing right into where others have been from the start. 

As a leading player in the latter category, LTN benefitted at the NAB Show from its ability to tout a multi-pronged set of turnkey FAST, addressable advertising, production, and playout solutions, all of which are closely linked to the global B2B LTN Network serving as a multicast playout alternative to satellite distribution. 

“We’ve been hearing about the shift to IP and cloud production for well over a decade, and even two years ago we were saying it’s no longer a matter of if, but when,” said LTN CTO Brad Wall. “Now it’s here with a focus on what tools and workflows are out there ready to use with low latency and high reliability.”

The company offers LTN ARC as a fully managed production/versioning system, which Wall said sports producers are leveraging to “manage and customize premier sports at global scale.” He cited a tier one producer delivering soccer games in multiple versions matched to licensing and language requirements as an example of how sports producers are overcoming the market-specific production limitations of the past. 

Whether they use ARC or the self-managed LTN Lift playout technology, producers can leverage the new IP production paradigm whether on premises or in the cloud to “empower these types of workflows with all kinds of new branding and marketing opportunities,” he said.

Another company capitalizing on a solution set built from the ground up for this moment is Mediagenix, which offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform enabling broadcast networks and streamers to manage monetization and scheduling of live and stored content across broadcast and OTT footprints. “True transformation is finally happening,” said Mediagenix Chief Product and Marketing Officer Ivan Verbesselt. 

“FAST is an example of the business growing up,” he added. “We shouldn’t be building platforms to accommodate business models. We should build business models first using platforms that enable business agility.”

Toward that end Mediagenix has developed tools that allow media companies to manage the complete content life cycle with seamless organization-wide collaboration, Verbesselt said. Platform intelligence, often with AI assistance, enables highly efficient approaches to formulating and budgeting value management strategies, leveraging audience data in the use of metadata, orchestrating dubbing, subtitling, and graphics, scheduling placement in FAST and other channels based on AI predictive ratings, and much else, he explained. 

One of the more arresting innovations supporting cloud production comes from Matrox Video, a company best known as a leading decades-old supplier of line cards, encoders, extenders, switches, and other production hardware to OEMs. But in Las Vegas, its focus was on tools that add efficiencies to SDI-to-IP points of conversion and that support connectivity enabling synchronized collaboration across cloud production workflows.

Matrox describes its ORIGIN ultralow latency framework as a “groundbreaking approach” to linking workstations. According to Francesco Scartozzi, vice president of sales and business development for the Matrox Broadcast and Media Group, ORIGIN tailors high-end IT operations to broadcast TV requirements so that each set of tasks in the production process is executed with frame-accurate synchronization across all relevant points of collaboration on the workflow, whether hardware related to the task at hand is positioned on premises on in the cloud.

“ORIGIN is built on a media-aware content transfer fabric,” Scartozzi explained. It treats production applications as completely independent stateless media services sharing a common storage infrastructure with reliance on a mode of low-latency transport that he described without elaboration as “our secret sauce.”

By all appearances, there’s nothing left standing in the way of the transition to live programming production in the cloud other than the remaining life spans of premises-based equipment. 

And once those who haven’t yet moved to the cloud start feeling the impact of service innovations introduced by those who have, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a good bit of cost/benefit analysis justifying reductions in those life spans. 

DENVER—Veritone has launched a consulting and services group focused on bridging the marketplace gap it says exists for seamless artificial intelligence (AI) implementation. 

Veritone has a decade of experience developing and deploying AI applications and solutions and can serve as a strategic partner for AI providers and end customers, facilitating the adoption and integration of AI technologies to drive business success, the company said.

"The proliferation of AI technologies has created significant opportunities for organizations across industries, yet many struggle to navigate the complexities of implementation effectively. Veritone's AI consulting and services group addresses the growing demand for expert guidance in AI implementation," said Ryan Steelberg, chief executive officer of Veritone. “Our services group will help customers realize the value of AI and serve as a significant growth driver for Veritone." 

Being proficient as an advisor played a key role in the company achieving AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status within the AWS Partner Network (APN), it said.

AWS Advanced Tier Services Partners are recognized for proven technical experience and demonstrated customer experience. To attain AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status, Veritone met several AWS technical requirements, including AWS certifications, capabilities, and implementations as well as AWS technical and business professional training accreditations, it said.

Achieving AWS Advanced Tier Services status acknowledges Veritone’s AI consulting and services group, which plays a significant role in the advancing AI, empowering customers to use it effectively and derive the most benefit from the technology. By combining human expertise with aiWARE technology, the newly formed group will empower businesses on their digital transformation journey through custom AI strategy development, AI workflow solutions and innovation workshops, it said.

Veritone consulting and services group can also assist in data preparation and migration, expediting the path to AI activation, it said.

Veritone is now an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner offering unique value in enterprise AI. The achievement further empowers Veritone to develop and deploy innovative AI solutions, similar to the media management platform and licensing services Veritone architected for U.S. Soccer. By integrating Veritone's AI technology on AWS, clients can expect enhanced scalability, reliability and performance for their AI-driven initiatives.

 More information is available on the company’s website. 

BOSTON—Brightcove has announced that it has implemented Amazon Q Business, a new generative AI assistant on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Using its own public documentation, product, and release notes, Brightcove is using the new assistant internally to further bolster its award-winning customer service.

As an early adopter of Amazon Q, Brightcove has launched the “Brightcove Expert Bot,” an AI-powered chatbot embedded into the internal tools, as a new resource for the customer and product support teams. Streamlining its customer support processes enables employees to quickly and effectively find relevant information, solve technical cases, analyze support requests, summarize support tickets, and use those results to help recommend the best solutions to meet their customers' needs, Brightcove reported. 

“Our customer success team is at the heart of our business. Their unmatched service and unparalleled support have earned them the Support Staff Excellence Certification by TSIA for ten years in a row,” says Deb Richards, executive vice president of global customer success at Brightcove. “With the new AI expert chatbot resource, we are finding new ways to empower the team to automate timely tasks, find answers faster, and make a difference in the quality of support we provide our global customers.”

Brightcove reported that its use of Amazon Q on AWS marks a significant step in the company's commitment to innovation and increasing efficiency by leveraging artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, Brightcove said it is strategically collaborating with leading experts and organizations known for their dedication and expertise in AI to find new ways to super-serve its global base of media and enterprise customers.

"We view generative AI technology as a game-changer for internal operations and customer-facing workflows. As the technology improves our internal processes, we are developing ways to implement AI across our product portfolio to enhance the Brightcove experience," says Scott Levine, chief product officer at Brightcove. "AWS has been a great partner in allowing us to test, fine-tune, and launch this technology. They built Amazon Q in an easy way to deploy and manage while prioritizing security to minimize risks."

“Brightcove and AWS share a commitment to innovating on behalf of customers,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS. “With Amazon Q, Brightcove is harnessing the power of its data platform and generative AI on AWS to improve customer service and experiences while enabling its teams to work more productively and efficiently.”

For more information, visit Brightcove.com. 

If there remains any doubt that the cloud and artificial intelligence are transforming the workflows that drive the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actively removing them at the 2024 NAB Show.

Television broadcasters — especially news-producing stations and networks — are getting a firsthand look at how the AWS cloud offers an alternative to brick-and-mortar newsrooms and production control rooms.

“This is a year of news, especially in the U.S. with the elections,” said Tracy Geist, global head of Industry Marketing for Media & Entertainment, Games and Sports at AWS. “We are really focusing on the newsroom in the cloud, from production all the way through distribution and consumption.” 

In the West Hall lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) and a glass-enclosed production control room in the AWS booth (W1701) attendees can see firsthand how AWS in partnership with NVIDIA are powering the NAB Show LIVE news desk — a traditional rundown-oriented news presentation — on the cloud.

In the mornings, production control shifts to the Broadcast Beat Studios in Florida to demonstrate how the cloud can be used to produce rundown-centric newscasts from a remote location. 

A separate booth demo builds on the news focus with the cloud as the centerpiece of story-centric news workflows. Rather than simply producing the content for a newscast rundown, story-centric workflows focus on collaborative story production for distribution via social media, mobile, websites and linear newscasts.

The story-centric workflow at the AWS booth features SaaS tools running on the company’s cloud, including a story-centric newsroom solution from Dina, a production asset management system from Mimir and an HTML5-based graphics solution from Viz Flowics.

Some 80 AWS partners are participating in the company’s focus on newsrooms and the other five targeted M&E solutions in the booth, including broadcast, live production, content monetization, media supply chain and data science and analytics. Many are highlighting how generative AI fits into the overall media equation, said Geist.

“Tech for tech’s sake is not as interesting as tech that actually is driving real value,” said Julie Souza, global leader, Strategic Business Development, Sports at AWS. “Gen AI is driving operational efficiencies so that creative people can be freed up to do more of the great things they do best.”

The booth’s Builder Zone not only is giving visitors a peak behind the demos to see the specific AWS services and components powering them but also the chance to have some fun at the AWS Generative AI Playground where they are getting hands-on experience building Gen AI apps with Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q and PartyRock.

BEYOND THE BOOTH

The 2024 edition of the NAB Show is the biggest to date for AWS, and the company is making its presence felt beyond its booth, said Geist.

Near the booth, NAB and the company have put together the AWS Partner Village and Learning Lounge (W1343) where about a dozen companies are demonstrating their solutions in standalone pods. The site also offers an area for people to network and a theater where partner companies, their customers, thought leaders and AWS offer daily presentations on different implementations. The Learning Lounge focuses on the technical aspects of the cloud, offering an environment conducive to education. 

AWS Partners participating in the village and lounge include: Amagi, Anypoint Media, Arc XP, Ateliere, Bedrock Streaming, CSG, Datazoom, EPAM, GlobalLogic, Imagine Communications, IMDb, Irdeto, JW Player, M2A, MASV, Merapar, Stringr, Tagboard and Veritone.

In the LVCC South Upper Hall (SU4109), the AWS Generative AI Golf Experience gives attendees a chance to tee off from many iconic golf courses. AWS is working with Full Swing, the official simulator partner of the PGA TOUR, to power the company’s golf simulator experience.

Golfer Alastair Soutar, Director, Batcam, tees off in the AWS Generative AI Golf Experience.

After taking their swing, attendees can design their dream golf holes with AWS generative AI tools and walk away with customized golf posters.

Those looking to level up their careers in the M&E industry during the #GALSINGEAR CONNECT half-day program, Tuesday, April 16, also have an opportunity to hear from a leader at AWS, which is sponsoring the event.

Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of Media & Entertainment, Games and Sports at AWS, is delivering the program keynote.

The expanded presence of AWS at NAB Show is no accident, said Geist. “If we look back as we were going into last year, we were talking about how we were going to double down on M&E as a company and as a business,” she said. “That’s exactly what we have done for 2024 and exactly what people are seeing throughout the convention center with our presence in so many places.” 

AWS AT NAB SHOW

Along with the company’s participation in the Excellence in Sustainability Awards, which happened on Sunday, and today’s session “How Generative AI Is Changing the Game,” on the Main Stage at 11:30 a.m., AWS has a busy lineup at NAB Show.

Amazon Web Services, West Hall (W1701):

• Six AWS M&E Solutions Areas, including Newsroom in the Cloud
• Four Direct-to-Consumer Use Cases, including live, linear playout with dynamic Server-Side 

Ad Insertion (SSAI) with live news content; Video on Demand (VOD) programming options; Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) channels for VOD assets; and Personalized FAST from VOD assets

• Monetization demos focused on converged TV ad sales, unified measurement solutions, next-gen ad formats and privacy-enhanced consumer data solutions
• Media Supply Chain & Archive solution area, including newsroom use cases
• Content production with production of a 60-second movie trailer
• Data Science & Analytics with demonstrations of contextual search for real-time news, and contextual ads for real-time news.
• AWS Generative AI Playground
• AWS Builder Zone

The NAB Show LIVE News Desk Powered by AWS and NVIDIA
West Hall Lobby
In partnership with Broadcast Beat Studios, the news desk will demonstrate how the cloud can be used to create rundown-centric newscasts. Production control is taking place in the AWS booth and at a remote site in Florida.
The NAB Show LIVE can be viewed in the AWS booth, on the NAB Show website and on select screens located across the conference halls. 

AWS Partner Village and Learning Lounge (W1343)
AWS partners participate in learning workshops. A theater provides a venue for presentations by AWS customers and partners as well as M&E industry experts. The AWS Partner Village and Learning Lounge features multiple partners.

AWS Generative AI Golf Experience (SU4109)
Step into the tee box of some of golf’s most iconic holes with Full Swing, the Official Simulator Partner of the PGA TOUR. Full Swing’s technology delivers a realistic off-the-course experience showing real ball flight, powered by AWS. 

AWS x #GALSNGEAR CONNECT 2024 (W208-W209)
AWS is sponsoring the #GALSNGEAR CONNECT event, taking place at NAB Show tomorrow. The half-day program is designed to help participants level up their career journeys and build their professional brands in M&E industry. Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of Media & Entertainment, Games and Sports at AWS, will deliver the opening keynote. 

Copyright NAB 2024.

Like a science fiction novel where artificial intelligence is involved in everything people do, the 2024 NAB Show is seeing artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, assume a level of prominence that only highly disruptive, once-in-a-generation technologies like the rise of digital media or the internet can command. 

Separating some of the sci-fi hype surrounding AI from real long-term opportunities remains difficult, but nearly a dozen NAB Show exhibitors say there is little doubt that the real-world marriage between AI and data opens enormous opportunities for media companies with extensive consumer data and metadata-rich content libraries.

“ChatGPT and Gemini have revolutionized the world of generative text, and we expect to see similar disruptions in the video and audio generations using AI,” said Bibhas Kumar Samanta, head of sales, India and MENA at Interra Systems, which is showing AI-powered quality control and captioning solutions. “With newly released tools like OpenAI Sora, content creators will be able to produce short videos rapidly and more cost-effectively, which is especially relevant for ads, marketing and social media campaigns and will lead to new forms of content engagement and monetization.” 

Some of this builds on existing, very large businesses and is likely to only get bigger. The International Data Corp. (IDC) is now predicting that the worldwide AI software market will grow from $64 billion in 2022 to nearly $251 billion in 2027 and that generative AI platforms and applications will generate additional revenues of $55.7 billion in 2027.

“Many of the use cases that are being explored by our customers today involve applying generative AI to areas that already use some form of AI, such as monetization, upscaling, media supply chain and search,” said Chris Blandy, director of Strategy and Business Development for Media & Entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Carol Bettencourt, vice president of marketing, said Chyron will be demonstrating a number of products with AI features that greatly streamline workflows for graphics and live production. “We believe data is so important to the storytelling [and our solutions] that it has to be considered in our projects from the very start.”

“New AI solutions enable M&E companies to swiftly comprehend and act on data, which is an industry advantage and a necessity for optimized content production, management and monetization,” said Sean King, senior vice president at Veritone. The company is launching “Ask Veri,” a media intelligence tool designed to help users maximize the value of their content and data. 

The extensive data that broadcasters, studios, streamers and other media companies have relating to consumer behavior and the content they create, give the M&E industry a leg up when it comes to capitalizing on AI advances, but it also underlies some of the biggest challenges posed by AI. “The legal landscape in terms of content rights for generative AI is a minefield right now with a multitude of lawsuits having been filed against tech companies by artists and authors,” explained Camilla Powell, product manager at disguise.
Powell stresses, however, that the marriage of AI and data is already producing major advances in content creation. In addition to applications in editing, remote production and content personalization, the melding of data from cameras, LED walls, lenses and other components has produced improved AI tools for virtual production. “Instead of creating virtual production backdrops in weeks, teams can use AI to compose photorealistic nearly 3D backdrops in minutes,” she said. 

More specifically, a host of companies such as Chyron, Vizrt and Sony will be offering AI-powered tools for live production and sports. Sony, for example, will be showing the Sony AI Automated Production (Sony A2P) solution, said Alan Gagliardotto, senior product manager, Sony Electronics.

“Using AI and integrated data in our news and sports workflows means we can build graphics and the playout of stories quicker and easier,” said Steve Taylor, vice president, R&D at Vizrt, which will be showing Viz Engine and other solutions with AI features.

Other applications, which are too numerous to list, run the gamut from content creation and distribution to monetization and personalization for both consumers and operations. Elke Hungenaert, vice president of product management, video network at Synamedia, noted: “We’ve all heard of the benefits of AI for consumer experience, but what it can do for video service providers on the business side is equally game-changing,” offering them tools to improve video quality while delivering “video content more cost efficiently,” Hungenaert concluded.

Five AI Takeaways, Not Generated by AI

• The Marriage of AI and Data Fuels Innovation — “Data is the key foundation for the training of machine-learning platforms,” explains Steve Taylor, vice president, R&D at Vizrt. “The better the data … the more exciting the experience [that] can be provided to the viewer.” 
• Personalization — After years of struggling to offer more personalized advertising,  and content discovery, AI tools promise to make personalized media a reality. “In the future [in sports] you’ll see partner collaboration with different AI engines to personalize the fan experience,” said Alan Gagliardotto, senior product manager, Sony Electronics.
• Democratization of Production — AI is producing “more cost-effective virtual production than ever before, making the technology from Hollywood features [available] to indie productions,” said Camilla Powell, product manager at disguise. 
• Old Efficiencies Supercharged — AI applications promise to streamline existing applications for encoding, monitoring, quality control, bandwidth management, app development and other applications. “AI, machine learning and computer vision algorithms are all being used to automate practical content distribution tasks,” explained Mathieu Planche, CEO, Witbe, and in areas like app testing they have exponentially sped up processes. 
• AI Needs Humans — AI pioneer and Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li’s adage that “AI is made by humans” and that “there is nothing artificial about it,” is also being taken to heart by companies who emphasize the importance of training people in the developing AI solutions. “You have to train people to use them properly,” said Carol Bettencourt, vice president of marketing, at Chyron who also stressed the importance of working with clients to further improve the tools.

Copyright NAB 2024.

PARIS—Embrace, a developer of advanced automation and orchestration software solutions, has announced that Sinclair Broadcast Group has selected Embrace’s Pulse-IT solution as a key component for its centralized Cloud Media Transformation initiative, hosted on Amazon WebServices, inc. (AWS).

Pulse-IT enables Sinclair to achieve operational efficiencies at scale by seamlessly orchestrating media workflows across a suite of cloud-enabled tools, which include Telestream Vantage, Sony Ci, OSI, Wide Orbit, Amagi and even Microsoft Teams, the companies said. 

Pulse-IT’s containerized architecture also enables it to dynamically scale when needed in response to the needs of Sinclair’s nearly 200 channels. Those channels routinely require processing of more than 6,000 individual spots, promos, or syndicated programs per day. At slower times, the system will automatically and quickly scale back to use only minimum resources, thus achieving significant savings, the companies reported. 

Mike Kralec, Sinclair’s senior vice president and CTO said explained that  “The ongoing collaboration with Embrace has enabled Sinclair to build the foundational media workflows and orchestration essential for our vision of business transformation driven by cloud-based media operations, which requires integrating our broadcast business processes, media, and playout operations in the AWS Cloud.”

“We were thrilled to be chosen for the most ambitious project in media tech this year,” Julien Gachot, Embrace’s CEO, added. “Our fundamental strategy of bringing a low-code media-oriented supply chain transformation product to the market matched the co-innovation approach expected from Sinclair’s project team. We are proud to have met or exceeded their expectations by offering a reliable, nimble, and highly scalable platform, ready for future advancements and continuous transformation.”

Sinclair chose Pulse-IT as a media orchestration tool in large part because of its graphical, low-code or no-code paradigm used to create workflows which then run within scalable and responsive containers, the broadcaster explained. 

Mike Palmer, Sinclair’s AVP of media management, added, “We looked for a modern and robust media orchestration platform that could easily integrate with a diverse range of services to implement centralized and dynamic media orchestration across our nearly 200 channels. Our combined success in delivering those critical integrations has made Pulse-IT a vital component of our cloud media operations.”

Pulse-IT is a media-oriented business process management software enabling customers to transform, optimize, execute, and monitor any business, broadcast, or digital media workflow simply and quickly, Embrace said. 

The containerized and Kubernetes-orchestrated software solution features a rich and extendable API-based software architecture that is integrated with third-party provisioning, cloud networking, and orchestration applications on AWS. The solution addresses specific needs for core broadcast content preparation applications and for delivering highly intensive file-based media workflow services, the company said. 

Science fiction books and films have predicted it for years, but now it is actually upon us. Artificial Intelligence is here, and it is being used in the television and film industry.

Like any new tool, the desire is to use AI to improve productivity, while maintaining quality. AI also helps us do tasks that would just be impossible for a single individual to do.

Anyone who has attended a few NAB Shows knows that buzzwords and hot technologies rise and fall, and artificial intelligence is currently the hot technology—expect to find references to AI across the show floor.

“It’s an incredible time to be involved with AI and media right now, and the needs can often be both simple and profound,” said Skip Levens, marketing director for media & entertainment at Quantum. “For example, there are a ton of language models that will transcribe audio and tag it in a video timeline. But what about when you have decades of priceless archival film where multiple people are not just talking over each other, but talking in different languages? That turns out to be great example of where standard tools don’t work well.”

Using AI to recognize what sort of material you want and to understand the languages can streamline an otherwise nearly impossible task.

“We have a customer using Quantum’s ActiveScale Cold Storage solution, offering S3-enabled object storage for hot (active) and cold (inactive) data sets, to support the long-term archiving that reduces cold storage costs by up to 60 percent,” Levens said. “This is especially crucial as companies realize the value that today’s data could hold in the future, whether it be a week or decades from now.”

Next Generation
At the NAB Show, ENCO will unveil enCaption Sierra, the company’s next-generation automated closed-captioning solution. Sierra can pair with ENCO’s enTranslate software to offer live translation to more than 37 languages in real-time.

ENCO will also have some flashy AI possibilities in its NAB Show booth.

“This year, we will highlight how broadcasters can utilize ENCO’s Qimera live virtual production and augmented reality solution,” said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO.  “We will also debut an AI-generated virtual anchor within a 3D space. In our booth, we will use AI and virtual production tools to demonstrate a virtual anchor reporting live news.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be at NAB Show 2024 highlighting each of the company’s six solution areas for media & entertainment operations. Focusing on generative AI, monetization and cloud production, it will use the example of newsroom production as the backdrop of how to apply a number of different solutions.

“Visitors to the AWS booth will also learn how generative AI is being used to enhance viewing experiences for audiences and free up time during production,” said Tracy Geist, global head of media & entertainment for games and sports marketing at AWS. “While AI and machine learning (ML) have already begun to transform broadcast production processes in many ways, our activations at NAB will highlight how the industry is still just scratching the surface of all the day-to-day applications of the technology.”

Geist was eager to give examples of how big customers are using AI to improve both the viewing experience and broadcasters’ production workflows.

“AI is playing a big role in improving the ad-insertion process by making it easier to identify and automate natural ad breaks in content to ensure higher-quality broadcasts,” she said. “Using AI also enables content providers to insert ads that match the context of what’s happening, and more personalized ads based on viewer interests, using tools like Amazon Personalize.”

Geist also said that FOX Sports worked with AWS on its AI-powered Catch Up with Highlights feature, which is powered by Amazon’s open-source Media Replay Engine framework, as well as several AWS services and solutions.

“The engine behind the feature ingests broadcast streams, identifies valuable match moments through AI-trained computer vision, then encodes delivery streams with metadata across user devices,” she said. “By capturing key moments and events as they unfold, Catch Up with Highlights makes it easier for audiences to stay up-to-date with the action, and experience the excitement of the game, regardless of when they start watching.”

Natural Language Companion
At the NAB Show, Nice People At Work (NPAW) will present its newly enhanced version of NaLa, an AI-powered, natural-language companion app that helps video services work with data and the NPAW Suite.

“Our platform provides so much data and so many options for working with it that it can be overwhelming for our smaller and newer customers,” said Till Sudworth, head of the video business unit and member of the management board at NPAW. “At the same time, we wanted to enable even the most seasoned NPAW users to derive faster insights. By streamlining the process of identifying the root causes of errors, we are empowering all our customers with the ability to resolve issues more quickly and cost-effectively.”

Recently updated, NaLa 2.0 is integrated into the NPAW Suite of apps to help streaming operators obtain actionable insights into areas like service performance, viewer-perceived quality, and user behavior. Users can use either voice or text to ask NaLa questions about, for instance, their service’s performance and user engagement, and quickly receive answers in both text and graph formats. NaLa can handle these requests in almost every language in the world.

“Users can also click on a graph to gather in-depth analyses in seconds, revealing hidden trends, anomalies, and key learnings,” Sudworth said. “Additionally, users can request NaLa to create custom dashboards tailored to their specific needs or ask for guidance on how to use the platform.”

AI and its derivatives shows great promise, and the next few years will go a long way in embedding these technologies in our work and private lives. Most of us already have a version of AI in our homes and pockets—think “Alexa” and “Siri”—and AI is already toiling away behind the scene in many industries, including the media & entertainment industry.

The promise is that AI will lead to better, faster and more-targeted information and entertainment. Will the promise live up to the actual implementation?

Ask me in 2030.

CENTURY CITY, Calif.—Ateliere Creative Technologies has entered into a five-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on development of solutions that redefine media production and distribution from the initial stages of capture via the business-to-business supply chain to content delivery to consumers, the company said. 

This SCA will drive new product and feature development, boost customer adoption of the Ateliere platform and enhance marketing and general awareness efforts with support and funding from AWS, it said.

"Ateliere's platform, natively built on AWS, already employs a vast array of AWS services, powering our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings," said Ryan Kido, chief technology officer of Ateliere Creative Technologies. "This move marks a significant step in Ateliere's journey as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, demonstrating AWS's commitment to Ateliere's vision and belief in our potential for significant impact in the media and entertainment industry."

Ateliere Connect currently is offered in the Media Management category in the AWS Marketplace. The cloud-native Ateliere Connect platform orchestrates the supply chain of media content, enabling efficient management, automation and delivery from a central location, while minimizing storage costs and increasing global collaboration, it said.

Users of Ateliere Connect can decrease long-term storage costs by more than 75%, reduce QC time and costs, and increase profit margins with quicker time to market.

Ateliere customers stand to gain substantially from the SCA. They will have access to an expanded set of features and services, accelerated product delivery and comprehensive solutions spanning from camera to consumer, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

With their ability to provide video storage cheaper and more flexibly than on-premises systems, cloud-based video archiving services have established themselves in the broadcast TV and streaming video markets. Their competitive edge is now being sharpened by the integration of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to cloud-based archiving systems—making these systems more accessible to users than ever before.

The AI/ML Advantage
The simplest way to understand AI/ML’s positive impact on cloud-based video archiving is this: AI/ML helps these platforms do everything they do better.

“Machine learning in the cloud has been a huge step forward in expanding its range of capabilities,” said Sam Peterson, COO of Bitcentral. “Speech-to-text and language translation have been two of the big advances lately, but these are only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Metadata AI and Generative AI are all the rage since ChatGPT opened eyes to what can be achieved,” agreed Jonathan Morgan; senior vice president of product and technology at Perifery, a division of DataCore Software. “Like a glove fits a hand, AI is built on data, and when it comes to media archives there is both a wealth of information and monetizable assets.”

Newsbridge’s cloud-based platform manages both archived and live video content in highly sophisticated ways, according to James Fraser, vice president of U.S. Sales for the company. Newsbridge’s MXT-1 is “our own in-house AI that we’ve built over a number of years,” he said. “The idea behind MXT-1 is to produce a human-like description of what AI is seeing in your content, to make it highly searchable. So rather than search for a recorded conference using a file name, you can ask MXT-1 to find a specific moment.”

Meanwhile, customers moving to AWS are exploring the company’s full portfolio of AI/ML products, said Josh Mello, AWS’ Senior Worldwide Storage Specialist. “One helpful offering is the Amazon Media2Cloud solution, which provides a framework for enhancing metadata collection media archives via AI/ML services, as these assets are placed in Amazon S3 Glacier,” he explained. 

“Additionally, many customers are pulling out insights on their consumers, as well as data on their content, using Amazon Rekognition. Amazon Transcribe is another AI service our customers are turning to in order to easily transcribe information pulled out of their media archive.”

Pros and Cons
There is no doubt that cloud-based archiving has caught on with TV broadcasters and streamers alike in recent years, even without the advantages being offered by AI/ML.

Cost is a major reason why: It is far cheaper to store content on third-party web-connected servers on a fee-for-service basis — which is what the cloud actually is — rather than invest in on-premise server farms and the IT staff to maintain them.

Then there’s data security: “In addition to offering 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability in every AWS Region, Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes simplify archive management,” said Mello. “Once a customer migrates to AWS, that’s it. They no longer need to worry about end-of-life support on existing infrastructure or get bogged down in the endless cycle of generational updates.”

Better yet, cloud storage providers like Newsbridge offer tiered levels of service for their customers, with instant retrieval cloud storage offering faster and more expensive access to customer content than “cold” or “deep archive.” This choice of options is made available for “cost optimization,” according to Fraser, and is proving popular with Newsbridge’s broadcast and streaming clients. 

“Another significant feature is the capability to store content off-site, providing a safeguard against on-site hardware failures or unexpected incidents,” Bitcentral’s Peterson said. “In the cloud, users can leverage multiple layers of storage and implement replication across different physical regions for added resilience.”

Best yet for M&E customers, AWS’ cloud-based archiving opens up the art of the possible for more interactive viewer engagement, new revenue streams through opportunities like FAST channels, plus “additional monetization efforts that leverage the vast amount of content available in customer archives,” said Mello.

Hybrid Approach
Still, the cloud isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution, Peterson readily admitted. “This is why some of our customers are fully cloud-native. But for other customers, it makes more business sense to employ a hybrid approach that simply adds to the capabilities of their existing physical storage.”

As well, some of the apparent advantages of cloud-based archiving can turn out to be disadvantages in certain circumstances. For example, when a broadcaster/streamer decides to use a large number of AI/ML apps to manage their cloud-stored media, there can be “large associated compute and access costs related to running those apps.” said Morgan. “Alternatively, the AI/ML apps required might be available on-premises and are likely to be significantly less expensive and quicker to run there.”

In the same vein, on-premises storage can prove to be a more economical option than cloud-based storage in some cases. “For instance, if a media archive can be stored in a ‘cold’ public tier and is rarely accessed, then public cloud might be a cost-effective way to go,” Morgan said. “But if the media archive is actively accessed, then public cloud costs can quickly mount.”

This being said, the many advantages offered by cloud-based archiving is ensuring its viability in the marketplace. This is why “the broadcasting and streaming industries are now far beyond the point where the cloud is treated merely as a byword for storage,” concluded Peterson. 

POZNAN, Poland—Insys Video Technologies has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, a joint sales program for AWS Partners selling software that runs on or is integrated with AWS, the OTT solution provider said today.

The program, which connects participating ISVs with the AWS sales organization, will provide In-Sys with co-sell support and benefits to meet customer needs by working with AWS sellers around the world, Insys VT said.

Insys Video Technologies is offering its OTT solutions, professional services and video processing tools via the AWS Marketplace, a managed software catalog, with other solutions, including Cloud DRM, an AWS Qualified Software. 

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program members are held to the IT industry's highest standards and must undergo a comprehensive evaluation, including a Foundational Technical Review (FTR), to gain acceptance into the program, the company said.

"Insys Video Technologies is a long-standing AWS Partner, and we are thrilled to strengthen our relationship through acceptance into the ISV Accelerate Program," said Insys VT CEO Krzysztof Bartkowski. 

Insys VT is also an AWS Public Sector Partner and a member of the AWS Solution Provider Program, it said. 

"Co-selling allows Insys VT to streamline the delivery of our OTT solutions, video processing and content security tools to various businesses through the trusted marketplace,” said Bartkowski. “We are excited to go to market with AWS and look forward to building relationships with new customers as a result of this program.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

CINCINNATI—ActionStreamer, a platform for streaming media from embedded and connected devices, has announced it has been approved to be part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN). 

ActionStreamer said the approval allows “ActionStreamer to provide enterprise customers with the first-ever AWS Private 5G-qualified streaming camera solutions.”

"We are thrilled to make these solutions available to Amazon's network of partners, as they unlock new video streaming capabilities powered by 5G. Combining our software platform with AWS P5G is making fully-managed visual communication solutions and new digital workflows a reality," stated Bob Lento, CEO of ActionStreamer.

The integration of ActionStreamer's end-to-end streaming platform with AWS Private 5G (P5G) represents a significant advancement in connectivity and scalability for streaming media from embedded and wearable technologies, the company said. 

With this collaboration, APN customers can now leverage 5G-enabled connected device hardware and deterministic video streaming software through a single platform. This enables the delivery of consistent, low-latency video streams in 4K HD, which are crucial features for critical applications such as telemedicine, real-time surveillance, and live events.

"The combination of our sophisticated streaming solutions and AWS's powerful 5G capabilities unlocks new horizons for IoT and smart device connectivity, offering customers a seamless, high-bandwidth communication experience that's both secure and highly scalable. This collaboration is not just a technical enhancement; it's a game changer in how we perceive and utilize mobile streaming technology in an increasingly interconnected world," said Chris McLennan, Co-founder and CTO of ActionStreamer.

In 2021, ActionStream became the first video streaming technology to transmit real-time video from wearable 5G-enabled devices. Following this achievement, ActionStreamer was selected by AWS to be one of the first companies globally to receive and pilot AWS's Private 5G products. Their solutions have also been showcased at AWS's P5G exhibits at the re:Invent conference.

By qualifying for the APN, ActionStreamer joins a global community of over 100,000 AWS Partners from more than 150 countries. This partnership allows ActionStreamer to work closely with AWS in providing innovative solutions to mutual enterprise customers.

LAS VEGAS—Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and NVIDIA have announced an expansion of their ongoing strategic collaboration to deliver the most advanced infrastructure, software, and services to customers working in the area of generative artificial intelligence.

AWS has been working to stand out as a cloud-provider for AI related solutions while  NVIDIA's chips have been widely used in the development of generated AI services.

As part of the expanded effort, the two companies said they will bring together the best of NVIDIA and AWS technologies to offer training foundation models and building generative AI applications. 

This includes work to develop and design the world’s fastest GPU-powered AI supercomputer and to deploy software to speed the development of generating AI technologies. 

AWS to offer first cloud AI supercomputer with NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and AWS UltraCluster scalability. 

Also during its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, the AWS cloud unit announced its new Trainium2 artificial intelligence chip and the general-purpose Graviton4 processor.

“AWS and NVIDIA have collaborated for more than 13 years, beginning with the world’s first GPU cloud instance," said Adam Selipsky, CEO at AWS. "Today, we offer the widest range of NVIDIA GPU solutions for workloads including graphics, gaming, high performance computing, machine learning, and now, generative AI. We continue to innovate with NVIDIA to make AWS the best place to run GPUs, combining next-gen NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips with AWS’s EFA powerful networking, EC2 UltraClusters’ hyper-scale clustering, and Nitro’s advanced virtualization capabilities.”

“Generative AI is transforming cloud workloads and putting accelerated computing at the foundation of diverse content generation,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Driven by a common mission to deliver cost-effective, state-of-the-art generative AI to every customer, NVIDIA and AWS are collaborating across the entire computing stack, spanning AI infrastructure, acceleration libraries, foundation models, to generative AI services.”

More specifically the two companies described the expanded collaboration as follows:  

• AWS will be the first cloud provider to bring NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips with new multi-node NVLink technology to the cloud. The NVIDIA GH200 NVL32 multi-node platform connects 32 Grace Hopper Superchips with NVIDIA NVLink and NVSwitch technologies into one instance. The platform will be available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances connected with Amazon’s powerful networking (EFA), supported by advanced virtualization (AWS Nitro System) and hyper-scale clustering (Amazon EC2 UltraClusters), enabling joint customers to scale to thousands of GH200 Superchips.
• NVIDIA and AWS will collaborate to host NVIDIA DGX Cloud, NVIDIA’s AI-training-as-a-service, on AWS. It will be the first DGX Cloud featuring GH200 NVL32, providing developers the largest shared memory in a single instance. DGX Cloud on AWS will accelerate training of cutting-edge generative AI and large language models that can reach beyond 1 trillion parameters.
• NVIDIA and AWS are collaborating on Project Ceiba to design the world’s fastest GPU-powered AI supercomputer – an at-scale system with GH200 NVL32 and Amazon EFA interconnect, hosted by AWS for NVIDIA’s own research and development team. This first-of-its-kind supercomputer – featuring 16,384 NVIDIA GH200 Superchips and capable of processing 65 exaflops of AI – will be used by NVIDIA to propel its next wave of generative AI innovation.
• AWS will introduce three additional Amazon EC2 instances: P5e instances, powered by NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, for large-scale and cutting-edge generative AI and HPC workloads; and G6 and G6e instances, powered by NVIDIA L4 GPUs and NVIDIA L40S GPUs, respectively, for a wide set of applications such as AI fine tuning, inference, graphics, and video workloads. G6e instances are particularly suitable for developing 3D workflows, digital twins, and other applications using NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building generative AI-enabled 3D applications. 
• In addition, NVIDIA announced software on AWS to boost generative AI development. NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservice offers new tools to create highly accurate chatbots and summarization tools using accelerated semantic retrieval. NVIDIA BioNeMo, available on Amazon SageMaker now and planned to be offered on AWS on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, enables pharmaceutical companies to speed drug discovery by simplifying and accelerating the training of models using their own data. The companies said that NVIDIA software on AWS is helping Amazon bring new innovations to its services and operations. AWS is using the NVIDIA NeMo framework to train select next-generation Amazon Titan LLMs. Amazon Robotics has begun leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac to build digital twins for automating, optimizing, and planning its autonomous warehouses in virtual environments before deploying them into the real world. 

More information is available at nvidianews.nvidia.com/ and at aws.amazon.com.

SEATTLE—Amazon has launched a new initiative called “AI Ready” that plans to provide free artificial intelligence (AI) skills training and education to 2 million people globally by 2025. 

As part of that effort, it also announced eight new, free courses to help adults upskill in AI and generative AI; a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Generative AI Scholarship program with online learning platform Udacity; and a new collaboration with Code.org designed to help students learn about generative AI.

“Artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology of our generation. If we are going to unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world’s most challenging problems, we need to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “The goal of AI Ready is to help level the playing field of AI education, supported by the new initiatives we’re launching today. We will also scale our existing free AI training programs and courses as we continue to remove cost as a barrier to accessing these critical skills.”

Amazon also released results of a new study that highlighted the importance of finding workers skilled in AI. 

The study found that 73% of employers say hiring AI-skilled talent is a priority and that finding this talent is currently difficult. Of those hiring AI-skilled workers, three out of four say they are unable to meet their AI talent needs. 

The new study by AWS and research firm Access Partnership also found that employers expect their workers to earn up to 47% more in salaries if they upskill in AI. Looking ahead, AI will only become more integral to the way business is done, with 93% of businesses expecting they will be using AI solutions across their organization in the next five years.

AWS said that the eight new, free AI and generative AI courses are open to anyone and designed to be aligned with in-demand jobs. These courses augment the 80+ free and low-cost AI and generative AI courses and resources provided through AWS.

Courses for business and nontechnical audiences include: 

• Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence provides an introduction to generative AI, its applications, and need-to-know concepts, like foundation models. Find it on AWS Educate.
• Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers is a three-course series covering how to plan a generative AI project and build a generative AI–ready organization. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.
• Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer teaches participants how to use Amazon’s AI code generator, which produces whole lines of code. Find it on AWS Educate.
• Courses for developer and technical audiences
• Foundations of Prompt Engineering introduces the basics of prompt engineering, the practice of designing inputs for generative AI tools, all the way through to advanced prompt techniques. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.
• Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS explores how to prepare data, train machine learning models, and deploy machine learning models, with minimal coding and without deep knowledge of machine learning. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.
• Building Language Models on AWS covers how to use Amazon SageMaker distributed training libraries to build language models and how to fine-tune open source and foundation models. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.
• Amazon Transcribe—Getting Started explores how to use Amazon Transcribe, a fully managed AI service that converts speech to text using automatic speech recognition technology. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.
• Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock teaches how to use Amazon Bedrock to build generative AI applications. Find it on AWS Skill Builder.

 To help people get the training, AWS also announced funding for scholarships. 

Through the AWS Generative AI Scholarship, AWS will provide Udacity scholarships, valued at more than $12 million, to more than 50,000 high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities globally.

Eligible students can take Introducing Generative AI with AWS, a new course on Udacity, for free. The course, which was designed by AI experts at AWS, introduces students to foundational generative AI concepts and guides them through a hands-on project. Upon successful course completion, students earn a certificate from Udacity to showcase their knowledge to future employers.

In addition, Amazon is kicking off a new collaboration between Amazon Future Engineer and Code.org to launch Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition. During this hour-long introduction to coding and AI, students will create their own virtual music video set to hit songs from artists including Miley Cyrus, Harry Styles, and more.

Students will code their virtual dancer’s choreography and use emojis as AI prompts to generate animated backgrounds. The activity will give participants an introduction to generative AI, including learning about large language models and how they are used to power the predictive analytics responsible for creating new images, text, and more.

Hour of Code will take place globally during Computer Science Education Week, December 4–10, engaging students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade. Additionally, AWS is providing up to $8 million in AWS Cloud computing credits to Code.org, which runs on AWS, to further support Hour of Code.

Amazon’s new AI Ready commitment is in addition to AWS’s commitment to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people by 2025, which has already trained more than 21 million people. To get started, visit: aboutamazon.com/29million.

An analysis of recent price increases among the largest cloud providers shows the impact of AI on cloud services, and in particular, how the price of accelerators is having on rates. 

This is according to Liftr Insights which over the past three months tracked the average price of accelerators, which are used to enhance and expand cloud capabilities. Prices have increased for the top cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Alibaba (Aliyun) Cloud, and Google Cloud. For example, when looking at certain NVIDIA GPUs, Azure is leading the pack with prices increasing by 55.2% in the past three months. Specifically, these percentages are based on average price for NVIDIA Tensor Core (Ampere) models. Google Cloud was the next largest at 20.0% followed by Alibaba Cloud and AWS at 3.5% and 1.2%, respectively.

A portion of these increases are due to higher core counts, but the prices for these in-demand accelerators also show growth when evaluating the average price per core.

"While we see many valuable data points in the prices across providers and across the globe, Liftr data show that cloud prices don't typically fluctuate to this extent," says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "It's a sign of the hot AI market. Accelerators—like NVIDIA GPUs—are the technology needed for artificial intelligence training and inference. Demand for AI is driving these price changes."

Among many attributes, Liftr Insights tracks on-demand prices for the top six cloud providers, representing over 75% of the total public cloud space. These prices are measured for all the unique configurations in Liftr Insights data, including numerous dimensions for processors and accelerators, such as global region, architecture, core count, and accelerator count as a few examples.

"This level of information is important for organizations needing to pay attention to their bottom line," says Schadt. "Particularly as they expand into new territories and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Our customers will be paying close attention to changes in the data as they occur."

As part of the launch of AWS’ Media and Entertainment (M&E) solution area to help broadcasters and advertisers improve the monetization of content, Comscore's data sets have been integrated into the AWS solution, a development that will provide clients easier access to data and analytics, according to Joseph Delfino vice president of strategy  and business development at Comscore. 

This new initiative, announced earlier in September, will enable customers to simplify and modernize their advertising stacks, increase revenue across viewing platforms, and build direct, more personalized relationships with audiences, Delfino said in a blog post. 

The effort is designed to help advertisers deal with ongoing market challenges that include cookie deprecation, privacy regulations, signal loss, media fragmentation, and lack of data interoperability are significant obstacles for businesses to overcome. 

To help with that Comscore was recently part of the launch of AWS’ Media and Entertainment (M&E) solution area focused on monetization. 

“By leveraging AWS and its new solution, Comscore will be embedded within a technology platform that is native to many client workflows,” Delfino wrote. “This will further enable frictionless access to Comscore’s rich cross-platform dataset and provide clients with the flexibility to collaborate with Comscore and their first-party datasets in the future. The AWS M&E Monetization solution area is one of many ways in which Comscore is working with partners in the media ecosystem to frictionlessly deliver data.”

As part of a demo of the solution at IBC, Delfino said that Comscore showcased this data collaboration and the drag-and-drop UI with a no-code interface on AWS Clean Rooms. This solution lets customers access Comscore datasets, without leaving the AWS Console or writing a single line of code.

Comscore’s integration with AWS gives customers easy access to datasets in a privacy-compliant clean room setting, he added. “With this solution, Comscore is building upon several important strategic pillars in its cross-platform approach, giving publishers and broadcasters the ability to: capture, curate, and create more audience value, drive new revenue streams, and unify planning, optimization, and measurement,” he wrote. 

“We continue to build a technology ecosystem that meets customers’ needs for frictionless data distribution,” Delfino reported. “This partnership will play a significant role in Comscore’s goal to deliver cross-platform solutions to the industry.”

SEATTLE—As part of a larger push into generative AI, Amazon has announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic that will see Amazon invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic.

The companies said that the strategic collaboration will bring together their respective technology and expertise in safer generative artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the development of Anthropic’s future foundation models and make them widely accessible to AWS customers.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider and use AWS’s chips to develop future foundation models for generative AI. 

“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”

 An AWS customer since 2021, Anthropic has grown quickly into one of the world’s leading foundation model providers for generative AI and a leading advocate for the responsible deployment of generative AI, the companies said. 

Anthropic's foundation model, Claude, works on a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction, while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability, the companies said. 

“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”

As part of the expanded collaboration:

• Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS. The two companies will also collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
• AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic plans to run the majority of its workloads on AWS, further providing Anthropic with the advanced technology of the world’s leading cloud provider.
• Anthropic makes a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
• Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and have a minority ownership position in the company.
• Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.

Amazon reported that the collaboration is only the latest AWS generative AI announcement and that the company continues to expand its unique offering at all three layers of the generative AI stack. 

At the bottom layer, AWS continues to offer compute instances from NVIDIA as well as AWS’s own custom silicon chips, AWS Trainium for AI training and AWS Inferentia for AI inference. At the middle layer, AWS is focused on providing customers with the broadest selection of foundation models from multiple leading providers where customers can then customize those models, keep their own data private and secure, and seamlessly integrate with the rest of their AWS workloads—all of this is offered through AWS’s new service, Amazon Bedrock. 

The Anthropic agreement means that customers will have early access to features for customizing Anthropic models, using their own proprietary data to create their own private models, and will be able to utilize fine-tuning capabilities via a self-service feature within Amazon Bedrock. At the top layer, AWS offers generative AI applications and services for customers like Amazon CodeWhisperer, a powerful AI-powered coding companion, which recommends code snippets directly in the code editor, accelerating developer productivity as they code.

As part of this deeper collaboration, AWS and Anthropic are committing meaningful resources that are helping customers get started with Claude and Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock, including through the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, where teams of AI experts will help customers of all sizes to develop new generative AI-powered applications to transform their organizations, the companies said. 

In addition, Amazon reported that customers accessing Anthropic’s current models via Amazon Bedrock are already building generative AI-powered applications that help automate tasks such as producing market forecasts, developing research reports, enabling new drug discovery for healthcare, and personalizing education programs. 

Enterprises already taking advantage of this advanced technology include Lonely Planet, a premier travel media company celebrated for its decades of travel content; Bridgewater Associates, a premier asset management firm for global institutional investors; and LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a top-tier global provider of information and analytics serving customers in more than 150 countries.

“We are developing a generative AI solution on AWS to help customers plan epic trips and create life-changing experiences with personalized travel itineraries,” said Chris Whyde, senior vice president of Engineering and Data Science at Lonely Planet. “By building with Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock, we reduced itinerary generation costs by nearly 80 percent when we quickly created a scalable, secure AI platform that organizes our book content in minutes to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations. Now we can re-package and personalize our content in various ways on our digital platforms, based on customer preference, all while highlighting trusted local voices–just like Lonely Planet has done for 50 years.”

The companies also said that they are working with a number of organizations to promote the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) AI working groups, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the Partnership on AI, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Responsible AI Institute. 

In July, both Amazon and Anthropic joined President Biden and other industry leaders at the White House to show their support for a set of voluntary commitments to foster the safe, secure, responsible, and effective development of AI technology. These commitments are a continuation of work that both Amazon and Anthropic have been doing to support the safety, security, and responsible development and deployment of AI and will continue through this expanded collaboration.