New Relic Report Reveals Media and Entertainment Sector Looks to Observability to Drive Adoption of AI

New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, published its State of Observability for Media and Entertainment report, which offers insights into the adoption and business value of observability for the media and entertainment industry. The report, based on insights from media and entertainment professionals surveyed as part of New Relic’s 2024 Observability Forecast, illustrates that AI is core to their observability practices, with 35% of respondents reporting that AI adoption is a core driver of observability.

“Media and entertainment organizations rely on observability to keep content streaming and audiences engaged,” said New Relic Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders. “They face the burden of maintaining perfect uptime and reliability to support positive viewing experiences amidst often convoluted and complicated tech stacks. 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.”

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AI and containerization are core drivers for observability and improve digital operations

AI adoption was the second-highest technology strategy driving observability adoption, with 35% of media and entertainment respondents indicating this was the case. This trend reflects the sector’s commitment to leveraging AI for enhanced decision-making, customer insights, and operational efficiencies. 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 organization’s observability practice most, followed by AI-assisted remediation actions like rollbacks or configuration updates (33%), automatic root cause analysis (32%), and forecasting and predictive analytics (32%). Furthermore, 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. Organizations are 34% more likely to cite containerization of applications and workloads as a key driver for observability adoption (30% compared to 23% overall and the second highest of all industries) and were 23% more likely to say that adopting IoT technologies was a catalyst for observability adoption (33% versus 27% overall).

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Media and entertainment lags other sectors in detecting outages

Outages can devastate these organizations’ 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. As the media and entertainment industry has the most high-business-impact outages occurring each week (63% compared to the 38% industry average) and the highest median hourly outage cost across all industries ($2.2 million per hour), observability investments should focus on improvements to bring incident response efficiency closer to the industry average.

A single, consolidated observability platform connects IT performance data to business outcomes

In a push to enhance operational efficiency and drive business value, media and entertainment organizations are aiming to achieve full-stack observability. While only 20% of organizations have reached this milestone, lower than the 25% rate overall, the sector is making strategic strides to overcome barriers like tech stack complexity, which 39% identified as the major hurdle.

As media and entertainment organizations prioritize their observability strategies, the focus is on selecting platforms that offer comprehensive capabilities, affordability, and real-time linkage of business outcomes to telemetry data. An overwhelming 56% favor a single, integrated observability platform, but just 27% planned to consolidate tools in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend — the lowest of all industries.