Artificial intelligence is core to their observability practices, with 35% of IT decision makers in the media and entertainment industry across 16 markets saying that AI adoption is a core driver of observability, according to a report from New Relic.
The report is based on a survey fielded in April to May 2024. There were 70 respondents from the media and entertainment industry, representing 5% of total respondents.
Nic Benders, chief technical strategist at New Relic, said media and entertainment organisations rely on observability to keep content streaming and audiences engaged.
“They face the burden of maintaining perfect uptime and reliability to support positive viewing experiences amidst often convoluted and complicated tech stacks,” said Benders.
He said 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,” said Benders.
Simon Lee, New Relic SVP and managing director of Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the region is set to witness continued rapid growth as consumers demand high-quality digital content
“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,” said Lee.
AI adoption was the second-highest technology strategy driving observability adoption, with 35% of media and entertainment respondents indicating this was the case.
In addition to AI, security, governance, risk and compliance (39%), migration to a multi-cloud environment (35%) and the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies (33%) are pivotal strategies shaping the observability landscape.
In terms of how AI can support observability adoption, more than a third (35%) of respondents believe the AI-assisted generation of runbooks would improve their organisation’s observability practice most.
This was followed by AI-assisted remediation actions like rollbacks or configuration updates (33%), automatic root cause analysis (32%), and forecasting and predictive analytics (32%).
Further, the media and entertainment industries adopted AI monitoring (60%) at the highest rate among all other industries, highlighting their need to rely on observability to ensure speed, uptime, and reliability.
Compared to all other sectors surveyed, the media and entertainment industry has unique technology adoption priorities.
Organisations are 34% more likely to cite containerisation of applications and workloads as a key driver for observability adoption (30% compared to 23% overall and the second highest of all industries). They were 23% more likely to say that adopting IoT technologies was a catalyst for observability adoption (33% versus 27% overall).
Outages can devastate these organisations’ brand reputation, especially during peak streaming periods like major sporting events or high-budget show premieres. Beyond brand reputation, downtime can cost these providers millions of dollars.
However, only 43% of those surveyed rely on observability tools to unearth software and system interruptions, instead relying on incident tickets and manual methods for detecting and resolving problems.
Consequently, media and entertainment companies lag behind other sectors in addressing outages, with a median mean-time-to-detection (MTTD) of 56 minutes, 51% higher than the median and the highest of any industry.
