By Chris Saito, Chief Commercial Officer, Vubiquity
2025 was a bruising year for many across media and entertainment. Budgets were slashed, teams were cut, and many companies were unsure of the next move. However, unlike most market dips, the fundamental driver of our industry did not change. Content. Audiences want more of it. More content on more platforms. More content in more languages. More content in more forms.
Somewhere in this demand for “more” lies the opportunity.
To seize this opportunity, 2026 will require media companies to do more than incremental improvements at the edges. We must rethink how content is prepared, localized, distributed, and monetized. This is a shift that cannot be powered by technology alone. It requires people who know how the industry really works, so we can transform inefficient media supply chains into intelligent operations, allowing us to do the “more” with less.
From Analog to Digital to Automation to Intelligence
Reshaping the landscape once again is consolidation across studios and vendors. At the same time, AI has moved from POC to efficiency driver. Economics are tight and every operational decision now has a financial implication. We have reached yet another tipping point, and like previous transformations, the industry must lean into tech not by choice, but to remain efficient, competitive, and relevant.
We’ve lived through two major transformations already. The first was the shift from physical to digital, a period when we replaced tapes with files but largely mimicked the analog world. Digital tools emerged, costs came down, but workflows remained familiar.
The second transformation came with the rise of streaming. Global platforms removed restraints of linear and demand skyrocketed. Localization scaled to dozens of languages at once, and somewhere along the way, remote collaboration became the norm. It is here where the media supply chain strained under the volume and complexity. It is here we began to “automate” our workflows.
We must embrace smarter automation through intelligent technology and human oversight.
The past few years have been dominated by automation. Automated QC checks, subtitles, and scripts that move orders from one step to the next. But automation alone doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. You can automate ten different tasks and still have no real insight into which titles to prioritize, which territories offer the best return, or which distribution blockers are about to derail a launch. Companies can streamline a process yet still lack the business insight that will enable better efficiency and better returns.
In 2026, the shift is from automation to intelligence. Intelligent operations give media companies the ability to make decisions before bottlenecks appear. They enable predictive insights into demand. They make rights, metadata, and operational readiness visible in one place. They turn content prep into a proactive exercise rather than a scramble. In every conversation I’m having, studios are being asked to deliver the same volume, or more, with fewer people. That reality is pushing the industry toward operational intelligence because nothing else can close the gap.
IP Intelligence
This is where catalog intelligence around your IP emerges as a true competitive advantage. Many studios don’t have easy access and/or a unified view of their libraries. Assets are often spread across systems with inconsistent or missing Metadata. Institutional knowledge disappears with each wave of restructuring. Rights, localization status, and distribution readiness live in silos.
Catalog Intelligence changes that. Vubiquity has spent the last two years developing this intelligence for our customers. The best way to describe our technology innovation is as an AI-powered media search engine. You can type a question and see every relevant result, just like you would with ChatGPT. A studio should be able to search a title, a language, or a region and instantly know what exists, what’s missing, what’s ready, and what could be generating revenue. Today, many teams are still relying on spreadsheets and manual digging to answer even basic questions. Vubiquity’s Catalogue Intelligence lets you surface underutilized titles, reveal new windows, highlight localization gaps, and prevent distribution failures before they occur. It turns a disparate, opaque archive into a measurable revenue engine.
It maximizes the full potential of your IP so you can meet the demand “more”. It is where the opportunity lies for 2026.
Human Oversight – Always
For all the power of AI and data, the human element matters more than ever. Media workflows require cultural understanding, creative judgment, editorial oversight, and nuance, particularly in localization. If you apply AI without the right expertise, you can amplify the mess instead of solving it. Technology accelerates the work, but people ensure it’s done correctly.
At Vubiquity, our global managed services teams deliver that expertise every day. Increasingly, studios are turning to us as their outsourced operations partner, asking us to take on the risk, the staffing, and the complexity so they can stay focused on creative and strategic priorities.
Tech Forward Media Companies
As the industry moves into 2026, the frontrunners will be those who fully leverage intelligence and human expertise to create entertainment. They will be driven by data, powered by AI, and grounded in human experience.
Vubiquity’s vision for 2026 is to be the partner that bridges these worlds. Backed by Amdocs, with deep AI experience and global scale, we are building an ecosystem of intelligent tools, starting with Catalog Intelligence, that strengthen our managed services. We are investing in the people, processes, and platforms that help our customers make smarter decisions. And most importantly – deliver more content to more platforms in more languages and formats with greater speed, quality, and confidence.