Written by Dale Gates
AWS Media and entertainment symposium 2025
Recently, I once again took the trip down to the Capital this time to AWS’s media and entertainment symposium 2025 at The Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square
The AI demos continue to lead discussion
AWS of course continue to push AI capabilities, and rightly so. Some of the demo stalls had some groundbreaking serverless solutions that are genuinely changing the game for content creation. One that particularly stood out was an automated F1 highlight system – it could spot crashes and overtakes automatically and clip them from a live stream, then create commentary using the actual commentator’s voice. Even better, it could translate that same voice into different languages whilst keeping all the personality intact.
Big players and their digital transformation
Getting to hear the BBC, ITV, and Sky talk about their massive digital transformation projects and how they’re rethinking their entire workflows was fascinating. These projects are huge given the history of these organisations – particularly the BBC, which has already migrated over 45 PB of data in a 10-month period. Unsurprising really, given their 100+ years of history. F1 were mentioned in a similar vein, doing digital asset migration and archiving with around 4 PB of content alone.
Untold studios and convergence
Untold Studios particularly stood out for me given how ahead of the curve they are with studio-in-the-cloud tech, which aligns perfectly with our focus in this space. I was keen to hear Amaan Akram, their CTO, talking about convergence in media – and how production boundaries are basically disappearing made perfect sense from a DevOps perspective.
The coffee chat
Beyond all the shiny demos and stage talks, it was good to meet like-minded individuals and industry professionals over coffee (and wine!) – especially those working in different parts of the media production pipeline who are solving similar challenges and keen to see what AWS have to offer.
Final Word
AWS are clearly doubling down not just on media, but on the UK tech space generally, given their recent announcement of £40bn investment into the UK over the next 3 year and the creative industry in particular is set to receive a sizeable slice of that in the form of new studios and upskilling our already world-leading UK VFX talent. This is an exciting time to be working with AWS, particularly in the media and entertainment space.