Media sector leads AI adoption in observability practices
New Relic has unveiled its State of Observability for Media and Entertainment report, highlighting the growing role of observability in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within the media and entertainment sector.
The report indicates that 35% of respondents are utilising observability to facilitate AI adoption.
According to New Relic's Chief Technology Strategist, Nic Benders, media and entertainment organisations rely heavily on observability to maintain seamless content streaming and audience engagement.
"They face the burden of maintaining perfect uptime and reliability to support positive viewing experiences amidst often convoluted and complicated tech stacks. The report's findings demonstrate they are steadily adopting AI as part of their observability practice and look to observability as a key enabler for more AI adoption. On top of that, their strategic investments in observability provide them with 4x ROI," Benders stated.
The report reveals that AI monitoring features prominently in the media and entertainment sector's observability strategies, with 60% of respondents employing this capability—the highest rate among surveyed industries.
Additionally, AI and containerisation are identified as core drivers for enhancing digital operations, reflecting the sector's focus on AI to improve decision-making, customer insights, and operational efficiencies.
In terms of observability improvement, 35% of media and entertainment respondents cite AI-assisted generation of runbooks as beneficial, while actions such as AI-assisted remediation (33%), automatic root cause analysis (32%), and forecasting and predictive analytics (32%) also play significant roles.
These findings show the industry's reliance on observability to ensure system speed, uptime, and reliability is huge.
The report highlights unique priorities within the sector, noting that organisations are 34% more likely to drive observability through containerisation of applications and workloads, and 23% more likely to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) technologies compared to other industries.
Despite these advancements, the media and entertainment industry shows a lag in detecting outages, with a 56-minute median mean-time-to-detection (MTTD), which is 51% higher than the median across other sectors. This delay occurs amidst frequent high-business-impact outages and the highest median hourly outage costs of USD $2.2 million per hour, posing significant challenges for the industry.
Simon Lee, New Relic Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Japan, observed the region's diverse media landscape and its rapid growth in digital content demand.
"Media and entertainment companies need a comprehensive view of the entire system in one platform to ensure uninterrupted, optimal user experiences, particularly when scaling to meet the demands of users during key events or moments," Lee said.
The sector is actively pursuing full-stack observability to connect IT performance data with business outcomes. However, only 20% of media and entertainment organisations have achieved this, highlighting the ongoing challenge of tech stack complexity, identified by 39% of respondents as a significant barrier.
Despite the preference of 56% for a single, integrated observability platform, only 27% have planned tool consolidation in the upcoming year, reflecting the lowest rate among industries.
