In my last article, I explored the orchestration challenges facing modern media companies. We looked at how global workflows and fragmented toolchains are forcing publishers and broadcasters to rethink how they produce, localise, and distribute content at scale. Now, as I meet with partners and clients across the entertainment industry in New York, through meetings, studio visits, and events like the Monks happy hour, I am seeing the shift move further. What began as media transformation is rapidly becoming a full-scale restructuring of entertainment. And this time, the change is not coming from inside the studio walls. It is being shaped at the system level.
The world of entertainment used to be studio driven, rooted in the comfort of predictable, linear consumption. Now, it is being driven by behaviour, emotion and cultural dynamics that change by the hour. The old question: what are we producing is being replaced by a more urgent one: how are we adapting what we produce to real-time attention? That question is reshaping production cycles, marketing strategy, rights management, and even how executives evaluate ROI. The infrastructure of entertainment, not just the content itself, is being rebuilt.
Netflix creative scale as competitive edge
A recent case from Netflix highlights how different that infrastructure now looks. In their new Argentinian sci-fi series The Eternaut, Netflix used AI-powered VFX through Eyeline Studios to create a building collapse scene that would have been prohibitively expensive to film traditionally. According to Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, the sequence was delivered ten times faster and at a significantly lower cost. The results speak for themselves. In the same quarter, Netflix posted over 11 billion dollars in revenue, up 16% year over year. More than visual effects, this lesson is about how infrastructure enables creative scale. Netflix’s investment in real-time, AI-enhanced tools is allowing them to tell stories they otherwise could not afford and to do so with local teams producing globally resonant results. This infrastructure-first approach to creative scale is now spreading across the industry, but it requires new ways of measuring what actually works.
What MediaScience taught me about emotion
Understanding what works means measuring real human response. Last week I visited MediaScience’s lab in Manhattan, where they test content by measuring real human response eye movement, facial expression, electrodermal activity, and heart rate. Their research shows that attention is shaped in the first seconds and influenced by emotion, context, and platform. I watched how small creative choices – a change in music, a tighter edit – triggered measurable shifts in engagement. Studios are already using it to green-light projects, fine-tune trailers, and adjust platform recommendations. MediaScience found that adapting stories based on behavioural signals can boost viewer engagement by over 30%.
What struck me most is how context and psychophysiological data has become a strategic input. Rather than focusing solely on views or completion, the emphasis has shifted towards understanding and quantifying emotional context. MediaScience is measuring what the viewer feels, right now, and how content responds. This is the new layer of intelligence shaping how entertainment is made and delivered. Phillip Lomax, MediaScience EVP, explained that context is shaped by four pillars, Audiences, Platforms, Content, and Ad Formats, and how MediaScience has gathered significant intelligence across these subjects which have been leveraged by their clients at Disney, Comcast, Google, Amazon, Netflix and many others.
Why platforms like Tubi are winning
That emotional intelligence MediaScience measures is exactly what’s driving the fastest-growing platforms. During my meetings here in New York, it has become obvious that many of these platforms are not focused on subscribers alone. They are building ecosystems around engagement. Tubi, for example, recently surpassed 100 million monthly active users, with over a billion hours of content watched in a single month. These are ad-supported businesses with no subscription revenue. Instead of payment, their metric of success is attention, relevance and repeat engagement. And they are winning by making their AI-enabled infrastructure flexible enough to adapt to viewer behaviour in real time. That adaptability is increasingly powered by AI systems that interpret how, when, and why people engage.
In this new wave of entertainment, the real competition isn’t just between streamers, it’s between formats. Premium, paid experiences on one side; free, algorithm-driven discovery on the other. And the future likely sits somewhere in between. The next generation of platforms is betting on frictionless, culturally-tuned content that feels as easy and diverse as scrolling TikTok, while still delivering the narrative pull of long-form entertainment. There’s also a shift in mindset: from producing more to producing what connects. Experiments are becoming institutional like studios that green-light based on fan input, or libraries that blend creator-led stories with licensed hits. What’s emerging is a new hybrid model where the old Hollywood playbook is rewritten for a leaner, faster, more emotionally aware viewer economy.
Studios focus on convergence, not channels
That same mindset is shaping strategy at the studio level. With linear viewership down and theatrical releases under pressure, the big players are thinking convergence. Disney is in the final stages of consolidating its operations across Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ into a single unified offering making Disney+ its one-stop shop in streaming. The same time Netflix is investing heavily in music with reports of deeper partnerships spanning video, music, and live events. The experience is now the differentiator. And experiences require infrastructure that can handle rights, regionalisation, creative variation, billing, and measurement all in one real-time loop.
Fox moves toward one spine
FOX is also embracing both ends of the format spectrum. On one side is Tubi, their ad-supported platform built for scale and discovery. On the other is FOX One, a premium, subscription-based service launching August 21. Meanwhile, their internal OneFOX initiative unifies content, advertising, and metadata into a single infrastructure layer. When companies of this size start operating from a single spine, it changes not just internal speed. It changes what becomes possible for audiences and advertisers alike. Together, these moves reflect FOX’s twin approach to market: accessible at scale, integrated at depth.
When AI orchestration works
Yet most companies remain stuck in what I call the pilot trap. They are experimenting with artificial intelligence tools here and there, layering plugins or point solutions into isolated workflows. But they are not integrating. They are not feeding data back into their systems. And as a result, they are not scaling. True orchestration does not come from tool trials. It comes from connected systems that allow real-time response to audience behaviour, creative feedback loops, and operational decision-making.
You can see what this looks like when it works. In June, Netflix released the animated film KPop Demon Hunters. The movie was watched over one hundred thirty million times within weeks, and its soundtrack dominated the charts across the United States and Asia. Fan art began circulating within days. Cosplay, TikTok remixes, and micro-fandoms exploded globally. What made the real difference was the way AI models tracked and adapted in real time to audience engagement, shaping marketing and creative simultaneously. Much of that responsiveness came from AI models tracking sentiment and engagement signals across platforms.
From creative execution to strategic infrastructure
These successes are forcing teams across the industry to ask serious questions. How do we adapt narratives across cultures without reshooting entire scenes? How do we automate marketing assets in multiple languages within hours? How do we ensure our rights logic and licensing structures do not become bottlenecks to creative agility? These strategic questions are the ones shaping who moves forward and who gets left behind.
What the Paramount-Skydance deal reveals
The newly sealed merger between Paramount and Skydance confirms precisely this shift. It brings together Hollywood legacy and Silicon Valley agility, creating a powerhouse built for an AI-shaped era where flexibility and infrastructure matter as much as storytelling. Editorial integrity, platform integration, and operational scalability are now board-level priorities. For the industry, it indicates a new phase – one where collaboration is creative and systemic.
Programming for cultural moments
During one of my conversations this week, an executive said something that stuck with me. He said, we are no longer in the business of programming for time slots. We are programming for cultural moments. That line captures exactly where entertainment is heading. The winners will not be those who simply produce more content. It will be those who can connect that content to emotion, context, and culture – fast, at scale, and across borders.
Whether it’s a media agency like Havas aligning production and performance, or a contextual tech company like GumGum measuring attention with AI-powered contextual signals, the lines between storytelling, infrastructure, and intelligence are blurring fast.
Entertainment’s new operating system
Across all of these examples from Netflix’s AI-powered production to Tubi’s adaptive engagement engine and GumGum’s contextual intelligence, a new layer of AI infrastructure is quietly becoming the foundation of modern entertainment. It’s not just content being transformed, but the entire operating system behind it: one powered by intelligent agents, audience signals, and dynamic orchestration.
I am seeing this first hand across every conversation I am having now in New York. Whether I am speaking with creative studios, rights managers, marketing leaders, or platform heads, the same trend keeps emerging. The entertainment industry is undergoing a complete restructure. The systems behind the scenes, the tools, workflows, orchestration engines, and attention models, are now what make or break success.
It is no longer enough to have good content. You need good systems. You need the ability to operate across markets, adapt in real time, personalise without compromising quality, and measure value not just in views but in cultural impact. The companies that build this AI-native infrastructure now will not only lead in entertainment. They will define how entertainment itself is experienced in the years to come.
