Is this Media’s Web Inflection Point?

For over a decade, the media industry has envisioned a seamless cost effective and efficient cloud-powered future. A world where content flows effortlessly from the lens of production cameras to the audience’s screens without delays, duplication, and inefficiencies.

At NAB and IBC we’ve all seen glimpses of this future in showcase workflows, teasing us with the potential. But media nirvana has remained just out of reach.

Despite seismic advances in cloud storage, web technology, broadband internet coverage, distributed compute power, and now AI, if we’re honest media workflows have largely failed to take full advantage of these innovations.?

Production teams still wrestle with data. Post-production still relies on moving, duplicating and reformatting files. Distribution is still bogged down by static exports tailored for each platform, region, or device.

This is not a failure of technology infrastructure. It is a failure of the media industry’s architecture. The cloud has been ready for years. This issue has been integrating it seamlessly into existing media technology ecosystems.

Now we have a way forward.?

A Media-Aware Architecture Changes Everything

Other industries handling large-scale digital data have already undergone a fundamental shift to real-time, software-defined workflows. Financial markets move trillions of dollars in transactions without ever "copying" a file. E-commerce platforms dynamically assemble personalised content without exporting static inventory versions. The web itself scales to serve billions of users in real time, often personalized.

Meanwhile, media workflows remain trapped in an outdated mindset. The logic of film reels and tape machines, where content was physically moved between stages, has been transplanted into the digital era. The result? Files must still be duplicated, transcoded, manually transferred, and tracked.

These aren’t technological necessities. They are legacy inefficiencies. The failure to move past file-based workflows is not just a technical issue; it’s a financial and strategic one. Every hour spent transcoding is an hour lost to creative work. Every gigabyte duplicated is wasted storage cost and an increased security risk. Every delayed localization process is lost revenue.

For too long, media executives have accepted these inefficiencies and security risks as the cost of doing business.

They no longer have to.

The Breakthrough: A Media-Aware API Architecture

The current shift is not about moving legacy processes into the cloud. It is about replacing them entirely with a web-native approach.?

At Media-Anywhere, we identified two critical barriers to cloud-based media production and distribution:

1. Instant access to cloud storage. In Real-time. Traditional file transfer models are inefficient for cloud-native operations. Media files are large and complex, making real-time workflows impossible without a way to reference and manipulate media instantly from object-based storage (e.g., AWS S3). We’ve solved this; our approach eliminates the need for downloads, proxy generation, proprietary file formats, file transfers, and ingest processes. Media archives can remain in their original format - no proprietary virtual file system or file format required.
2. Integration with existing tools. Editors, colorists, VFX artists, and QC professionals rely on broadcast industry-standard applications like Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and many more popular tools not originally designed for cloud-native workflows. Many companies have significant investments in these systems. Our solution; we embed our web technology into these legacy tools and Media Asset Management (MAM) systems, enabling them to function within a modern, media-aware cloud architecture.

With AirFrame, we are solving these challenges, delivering a real-time, cloud-native workflow for Live, Near Live, and Archive content.

AirFrame: Every Frame On Demand

AirFrame is more than a product; it is our first solution for a media-aware architecture. A real-time essence layer that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, accessible from within familiar tools.

As I write this we are preparing to publish our APIs, to enable partners to build media processing nodes that unlock unprecedented automation and efficiency. Unlike virtual file systems that stream raw bits and bytes without context, our architecture understands that it’s handling media—frames of video, sequences of audio—not just generic files.

This fundamental difference enables real-time, on-the-fly processing frame by frame. Future processing nodes will dynamically transcode, enhance, localize, transform and analyze content on-the-fly as it streams, eliminating the inefficiencies of static file-based operations.

From Camera Lens to Audience: Media Finally Moves Differently

We are now entering an era where media companies can design workflows that process content in real time instead of relying on rigid file-based infrastructure. The entire media pipeline - from capture to consumer - is in scope.

Production: Instant Access

• Cameras no longer need to offload media onto physical storage. Footage is streamed directly to the cloud in real time, and captured media is immediately accessible for editing with only frames of latency.

Post-Production: Ingest once, Processing on Demand

• The traditional bottlenecks of transcoding, proxy creation, and versioning are disappearing.
• The AirFrame approach eliminates redundant workflows, allowing automated processes such as color grading, VFX renders etc, to happen dynamically.
• Generative AI is being integrated into the editorial process, assembling rough cuts, and generating localization assets in real time.

Distribution: Mass Personalization at Scale

• The static concept of a “final master” is becoming obsolete. Instead of creating multiple versions of content for different platforms, media companies can now publish dynamically.
• Real-time formatting, subtitling, and localization enable a single master asset to be delivered in dozens of variations, without costly duplication.?
• Even advertising is evolving: virtual billboards in live sports broadcasts can now be personalized for each viewer, with real-time rendering replacing static ad placements.

Every one of these workflows can be developed with our API. The ambitious visions outlined by MovieLabs, and other industry thought leaders are now being realized.

Value Creation: The Real Case for Change

The economic impact of this shift will be transformative. Efficiency gains alone will fundamentally restructure production economics:

• The cost of storing, duplicating, and transferring unnecessary files will be eliminated.
• Editorial and finishing workflows will be dramatically accelerated. (Imagine never waiting a second for the media!).
• The cost of physical locations, with on-premise staff and capex systems is reduced.
• And new revenue streams will be unlocked through real-time versioning, localization, and audience-specific features and services.

Once you see it, and start to reimagine your workflows and rethink business models, the implications are clear. This is not about marginal cost savings or incremental process improvements. This is about a wholesale transformation of how content is created, distributed, and monetized.

The industry has been here before. The transition from analog to digital, from film to file-based production, from SD to HD, from linear broadcast to on demand streaming. Each of these shifts brought challenges and opportunities alike - I’ve the scars to prove it.

This time, the infrastructure has been ready for years. We’ve all seen glimpses of its potential.?

Now the architecture to fully leverage it is ready too. And it all starts with a single frame.

Peter Bruggink, CEO Media-Anywhere