Delivering the future of media with data and AI
IBC 2026 Amsterdam, September 11-14
Delivering the future of media with data and AI.
Audiences are everywhere and the industry is changing faster than ever. AWS helps media and entertainment customers create content, connect workflows, and captivate audiences across multiple platforms.
The main booth was built around the four primary areas in which AWS supports media and entertainment companies – content creation, media lifecycle management, multiplatform distribution, and revenue generation – with a focus on AI. The layout reflected the journey of media content – from the moment it’s created to the moment it's consumed.
If IBC 2026 had a single theme, it was agentic AI. On the Content Everywhere stage, Chris Ziemer (AWS), Gareth Capon (Grabyo), and Soyoung Lee (TwelveLabs) joined Omdia analyst Paul Erickson to discuss three things: how agents are already reshaping the media value chain, how far the industry is from trusting them to run it, and what the payoff looks like when they do.
The payoff is new ways to earn. Once a library is understood, it can be used for new formats and new shows. Agentic AI raises ad yield, connects first-party data for sharper audience insight, and spreads revenue across advertising, subscriptions, and content licensing.
Agents are reshaping the value chain end to end. Agentic workflows run from ingest to audience. With content stored in Amazon S3 enriched by foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, every asset becomes data that drives decisions.
Trust is being earned one workflow at a time. Few media companies let agents publish without human oversight. Short form clips are first to automate. Live is the hardest test, where broadcast-grade reliability and scale matter.
AI workflows are compressing production cycles from months into days, so creators now compete on ideas rather than budget.
Agentic AI turns disconnected manual processes into workflows that unlock the full value of a content library.
Live production and delivery move from fragmented, channel-by-channel approaches to AI-driven strategies that reach audiences wherever they watch.
AI agents automate advertising operations and maximize yield, while publishers diversify into hybrid monetization models.
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Key takeaway: AWS meets creators and studios securely at every layer of the production stack, removing the technology constraints that limit scale, speed, and creative ambition.
Production costs keep climbing while demand for content keeps growing. AI in media production has moved from experimentation into real-world deployment across scripting, editing, visual effects, localization, and distribution.
AI is lowering the time and cost of production, bringing what used to take a large studio and a long schedule within reach of a small team on a short one.
Create and scale without limits
Collaborate without boundaries
Accelerate creative workflows with agentic AI
Produce hybrid films in real time
Two sessions evidenced what happens when the cloud is the starting point rather than the destination.
Untold Studios: Untold Studios was built on AWS from the beginning. Amaan Akram, CTO, explained how running five global sites without traditional infrastructure changed how the studio hires, collaborates, and takes on work – and why it's now building its own VFX AI on top.
Innovative Dreams: Adam Jones, Director of Production Technology, walked through the real-time hybrid filmmaking behind House of David and Young Washington. The director sees the finished shot while the actors are still on set.
Key takeaway: Untold Studios grew from a 16-person startup to 750 artists across 5 global studios – on a cloud-native foundation built from day one.
Key takeaway: Intricate scenes were filmed on the LED wall, saving days on set.
Visitors picked a world – piracy, wizardry, or science fiction – stepped onto the LED stage, and got six seconds, a short script, and a prop if they wanted one. AWS services – including Amazon Bedrock AgentCore – placed them inside the scene, and they took the finished film away with them.
The Microdrama Studio showcased how a complex production can be reduced dramatically with AI. Script, virtual set, and rendering all happened in real time onsite – no costume or set build. Every visitor walked away with a finished film that showed what generative AI makes possible for media production. An even bigger version of the demo is coming to re:Invent.
Watch the video: A microdrama created at IBC with AWS.
Key takeaway: Agentic AI on AWS orchestrates the workflow from ingest to monetization, turning archived assets into revenue-generating opportunities.
Most media organizations are sitting on decades of content they can't easily reach. It lives on aging tape and on-premises systems, cataloged inconsistently, cleared for rights nobody can quickly confirm. Meanwhile the processes moving new content through ingest, versioning, and delivery are still largely manual.
Agentic AI changes the equation. It transforms these disconnected, manual processes into seamless workflows that unlock the full value of every asset – turning storage from a cost center into a revenue driver.
Turn archives from cost centers into revenue drivers
Analyze rights and contracts with agentic AI
Automate quality checks across the whole library
Find every asset in one place, with its full history intact
AI-driven archive migration: A guided journey from the first business case to a live, linked archive. An AI agent builds the cost and revenue case first, and then guides the migration, links every file to its catalog record, and keeps storage costs down afterward.
Reuters Imagen: Transcribing an archive turns decades of unsearchable footage into a searchable library. Reuters Imagen CTO Ian McLaren and AWS's Chris Fane demonstrated how a single transcription pass makes an entire news archive discoverable.
Key takeaway: Unused archive footage was digitized and put into a Channel 5 documentary.
Key takeaway: Cost and revenue are modeled before a single file is migrated.
A news archive is the hardest version of this problem. The volume’s enormous, the material’s old, and what makes a clip valuable is usually a specific quote buried deep inside it.
TAMS – the Time-Addressable Media Store – is an open-source, frame-accurate way of storing media that lets teams work with content as a timeline rather than a set of files.
Yahoo Studios builds its cloud-native media workflows on TAMS on AWS. Liam Mulvey and Dan Brantigan demoed their approach live at IBC, where Yahoo Studios took a Best of Show award.
Key takeaway: AWS enables unified, AI-driven distribution that adapts content format, quality, and monetization across every platform in real time.
There's no longer a default way to reach an audience. People access content on broadcast, streaming, connected TV, FAST channels, the web, and their phones, and they expect the experience to feel personalized on each one. Most distribution was designed channel by channel, and it shows. AI-driven strategies change that – enhancing discoverability and delivery of personalized, engaging content across every viewing surface.
At the same time, live production is moving to software-defined, cloud-native infrastructure built on open standards. The MXL v1.0.0 release in March 2026 shows clearly where that's heading.
Accelerate content for every platform with AI
Build live production on open-standards, across vendors
Personalize viewing experiences at broadcast scale
Contribute and distribute linear channels in the cloud
JioHotstar: Akash Saxena, Chief Technology Officer at JioStar, and Manish Rao, General Manager of Elemental Media Services at AWS, showed how multiview hands that choice to the viewer – several camera angles, one stream, no compromise on quality or scale.
Personalizing the viewing experience at broadcast scale: The demo shows three viewers on the same platform – an action fan, a romcom lover, a sports fan – each getting their own recommendations and their own highlights from the same titles. In the live match, the clips are built around the player each viewer follows.
Live sport makes distribution harder as you scale, especially during live moments that can't be repeated. At the same time, personalization matters more than ever, as audiences increasingly want to watch their own way.
Key takeaway: JioHotstar streamed to a record-breaking 72.5 million concurrent viewers.
Key takeaway: Goals, shots, and saves – detected live, reframed for mobile in minutes.
Captain is an AI agent Bundesliga built on Amazon Bedrock to answer the questions fans ask during a match – about a player, a statistic, a moment that just happened – in real time.
Bundesliga brought it to IBC twice. Jean-Michel Lourier of AWS and Sebastian Hess of Bundesliga Media showed how live match data becomes a personal fan moment. Dominik Scholler, SVP Product Management and Innovation, and Jakob Rosinski of AWS set out the Content Hub vision for pulling every piece of Bundesliga content into a single experience. Visitors could use it themselves in a dedicated area of the booth.
Key takeaways:
Turn live match data into a personal fan moment
Bring every piece of Bundesliga content into one place
Open up the world's biggest football archive, back to 1963
Key takeaway: First-party data becomes a durable competitive asset on AWS, where AI-powered workflows automate complex advertising operations and publishers diversify into hybrid monetization models.
The third-party cookie is gone. Audience data sits across platforms that were never designed to talk to each other. Ad sales still run on manual processes built for a slower market. And a growing share of traffic now comes from AI crawlers that generate nothing.
The answer is better use of what a publisher already owns – first-party data, an existing audience relationship, and the operational capacity to act quickly on both.
Automate ad sales with agents
Measure brand sponsorship with AI
Place intelligent ad breaks in live sports
Monetize AI-crawler traffic
Warner Bros. Discovery: Kacper Dabrowski, Sr Director of Client Engineering & Solutions Architecture Engineering at WBD, and Brad Epperson, Global Business Development Lead at AWS, walked through WBD's automation: forecasting, pricing, inventory, and yield, each with its own agent, working across linear and digital together.
Modernize advertising operations with open data architectures: When the same viewer appears three times over across TV, streaming, and web, nobody can prove who the audience is. Four straightforward questions can turn fragmented profiles into an audience with a verified size, forecast, and price.
Plenty of companies are running agentic pilots somewhere in their advertising stack. Warner Bros. Discovery did it across the whole thing.
Key takeaway: Identifying inventory and revenue that nobody could see before.
Key takeaway: A simulated 50% increase in minimum ad price revealed a potential 5% revenue drop.
The Entertainment Loft
Prime Video, Amazon Studios, Amazon Ads, and Twitch are all built on the same AWS services available to every customer. From AI-native live sports operations and cloud-native post-production to enhanced live-sports graphic overlays and video game streaming for players around the world, these stories aren't theoretical; they're proven at Amazon scale and built on AWS.
At IBC, that proof came to life in the Amazon on AWS Entertainment Loft, new for 2026. The Loft showcased interactive demos where attendees could see NBA on Prime Video, AI-powered sports intelligence, Prime Video streaming innovations, and Luna cloud game streaming, including Twitch Playable Ads, powered by Amazon GameLift Streams.
The clearest proof that AWS can run media at scale: Amazon runs its own media business on it.
Go live anywhere. Engage audiences everywhere.
Amazon Leo and AWS bring connectivity and cloud computing to locations previously beyond reach, enabling broadcast, sports, and media organizations to create content without limits, deliver broadcast-quality experiences across every screen, and turn first-party data into advertising revenue – from even the most remote locations.
Michael Rack, Enterprise Sales Lead for Amazon Leo, explained why media companies are using Amazon Leo: transmitting live from places that previously had no route out, feeding straight into the cloud so editing can start while the event is still running.
Satellite connectivity, feeding straight into the cloud.
AWS had a second booth at IBC, given over entirely to startups – smaller and full of companies showcasing their new innovations.
The AWS for Startups booth featured four media startup companies built on AWS, as well as a live demo of AWS Startup Advisor – a build assistant that gives founders AWS expert development guidance in real time, including deployment or migration of production-grade agent architectures on AWS.
More than 88% of internet traffic is video. If your strategy isn’t video, you’re out of the market."
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