Next ’25 recap: Media and entertainment

AI takes the spotlight: How Google Cloud is revolutionizing media and entertainment

The energy was palpable at Google Cloud Next '25 in Las Vegas, and for the media and entertainment industry, the spotlight shone brightly on the transformative power of artificial intelligence. Conversations and sessions were packed with insights into how AI is empowering the industry and creatives to enhance content production and management, unlock the immense value of existing content, deliver audience personalization, and achieve new levels of enterprise productivity.

To supercharge these changes, Google Cloud is delivering cutting edge advancements including our new Ironwood TPUs optimized for inference; the latest generative AI media models—Veo, Imagen, Lyria, and Chirp—for creating stunning video, images, speech, and music; and Agentspace—powerful agents to seamlessly find, understand, and act on enterprise data.

The key takeaway was clear: AI is moving beyond experimentation into practical application, driving innovation and efficiency across the industry landscape. Here’s a glimpse into how AI's impact was showcased at Next '25:

Enhancing content production and management: The next generation of creation

AI is helping media organizations rethink what’s possible with content production and management. An example of this transformation is the collaboration between Sphere, the groundbreaking domed performance venue in Las Vegas, Magnopus, Google Cloud, and Google DeepMind. Together, they have enhanced the timeless classic, "The Wizard of Oz," for a new era by leveraging a specialized version of the Veo 2 video generation model to perform super resolution, outpainting, and performance generation to bring the beloved story to life on Sphere's unparalleled immersive canvas, revealing an experience on a scale that’s never seen before. 

Buzz Hays, Global Market Lead for Media and entertainment at Google Cloud and a producer with 37 years in Hollywood, points out that this “effectively brings the original characters and environments to life on a whole new canvas — creating an immersive entertainment experience that still respects the original in every way.”

Further emphasizing the cloud's pivotal role, Buzz hosted a conversation with Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony to discuss how cloud is more than infrastructure, and is becoming a true catalyst for content innovation. His session delved into how companies are harnessing cloud capabilities to streamline complex workflows, optimize production pipelines, and ultimately drive significant business outcomes. The focus is on smarter, faster, and more agile content production.

Unlocking the value of content: Intelligent discovery and management

The sheer volume of content in today's media and entertainment landscape presents both an opportunity and a challenge. Dailymotion, a major global video-sharing platform, faced this head-on. With a vast library exceeding 100 million videos, they sought a revolutionary search engine solution. Google Cloud is providing a solution specifically architected for multimedia content, leveraging advanced semantic understanding to help Dailymotion unlock the full value of its extensive catalog and enable users to discover content more effectively.

The United Daily News Group in Taiwan worked with Merkle to develop a new AI model using Vertex AI — creating and training an AI model in just eight months that extract keywords in UDN Group's online content for tagging, match content tags and ad categories, and generate target audiences. This delivered more accurate ad targeting, and increased clickthrough rate as much as four times in some categories.

Personalization at scale: engaging audiences like never before

In an era of almost limitless content choices, effective distribution and audience engagement are paramount. Anshul Kapoor, joined by representatives from Dailymotion and Globo, led a compelling discussion on how streaming is being disrupted by AI transformation. The session highlighted how companies are embracing cloud capabilities to transition from "traditional" media entities to "media-tech" and ultimately "media-AI" powerhouses. The goal? To maximize personalization and monetization through the next generation of AI-powered streaming experiences for audiences worldwide.

Globo, Latin America's largest media company, offered a powerful case study. By implementing an AI-driven recommendations experience within its streaming platform, Globo more than doubled its click-through-play rate on videos – a testament to the power of understanding and catering to individual viewer preferences.

Similarly, music streaming giant Spotify continues its partnership with Google Cloud to manage its massive scale cost-effectively using BigQuery. This collaboration allows Spotify to harness enormous datasets to deliver deeply personalized experiences to its over 675 million users globally. Furthermore, Gemini, Google's advanced AI model, played a role in supporting last year's custom "Wrapped" podcasts, a fan-favorite personalized experience.

Boosting enterprise productivity: AI for smarter operations

Beyond content and audience engagement, AI is also driving significant efficiencies within media and entertainment organizations across customer experience, data, and employee efficiency.

YouTube, for example, leveraged Google Cloud's Customer Engagement Suite to achieve a remarkable 75% reduction in calls abandoned while users waited to speak to a representative. 

Formula E developed its Driver Agent, an AI tool powered by Vertex AI and Gemini, designed to analyze extensive multimodal data generated during racing and provide actionable insights to drivers.

Even grassroots organizations are benefiting. Vertical Hoops, a youth basketball league, utilizes the summarizing power of Gemini in Gmail to communicate more effectively with coaches and parents. This allows founder Jason Shea to dedicate more time to what matters most – being on the court.

The future is now: AI-powered media and entertainment

Google Cloud Next '25 underscored that AI is becoming indispensable for media and entertainment. AI is not just an add-on but a core enabler for the future of the industry and creatives alike. From reimagining iconic stories on an unprecedented scale to delivering hyper-personalized audience experiences, and streamlining enterprise operations, Google Cloud's AI solutions are empowering the industry to innovate faster, operate smarter, and connect with audiences in more meaningful ways. 

In addition, Google Cloud works with thousands of trusted partners to help you move to, build, and work in the cloud. At Next, industry partners showcased their innovations, including Globant and Quickplay for developing creative shorts, Iron Mountain for modernizing content archives, and Gunpowder for orchestrating creative workflows. 

Google Cloud is committed to providing the media and entertainment industry with the cutting-edge tools, secure infrastructure, and collaborative partnerships needed to navigate this AI-driven transformation and unlock new frontiers in storytelling and entertainment.