An Imminent Shift Toward Connected TV & Video Intelligence at Scale

Overview

In 2026, data captured, produced, and re-versioned will double to 250ZB in just three years globally. Although unstructured data repositories will remain dominant, accounting for close to 90% (volume terms) of the total universe (2023: 93%; IDC Worldwide Global DataSphere Structured and Unstructured Data Forecast, 2024–2028), structured data (metadata, audience, secondary social media, etc.) will be the fastest-growing category in the next 2–3 years. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) segment will follow a similar data growth trajectory, attributed to the exponential rise in media asset repositories (audio, video, and images), which will contribute 60% (volume terms) of unstructured data by December 2026. Furthermore, as cognitive services (including generative AI) adoption, fragmentation of audience engagement touch points, and the shift of consumption towards short-form video continue to surge, structured data repositories will also gain momentum across media enterprises in the next 12–18 months. Also, as the cost of new customer acquisition and profitability pressures mount significantly, this is paving the way for the following:

• “Lower and re-calibrate technical debt
• Embrace data-driven workflows (IP, software-defined, etc.)
• Accelerate distributed remote workgroup collaboration (cloud, microservices, etc.)
• Enrich metadata, data, and information repositories into near real-time actionable intelligence
• Unification of the content supply chain (i.e., linear, non-linear, third-party aggregation, etc.)/li>

Thus, as the majority of media enterprises embark on a data (AI)-first growth strategy, optimizing and managing their technical debt — especially modernization of legacy systems to meet new-age business requirements — is pivotal for competitive edge.

Technical Debt Continues to Rise

In today’s data & AI economy, media enterprises are facing multi-fold challenges centred on re-engineering and investing in technology workflows that meet their digital-native business priorities at scale. Also, the traditional best-of-breed technology procurement strategy has resulted in an exponential increase in technical debt due to:

• End-of-life span for proprietary systems built and supported in-house for tailored use cases
• Cost of support and maintenance of legacy systems continuing to grow due to lack of resources and back-end upgradation complexities
• Vendors gradually reducing dependencies on their on-premises deployments and support, and accelerating cloud migration journey 3.0 — see how Infocepts helps media companies modernize legacy infrastructure
• Cloud-native architecture led technology proliferation across the content supply chain, especially within internal & shared systems (analytics, subscription management, data management, CRM, etc.) — explore Infocepts’ Power BI Migration accelerator

Furthermore, macro-economic factors such as C-band reallocation, non-linear TV & video becoming the primary revenue mix, and multi-platform real-time insights, among others, are also pushing media enterprises to embark on the recalibration journey — with migration to IP and cloud workflows at the epicentre of this data-first transformation.

Unified Intelligence Anywhere, Everywhere — Becoming a Necessity

As cognitive services (AI/ML) penetration continues to grow across the content supply chain (i.e., from media acquisition, archiving, and distribution, to engagement), along with the audience consumption shift towards short-form, live, and connected digital services (beyond entertainment), siloed intelligence tailored for key strategic and operational executives (such as C-suite, LOB heads, etc.) is insufficient and inefficient. Furthermore, as remote distributed workgroup collaboration becomes the de-facto norm, access to secure and personalized data (along with associated metadata) in near real-time is essential — not only to improve faster time-to-market (TTM) but also to lower revenue leakages. These changing operational needs demand adoption of data & AI analytics workflows offering enterprise-wide connected intelligence with the following value add-ons:

• DIY self-service, local & regional support
• Interoperability, and API-first
• Enterprise-ready rather than enterprise-grade (personas, business priorities, use cases, sub-vertical, etc.)
• User-friendly UI and hyper-tailored UX for both business and technology leaders
• Pre-packaged, industry-specific (data, metadata, etc.) professional services (incl. change management) and managed services
• Optimization and orchestration of the data intelligence ecosystem

Therefore, re-calibrating technical debt to build a robust and seamlessly integrated intelligence layer across the TV & video value chain is crucial to maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage in the long run.

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Want the deeper technical breakdown of what re-calibrating this debt actually looks like? Read Data Modernization for Media: The Technical Debt Nobody’s Pricing In for the signs your infrastructure needs modernizing, where most projects go wrong, and a practical path to start.

Ready to see what a modernized, connected intelligence layer looks like for your organization? Talk to Infocepts’ Media & Entertainment experts.