.jpg)
2025 was (yet another) year of AI, there’s no question about it. Generative, agentic, LLM, AI dominated in tech news everywhere, not just media tech. Within media tech we saw fascinating and novel use cases of AI like Channel 4’s use of an AI presenter in a documentary that shocked and terrified viewers.
Elsewhere, Pakistan’s daily English language newspaper, Dawn, clearly printed the remnants of a journalist’s ChatGPT prompt after it was missed by the editor; Paramount faced backlash for its use of AI voiceover; and Coca-Cola famously cut corners and went all-AI on its 2025 holiday adverts. AI, in its use, in the content we consume and in our day-to-day lives and workflows, isn’t going anywhere.
When it is leveraged well, and integrated into workflows that support and help the user, AI can increase speed, agility and productivity. We will see even more real use cases and integration of AI for pinpoint analysis and not broad usage, across the media tech ecosystem in 2026.
But that is only half the story – loud as AI talk may be, we’re also on the verge of a great cloud acceleration. Off the back of cloud broadcast success during Paris 2024, we saw Super Bowl LIX utilise a hybrid cloud control room for secondary feeds, and multiple European leagues move to cloud-based switching with only smaller flypacks on site.
No longer optional
Teams are learning that the old way of doing things, clunky servers, siloed video libraries, and spreadsheets for editorial planning, just doesn’t cut it anymore. By mid-2025, the ‘cloud is optional’ argument had pretty much died. A report by Haivision shows that 86% of broadcasters now use some form of cloud technology, although nearly half admit it still makes up less than a quarter of their workflows.
So yes, media producers are moving, but cautiously. There is a growing realisation that some of the early ‘cloud’ technologies were cloud-washed lift-and-shift only, and broadcasters are becoming savvy, examining the offered technologies and choosing true cloud-native for true gains.
For the daring though, the benefits were obvious: cloud-based video archives, enriched automatically with transcription, translation and AI tagging, suddenly mean that editorial teams can find exactly what they need – fast. Faster workflows for content creation are not just nice to have, they’re a turning point for breaking news, live sports coverage, live events, and even highlight reels for social platforms which are critical to connect with target audiences.
This year, social media surpassed television as a source of news for the first time, according to a study by the Reuters Institute. If you’re not optimising your workflows and content for linear and social output, you’re lagging behind. But don’t fret yet, there are real use cases to learn from, to see how shifting workflows to the cloud, with AI elements, can transform your team.
The regional broadcaster who went big and remote
One regional European broadcaster, tired of wrestling with legacy systems, ripped the whole thing out and rebuilt their newsroom around cloud-native workflows. Reporters covering football, handball and cycling could pitch, draft and publish stories from anywhere – the stadium, the office, or a cafe with good WiFi. Editors in another city could log in, pull clips from a live feed enriched with automatic metadata, and assemble highlights in minutes.
Gone were the days of send the tape, wait 48 hours, hope nothing broke. Suddenly, the same team could turn around social clips, recaps and short-form videos almost in real-time – all without hiring extra staff or renting extra storage. Agile, fast, smart. Basically, the sports-media version of a startup that actually knows how to ship.
Multi-language, multi-timezone sports coverage
On the international front, global broadcasters covering world tournaments embraced cloud-based archives and automated transcription/translation. Suddenly, interviews from press conferences, locker rooms, or mixed zones were accessible to editors across continents within hours.
The effect? They could publish local-language highlight packages, analysis and press snippets on the same day. No more waiting on translators or shipping files across FTP. In an industry obsessed with timeliness, this isn’t just a technical win – it’s a competitive edge.
Metadata: The secret weapon everyone pretends they understand
Another key component of production success that must spread in popularity next year is metadata. It sounds boring, but this is where the real disruption lives. Speech-to-text, object recognition, face detection, combined with automatic, time-coded tagging of all the metadata this generates – all of these help teams search by ‘what happened’ instead of ‘what the file is called’.
In practical terms, if you want all the goals scored by a certain player across three leagues this season, you can find them in minutes. Want to create a ‘rivalry package’ from archival footage spanning five years? Easy. The combination of cloud-first infrastructure and AI-enriched metadata turns once-overwhelming archives into living, breathing, searchable story machines.
Industry numbers back this up: cloud-based media asset management already accounts for 64% of the MAM market’s revenue according to Future Market Insights, and The Big Tech Survey 2025 states that more than four in ten post-production teams have moved at least part of their workflow to the cloud. The message is clear: cloud workflows and properly leveraged metadata aren’t a fad. They’re becoming the baseline.
2026: The year workflows get smart(er)
If 2025 was about the rapid spin up of AI instances and moving to the cloud, 2026 will be about connecting the dots. Here are some bets worth taking:
Editorial and media will argue less: Planning tools and archives should feel like one system. Draft your story, and relevant clips pop up like magic. Search while you write, assemble packages on the fly, all without leaving your browser.
Metadata will drive personalisation: With rich, AI-generated tags, broadcasters can produce multiple story formats automatically, short social clips, personalised highlight reels, region-specific recaps. The audience will get more tailored content without more headcount on the producer side.
Remote-first becomes default, not exceptional: Distributed newsrooms will be the norm, not the exception. Journalists, editors and producers will work together in real time, from anywhere in the world. This isn’t just convenient; it’s a whole new way of thinking about production design and newsgathering.
Elasticity becomes the new standard: For major events: World Cups, Olympics, Euros, teams will scale ingest, storage and editing up and down on demand. No more flying in hundreds of staff and shipping hard drives. Cloud-first flexibility means big event coverage without big headaches – and most importantly, it means access to all content, immediately, from anywhere.
2025 showed us what’s possible when AI and cloud stop being buzzwords and start powering real workflows. Teams that embraced metadata-rich archives, cloud-native pipelines and integrated, serverless systems discovered they could turn around content faster, smarter and in more formats – all while keeping the editorial team connected, wherever they were working from.
Looking to 2026, the story is clear: success won’t go to the broadcaster with the fanciest cameras or the deepest rights portfolio. It will go to the teams who treat content and workflows as a living system – fluid, flexible and fast. Cloud-native pipelines, AI-driven insights and seamless collaboration will be table stakes, not optional extras.
For those still wrestling with fragmented storage, manual processes, or legacy pipelines, the clock is ticking.
This blog first appeared in SVG Europe: https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/the-great-cloud-acceleration-2026-will-be-the-year-workflows-get-smart-says-fonn-group/