Streaming Media 2025 Chair Andy Beach Talks Gen AI, AI/ML, and Changing Perceptions of Their Impact on Streaming
Streaming Media 2025 Chair Andy Beach joins Future Frames podcast’s Doug Daulton to discuss how much the streaming industry’s engagement with and implementation of AI have changed in a year, from the once-popular misconception that “one big AI” would come along and change everything to all of the smaller areas where AI has proven its usefulness, taking over redundant tasks and changing content creation workflows and easing budget constraints to enable much more content creation and regionalisation than was previously possible.
Putting AI in the Right Place
After volleying back and forth some general impressions of their respective Streaming Media 2025 experiences, Daulton and Beach alight on the issue of AI and its frequent presence and very occasional absence in discussions at the show. Daulton notes that in many of these conversations, “we’ve been talking a lot about the tech of AI and how it applies to more efficient pipelines, more efficient everything.”
Noting that AI hasn’t dominated every session at the show as one might expect it to do in the current climate, Beach says, “It's kind of been refreshing that AI, while still a big topic, is just another one of the things that we're looking at. And it's not necessarily dominating."
Recalling his opening keynote fireside chat with Netflix Head of Live Technical Launch Management Brett Axler, Beach says, "We talked for a full hour and AI never came up once. We talked a lot about data because they're a heavy data company for how they deliver things, but they were actually looking at implementing more traditional live operations and network operations functions into it, which really meant more people than they've ever had doing that operationally before."
Noting that he's heard "a lot of different unique takes" on AI during his time at the show, Beach says, "Where AI has come up has absolutely been around automating elements of the workflow for people so that you don't have to have your hands on as many things at one time. You can offload some of it to an AI service, whether that's transcription pieces or monitoring signal for audio loss or video loss or other elements that go into it. It's all about just making sure that you can react to the things that are going to change in either a live workflow or an on-demand workflow that you're going to have to get support with before it goes to air."
“One of the things I've seen as a throughline here and going back to NAB in the spring is there's a real focus on putting AI in the right place, not AI for AI's sake," Daulton agrees. "There's been some recent reporting saying that uptake of AI in broader business applications has not been as robust as people might think, but what I'm hearing here is that there's more of a 'let's do it in the right place where it makes the most sense,' and it's more of a force multiplier for the staff they already have rather than a replacement for staff. Would you agree with that?"
"There's two different pieces at play there," Beach replies. "There was a perception when we were talking about AI even a year ago, that there was this one big AI that was going to come in and save all of our workflows and we were going to push a button and something magical was going to happen. And where we've gotten to in the last year is the reality that it's really lots of little AI functions that get peppered through a variety of the workflows that we're already doing that help lift and the overall lift of that will be equivalent to what that big one button might've done."
Beach elaborates on this observation by describing AI’s role as “spread out across a variety of teams where it's just helping and supporting them, allowing them to focus more on the important pieces and taking some of the redundant tasks out of their hands. Because that mindset has changed, we're also seeing people implement it more quickly than they were before. I think it's harder to implement when it's that one big thing. You keep waiting for it when it's lots of little things that are just going to be additive and you know you can connect them together over time. There's less risk to putting it into operation sooner."
AI and Streaming’s Bottom Line
Daulton turns the conversation to the question of where AI can have the greatest impact on streamers’ or streaming publishers’ bottom line, and suggests that while generative AI is “getting all the press,” AI/ML is currently having the most significant fiscal impact.
"There are a lot of different budgetary constraints that go around how much content you can create or how much content you can oversee at any one time, and being able to automate some of those processes frees up people to ultimately create more content than they were previously," Beach says.
Referencing a fireside chat he did at the conference with I2A2 President and CEO and longtime studio exec Renard T. Jenkins. Beach said that Jenkins "felt confident that AI was ultimately helping creators more and that it was going to replace studios faster than it replaced an individual in it." AI, Jenkins argued, is "arming an individual with all the tools and resources that a studio typically has had to provide to get the quality production value that's there. An individual or even an independent studio can now do with AI what a Hollywood studio would have done in the previous decades on their own now. So there really is no need for that big infrastructure and the big funding that it took to do that. You can go out on your own and make something that's pretty compelling at a lower cost point."
Discovery and Distribution
Daulton points to a phenomenon discussed in sessions and other interviews where the lines between creator and major streaming platform content are blurring as popular creators are being “discovered” and recruited by streaming networks, and the suggestion that YouTube and other creator-centric platforms are operating as a sort of “farm team” for Netflix and Prime and other mainstream streamers.
"Something that I've heard from several people here in several different panels is this idea that YouTube and the creator networks are really kind of the farm system for Netflix and people are being noticed,” says Daulton. “Mr. Beast goes from obscurity to the biggest guy on YouTube and now to an Amazon Prime show. And so it feels like that's one of the places where gen AI in particular can help the smaller player play on the bigger field."
"Absolutely," says Beach. "On Monday before everything kicked off, we had an Industry Insights day with a variety of debates and topics, and Ben Relles, in one of the talks he was giving with Seth Hallen, talked about the fact that ten years ago, the creators were more of a farm system, and the goal of a creator was to get into the studio system. Now, he said, their goal is to just have their own platform and not necessarily to go for that studio viewpoint. So that's not their end result anymore. It's pivoted to more of their own thing, and that's because the tooling is so much better for them to be able to control it that there is no need, necessarily, to go for a studio in note as part of what you're doing."
"So the studio affiliation then just becomes one piece of their larger pie," says Daulton.
"Right," agrees Beach. "It's a great distribution place, but it doesn't have to be the only destination or the only distribution."
Join us December 9-11 and tune in for more great conversations at Streaming Media Connect! Registration is free and open now!