Boost viewer engagement with content management innovation

The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is transforming rapidly with evolving platforms, viewer habits, and device proliferation, creating immense pressure to innovate. To stay competitive, M&E leaders must invest in cost-effective solutions that streamline intricate workflows and enable immersive formats. By doing so, they can unlock the potential to deliver high-quality, customized experiences and connect with audiences worldwide.

I recently led a webinar on how to boost viewer engagement using content management innovation. The webinar highlighted real-world success stories and practical advice for approaching key challenges. Brandon Omohundro, Vice President – Digital Operations at Gray Media Group, shared how Gray Television accelerated content creation, boosting their engagement and ad revenue opportunities. This post highlights important lessons from three real-world examples including Gray Television’s transformation and the trends and challenges shaping the M&E direct-to-consumer landscape.

The M&E direct-to-consumer landscape

The media and entertainment industry continues to modernize content platforms to address key business objectives in a competitive market. Innovation will help the industry overcome challenges like data silos, legacy systems, device proliferation, and fragmented audience data (Nielson). Expanding audience diversity seeks inclusive content. Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends survey found that nearly 70 percent of respondents enjoy shows exploring new cultures and expect real-world racial and physical diversity. Connecting with global audiences also presents distribution complexities that require scalable, secure localization solutions.

According to our Forrester commissioned study, M&E leaders will seek ways to improve customer experience and differentiate from competition:

• 56 percent expect to adopt or expand their cloud marketplace for production innovation (Forrester).
• Content creators will provide more inclusive and localized content to meet diverse audience needs.
• Firms will increase cloud solution investments, with 1 in 3 users increasing current investment by over 10 percent (Forrester).
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will drive transformation in content creation, distribution, metadata, and discoverability.

Real-world examples

The webinar showcased customers who overcame M&E challenges using groundbreaking solutions to enhance viewer interaction and streamline content management.

Fox’s live-stream analytics ensures quality customer experience

Fox faced the challenge of ensuring a flawless and high-quality viewer experience across devices and regions for Super Bowl 54. To address this, they collaborated with Mux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and their livestreaming technology stack to rehearse potential chaos scenarios and leverage real-time data.

The solution involved monitoring color space, audio, captions, and video quality using data from AWS and Mux. This approach provided benefits such as isolating delivery errors, gaining visibility into network-level metrics, and optimizing video performance across devices and geographies.

As a result, Fox achieved one of the most successful streams to date, with Mux helping catch issues in real-time for rapid mitigation.

Vercel boosts visibility with native optimizations

Plex, a 24/7 TV platform with live and on-demand content, faced the challenge of creating a unified foundation for their web experiences. Their existing deployment on Kubernetes scaling clusters met performance requirements but led to wasted resources and suboptimal developer experience.

To address this, Plex refactored their site to Next.js on Vercel, using native optimizations such as Server-side Rendering (SSR), Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), and Edge Middleware. The solution decreased their code base by 40 percent, enabling faster feature development and improved developer experience. Plex also utilized hybrid rendering, personalization through Edge Middleware, and integrations like Checkly and Axiom for confident shipping and faster data propagation.

The benefits included less configuration, enabling more product development, improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through SSR, and the ability to serve different content based on geographical availability. As a result, Plex achieved faster page load times, increased traffic, and improved search engine rankings, delivering a better end-user experience.

Gray Television rapidly scales to 200 sites with Arc XP’s flexible CMS

Gray Television, which owns stations in 113 US markets, faced the challenge of effectively using content and video across their entire network. They needed a content management system (CMS) partner to help them achieve their goals of increasing video views and sharing content nationally.

Gray Television implemented ARC XP across all 200 sites, utilizing tools like Composer, Video Center, Photo Center, Page Builder, and Themes. The solution allowed Gray to curate and distribute content from local markets and their central content team across the entire network. They also implemented autoplay for video playlists to boost engagement.

As a result, 5–10 percent of traffic on each site now comes from stories generated outside that market. Gray Television successfully onboarded and migrated sites to ARC XP over two years, and continues to build new lifestyle, secondary, and Spanish-language sites. The platform’s micro-experiences feature enables them to redesign sites in phases for a more efficient rollout.

Conclusion

Engaging and retaining viewers requires continuous innovation. A modern content platform is essential for delivering exceptional, targeted experiences across devices and regions. With the right tools and an agile approach, M&E leaders can efficiently produce and distribute the diverse and compelling content that audiences desire.

About AWS Marketplace and next steps

How can you find partners who can help improve your content management innovation and boost your viewer engagement? AWS Marketplace has solutions like Arc XP, Mux, and Vercel that unlock innovation and address the needs of M&E organizations across the globe.

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, services, and data. It offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption, contract models, and streamlined procurement and billing operations. Over 330,000 organizations, large and small, use AWS Marketplace monthly to accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiencies across their enterprises.

Research from Forrester estimates it takes half the time to find, buy, and deploy solutions through AWS Marketplace compared to other channels.

Visit Media & Entertainment Solutions in AWS Marketplace to learn more about M&E cloud solutions available in AWS Marketplace.

View Boost viewer engagement with content production innovation to learn more about the topics discussed in this post, including an insightful Q&A session.

About the author

Marcos Stupenengo is the Global M&E Partner Lead at AWS. In his current role, he is responsible for driving strategic partnerships in digital publishing and news. His mission is to help organizations with their digital ventures and their international operations around the globe. Marcos has an extensive media background which includes executive roles at Disney, Google, Infobae, and editorial positions at Fox International Television and CNN.