16 Oct AI Hype No Longer: Focus Now on Practical Benefits Across Production, Monetization, and Business Performance [Omdia]
Photo: Paul Erickson | At IBC, two of the author’s Omdia colleagues (right), glean AI insights at the AWS booth.
By Paul Erickson
October 16, 2025 | IBC descended upon Amsterdam for 2025, and the world’s most significant media & entertainment (M&E) technology show yielded a fresh wave of insight into the trends and innovations shaping the industry this year and leading its focus into 2026. Of these, AI was ever present on the vendor and technology sides of this year’s show. In sharp contrast to prior years, it was being discussed in terms of tangible benefits and practical use cases – rather than the grandiose, non-specific hype of the past. The immense financial pressure on the collective industry has driven a focus on performance and results, and this focus has accelerated the harnessing of AI, particularly agentic AI, for practical use cases and purpose-built tools across all levels of workflow—from creative, to editing, to publishing, to monetization, and beyond.
AI is being put to work to drive improved efficiency, speed, and productivity—and new publishing and monetization capabilities
The most common implementations of AI in media and entertainment technology processes of all kinds discussed at the show focused on gains in efficiency—the essential industry metric of the moment, second only to “profitability.” Whether it was on the basis of speed, simplification, reduced human workloads, or financial merits, discussions frequently centered on AI’s utilitarian, fundamental, tangible benefits to workflow, distribution, and business efficiencies.
Financial pressures and profitability goals are the momentum behind the other major vector of practical AI advancements commonly discussed at this year’s show. The need for improved monetization and engagement is driving continued improvements in how AI is being used to extract deeper, more layered contextual insights for metadata, personalization, and targeted advertising purposes. Additionally, this improved contextual understanding allows AI to discover and deliver new monetization possibilities for existing legacy content libraries.
A prime example was the significant use of AI in localization processes, which was evident at the show. The aforementioned improvements in contextual understanding, along with AI’s inherent capability to process massive volumes of content far faster than teams of humans can, have made it the tool of choice to automate and accelerate the bulk of translation, dubbing, and local-market-aware editing processes to localize new and existing content—maximizing content monetization.
AI facilitating publishing in new formats, particularly short-form, micro-drama, and vertical content—even to remonetize library content
The undeniable growth in the importance of social, short-form, and user-generated video has had a ripple effect in the industry. Financial and efficiency pressures, and maturation of AI contextual content understanding capabilities, yielded numerous examples at IBC of different approaches to automatic/intelligent auto-generation of social-formatted, micro-length, and vertical video, along with associated metadata and teaser clips from traditional long-form and horizontal-format content. While this is not necessarily shocking, the degree to which this is quickly becoming table stakes as part of the featureset for today’s content workflow, editing, and distribution capabilities is notable. Quickplay’s AI Studio product was one example of this at the show, with the ability to leverage archive libraries to generate and publish new short-form content, to remonetize legacy content, and increase content ROI.
Fundamental improvements are laying the foundation for faster progress
Multiple parties in the industry have begun taking advantage of structural changes in how AI, particularly purpose-built agentic AI, is being practically implemented and leveraged in the industry. Anthropic’s Media Context Protocol (MCP) open standard was being discussed or implemented by multiple parties—such as Gracenote, Synamedia, and many more—as the next cutting-edge development in the use of AI in the industry. The MCP standard and framework provide a standardized way in which large language models (LLMs) and other AI models can interface with external tools and systems. Though it is early days, MCP is being touted as the next architectural development beyond agentic AI that will expand the degree to which AI is being leveraged to drive practical utility and results in M&E technology processes. Many other parties, including AWS, discussed how AI is now being practically leveraged across all stages of media and advertising workflows, and expressed that this is arguably the year that AI is finally being harnessed in earnest across the industry to deliver fundamental, tangible benefits.
These are only a limited sample of how AI is being leveraged anew in the sector, and was being discussed at this year’s IBC. While AI has been hyped by M&E tech vendors for years, IBC 2025 exhibited a sea change in the industry—sleeves have been rolled up, and AI is now broadly being put to work to drive tangible efficiencies and new monetization possibilities.
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