The Stalled Cloud Transition in the Global Media Industry

This is the third of a series of articles that discuss select findings from Devoncroft’s 2025 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), the largest annual global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands.

The transition to cloud in the global media industry has been called inevitable, has been labeled as a fundamental disruptor to media workflows, and has been described as promising salvation to the media technology industry; and all by the author of this post – often in a single presentation on the subject.

But you can’t choose when to be data-driven. The 2025 BBS is yet another data point of confirmation that the transition to cloud is stalled in the global media industry.

Background on Tracking Technology Adoption of Professional Media Technologies

While a small consideration should be given to stated intent, the primary predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

A great proxy for past behavior for the media industry’s adoption of new technologies are the precedent transitions of high definition (“HD”) and file-based (“file-based”) workflows. Both are instructive as they are indicative of the pace of adoption of new technologies, which directly accounts for the widely divergent motivations across geographies and organization types, and the idiosyncrasies of customer budgets and investment cycles.

Using the measures available for earlier iterations of the BBS (every year since 2009), and leaning more on file-based than HD, Devoncroft developed an anticipated adoption curve for cloud. Each year we would use the latest tracking from the BBS and direct feedback from industry executives to refine the model. This approach enables us to approximate the industry’s adoption of cloud at a use case, customer types, and ultimately aggregate level. It was a yearly activity, conducted diligently for more than a decade.

The State of Cloud Adoption in Media Industry

All of the above is prelude for the below chart. It visualizes the state of public cloud adoption in the global media industry (across use cases, customer types) in late 2023. The takeaway was the media industry was approaching the peak levels of year-over-year cloud adoption – and spend follows adoption as night follows day.

Using the language of business school, early adopters had validated cloud for media operations, both technically and financially, and the early majority of customers and use cases were accelerating their respective adoption.

The anticipated progression in 2024 and 2025 didn’t happen. Tracking of cloud adoption in the 2025 BBS is within the margin of error as the level recorded in 2023.

Possible Explanation for Stalled Adoption of Cloud

The cloud transition ran out of early adopters and ran into more challenging use cases, both in technical terms and – as important – business case terms. Early adopters of cloud had some combination of comparatively easier (technical) use cases, low levels of technical debt, and lots of resources in the form of budgets and developers.

Enter organizations with different budget and resource circumstances. Enter more challenging use cases like high-end live production.

Technology sourcing considerations have always varied wildly across geographies, use cases, and funding models. Buyer opinions are especially divergent when confronting the question of cloud.

For example, when asked to rank the considerations most important to migrating operations to the cloud, an equal percentage of 2024 BBS respondents ranked ‘Comprehensive Understanding of Costs’ the most important as ranked it the least important.

Advancing Cloud Adoption Requires Advancing the Industry Discussion

Moving media operations to the cloud has never been the finish line. Yet even while the industry progressed in cloud adoption in the early 2020s, the industry discussion really did not. Technical discussion about how to move media operations to the cloud evolved into additional technical discussion about how to move media operations to the cloud.

Sky is one of the most advanced global media groups in its adoption of the public cloud. It is instructive to note how they have discussed their cloud journey.

At this past AWS re:Invent, one of the most effective spokespersons for the cloud, David Travis, Group Director of Content, Broadcast & Platforms at Sky, presented an update on how Sky is enhancing sports experiences with automation and generative AI – a topical discussion.

While speaking to the below, fascinating slide, Travis made several notable points about how Sky is using data – from its cloud environment – to continue to transform its operations.

“Using data we have been transforming the way we operate. And what we’ve been trying to do is push our different workflows up towards the upper quadrant that you see here around smart operations. We’ve got different levels of success there, but it’s definitely taking us on that journey to exception-based monitoring, to using data to understand our workloads, using data to actually even look at things like total cost of ownership. Without that data at the core, it’s very hard to make the argument around the transformation.”

It is as true for Sky as for the broader media industry.

Strained analogies, simulators at tradeshows, and networking events all have their place, but they aren’t going to help technology groups understand costs in cloud environments and convince business decision-makers of the larger benefits. New disciplines, new conversations, grounded in data are needed.

Join us at the Devoncroft Executive Summit | Amsterdam

We hope you will join us at the upcoming Devoncroft Executive Summit | Amsterdam. As part of the agenda, we are assembling a panel of experts on the emerging discipline of FinOps including from the Sky team. Even the most cynical perspectives on cloud will benefit from hearing the how, the why, and the benefit of the structured approach to understanding costs and business value in media operations.

Looking forward to the panel. Looking forward to the feedback.

The information in this article is based on select findings from the 2025 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands. Several thousand media professionals in 100+ countries took part in the 2025 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever conducted in the broadcast and media industry. The BBS is published annually by Devoncroft Partners.

Granular analysis of these results is available as part of various paid-for reports based on the 2025 BBS data set. For more information about this report, please contact Devoncroft Partners.

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