The media industry is operating at a scale and speed that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Content is multiplying across formats, platforms, and geographies, and every part of the workflow is feeling the strain. Creative teams are navigating an explosion of data while trying to keep production timelines tight and collaboration seamless.
Our recent State of Media Archiving Report reflects that tension. More than 300 media leaders shared how they are adapting to growing libraries, evolving distribution models, and rising operational complexity. Their responses point to a sector in transition. Hybrid workflows, unified platforms, and AI-driven intelligence are changing how teams store, find, and move content at scale.
The strain of growing media libraries
Content libraries are scaling faster than existing workflows can support. Nearly one third of large M&E companies expect their libraries to exceed 5PB in the next year, up from 17% today.
Remote work adds even more pressure. Remote collaboration ranked as one of the top global pain points, driven by scattered storage, weak metadata, and limited automation. Editors and producers lose time searching for assets, reconciling versions, or waiting for transfers across siloed environments. And when organizations fail to access assets across locations, time to market slows and creative output suffers.
The mandate is clear: organizations need better interoperability, faster discovery, and reliable performance across every location and device.
Hybrid rises as the model of choice
Hybrid architectures are now the dominant preference at 42% and are expected to remain the leading model through 2026. Hybrid pairs the responsiveness of on-prem environments with the scale and reach of the cloud, giving teams flexibility without sacrificing performance.
Although hybrid is rising, on-prem adoption is also increasing. Preference for on-prem deployments will rise from 25% to 31% as companies double down on data governance, predictable performance, and cost control. Compliance demands and security requirements are tightening, and many teams want consistent throughput for post and live workflows
Together, these trends show that the future is not cloud versus on-prem, it is hybrid by design, and unified by orchestration. Organizations need environments that support performance-intensive tasks locally while unlocking remote collaboration and high-scale storage offsite.
The next competitive advantage
As infrastructure becomes more distributed, the real challenge shifts to workflow fragmentation. Multi-generation storage systems, disparate tools, and siloed archives waste time and raise operational costs. This is why 85% of respondents plan to migrate to a unified media archiving platform, though only 6% have completed that transition so far. The gap reflects how complex their ecosystems have become and how much modernization is still ahead.
Unified, interoperable platforms are emerging as the next major competitive advantage. The reasons are consistent across all surveyed segments: integration costs drop, operational visibility improves, and content moves through the supply chain without friction.
Teams no longer want a patchwork of tools, they want a single ecosystem that brings data management, orchestration, collaboration, and discovery together.
AI/ML as an accelerator
While unified platforms solve complexity, AI and machine learning accelerate value. 45% of respondents say operational productivity is the primary benefit of AI/ML within archiving workflows. Teams use AI to enrich metadata, identify duplicates, classify assets, and automate tasks that once took hours.
As archives grow and formats diversify into UHD, 4K, and 8K, AI is becoming essential for keeping media assets searchable and usable at scale. Without it, the advantages of hybrid and unified architectures cannot be fully realized.
Preparing for the new wave of media growth
The shift to hybrid and unified systems marks a new way of working. To stay agile and competitive, teams need:
- Interoperability across systems, vendors, and locations
- Fast, accurate search and discovery
- Orchestration so workflows become faster, more automated, and more predictable
- Low-latency performance on-prem with cloud scale when needed
- AI enabled intelligence that enhances productivity and speeds delivery
Hybrid brings the flexibility. Unification brings the clarity. And AI brings the acceleration.
Media organizations that embrace all three will be best positioned to thrive in a landscape defined by rapid growth, distributed workflows, and rising audience expectations.
Get the complete State of Media Archiving Report to see how leaders are reshaping media operations.
