How an Industry at Peak Demand Is Simultaneously Buckling Under Its Own Weight
As we start a new year, there’s a familiar mix of optimism and anxiety across the media and entertainment industry. Heading into 2026, that tension feels sharper and more consequential. Our industry is producing more content than at any point in history, and audiences are consuming it across more screens, formats, and platforms than ever. Demand has never been higher.
And yet, the businesses behind that content are under extraordinary strain. It was made clear at the 2025 DPP Leaders’ Briefing: budgets are shrinking, talent pools are drying up (despite mass layoffs that are becoming routine), and legacy architectures are cracking. Entire business models are being rewritten in real-time, as the advent of AI has transformed entire tech stacks and product roadmaps seemingly overnight.
It’s a paradox: a thriving industry built on a business model and infrastructure that’s no longer able to sustain its own success.
2026 will force a long-overdue reckoning with that reality. But I believe it will also be the year that sets the foundation for a stronger, more resilient, more intentional future.
Transformation Fatigue Meets Operational Reality
For years, we’ve spoken about “transformation” as if it were a choice: a strategic lever to pull at any given moment, ideally just after seeing the latest shiny new toy at NAB or IBC. The reality is that transformation is always happening – but how it happens is uneven, perhaps even haphazard across the industry spectrum (consider the vast differences in tech and compliance requirements between a company like Netflix and heritage media brands like the BBC).
If you were at this past year’s IBC, you may have heard the oft-repeated phrase “transformation fatigue.” There are too many tools, too many half-finished migrations, and too many overlapping systems that don’t talk to each other…and always a new standard or technology replacing the thing that was just deployed. It’s exhausting.
Meanwhile, the structural pressures are only accelerating.
In the U.S., major broadcasters are undergoing deep reinvention out of necessity, not aspiration. Cost adjustments, mergers, and divestitures are symptoms of a model that cannot scale in its current form. In Europe, a slower economic decline has allowed organizations to defer disruptive change, but that deferral is now becoming a risk in itself. “Business as usual” cannot continue under these conditions.
2026 will be the year the gap between aspiration and operational capacity becomes impossible to ignore.
But acknowledging the gap is only the beginning. The real shift we’re seeing is that organizations are no longer willing to pursue complexity in the name of transformation. Across every conversation this year, four themes surfaced again and again: the need for simpler workflows, open, interoperable ecosystems, practical AI that actually delivers ROI, and resilience across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
These aren’t abstract trends; they are the criteria by which every technology decision will be judged in 2026. And it is particularly notable in how the industry is rethinking its relationship with the cloud.
Cloud as Resilience, Not a Single Point of Failure
At the IBC2025 Devoncroft Summit, findings implied that the transition and adoption of cloud have stalled. But is it a stalling out, or a strategic shift in how broadcasters and media organizations are incorporating cloud into their content supply chain? We’d argue it’s the latter. The cloud conversation has matured. The question is no longer “should we move everything to the cloud?” but rather, “where does cloud actually add value?” And just as importantly: “where doesn’t it?”
This shift reflects a move away from ideology and toward pragmatism.
There are workflows – for example, those with variable or burst demand – where cloud elasticity is invaluable. Others have predictable, constant usage, where on-prem remains more cost-effective and operationally stable. Most organizations will increasingly live in a hybrid world, leveraging the cloud as a strategic tool rather than a universal mandate.
Most importantly, cloud should bring media organizations resilience. The industry can no longer afford single-cloud dependency. Outages will prove too impactful, and the significant risk of putting all “eggs in one basket” will lead to adjustments and new strategies against market dominance in 2026.
AI Must Prove ROI (But It Won’t in 2026)
If cloud defined the last decade, AI is defining the next. After two years of frenzied hype, the conversation is getting serious. Organizations have neither the appetite nor the budget for proof-of-concepts that never scale. They want measurable impact: the reduction of manual work, the acceleration of time-to-air, the assurance of quality, and the improvement of search and discovery.
With that said, if you’re expecting to see ROI from your AI strategy immediately, you’re going to be disappointed. AI will become a practical function embedded in workflows as infrastructure, which should create efficiencies – faster processes, fewer manual steps, more control – but the impact will still be limited in 2026. The meaningful applications are not flashy; they’re operational, and they’re the missing link between the rising volume of content and the shrinking number of people available to manage it.
Our hope for AI is this: it will remove friction, not creativity; augment expertise, not replace it. This is where real reinvention begins: AI that becomes so intrinsic to the workflow that it finally stops being a demo and starts being a differentiator.
The Supply Chain May Break…and Give Way to a Better One
The phrase “media supply chain” has been used so often that it’s lost some meaning. But strip it down, and the challenge becomes clear: the systems that move content from camera to consumer were never designed for today’s scale, complexity, formats, or speed.
- Too many ingest points
- Too many formats
- Too many QC steps
- Too many silos between broadcast and digital
- Too much manual intervention holding everything together
The industry is producing 10x the volume on architectures built for 1x.
In 2026, these cracks will widen to the point of forcing structural change – a genuine re-architecture driven by simplicity, automation, and interoperability.
The most successful organizations will be those that acknowledge that their supply chain is no longer something to maintain but something to reinvent. And they will increasingly choose partners who can help them unify, optimize, and measure workflows end-to-end, rather than assemble systems piece by piece.
The Consolidation Strategy
Another unavoidable outcome of these pressures is consolidation. As advertising models shift, costs rise, and operational complexity increases, scale has become less of a competitive advantage and more of a requirement for survival.
On the content side, broadcasters and media groups are merging to stabilize revenues, pool rights, and rationalize operations. But while mergers may provide temporary financial relief, they do not solve the industry’s deeper structural challenges. Without rethinking workflows, technology architectures, and operating models, larger organizations simply inherit larger versions of the same inefficiencies.
The same dynamic is playing out across the technology ecosystem. Many vendors entered the market during periods of rapid growth, at different times, more recently around cloud and AI, without a sustainable path to profitability. As budgets tighten and customers demand tightly integrated, more reliable partners, we should expect continued consolidation among technology providers as well. The market simply will not support the number of point solutions and niche platforms that exist today.
Why This Moment Is an Opportunity, Not a Crisis
It may sound dramatic and bleak to say the industry is buckling under its own weight. But we’ve been around long enough to know we can adapt and clear this hurdle.
Yes, 2026 will be disruptive.
Yes, some legacy assumptions will collapse.
Yes, the cost and complexity challenges are real.
But that’s exactly why we’re entering a moment of unprecedented opportunity. For the first time in years, the industry is aligned around what needs to happen:
- Simpler workflows
- Smarter, embedded automation
- More resilient infrastructure
- True interoperability and ecosystem collaboration
- Better visibility and measurement across the entire chain
These are the areas where we, as technology partners, can have the greatest impact; not by hyping up transformational tech that is more vaporware than substance, but by solving real operational problems with clarity and intention.
You’ve Gotta Break Some Eggs to Make an Omelet
If 2025 was the year the industry finally admitted exhaustion, then 2026 is the year it begins to move forward with purpose.
This won’t be an easy year…but it will be a defining one: the point at which media organizations shift from experimental transformation to meaningful, measurable progress.
The supply chain may break. But in doing so, it will create the chance to build something far stronger, practical, and more resilient. Something designed for the realities of today and the possibilities of tomorrow.
This is the moment we stop just maintaining the old and start intentionally building a better way forward.
— Ben Desbois, Chief Growth & Strategy Officer, Telestream