Living the stream: The infrastructure behind the next media revolution

The media world isn’t just shifting, it’s splintering, reforming, and accelerating in every direction at once. Streaming has redefined how content is made, delivered, and monetized. But behind the headlines about Netflix, YouTube, and the fall of cable lies a bigger story: the infrastructure race. At NetApp, we’re not in the business of creating content. But we are powering the ecosystems that deliver it — from the edit bay to the edge, from AI pipelines to advertising platforms. The future of streaming will be won not just by who creates the content, but by who can move, store, and protect it at scale. 

First, Netflix broke Hollywood’s studio model by using software, scale, and smart infrastructure. Now YouTube is outpacing Netflix, not just in eyeballs but in economics. It pays creators instead of producing its own content, uses Google Cloud’s backbone for distribution, and relies on its algorithms to surface what people want to watch. 

This is where infrastructure is strategic. When storage, compute, and data services are abstracted and optimized, media companies can: 

• Scale globally without building data centers 

• Serve content across formats and geographies in real time 

• Automate ingest, processing, and delivery 

• Monetize data through insights and AI  

We help make that possible, through NetApp® ONTAP®, StorageGRID, FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and BlueXP™ AI Data Services.

Generative AI is disrupting and transforming how media is created, processed, and delivered. From automated editing and localization to synthetic content and intelligent asset management, AI is deeply embedded throughout the production pipeline.   

To support this shift, media organizations need infrastructure that can handle large-scale, data-intensive AI workloads: 

• Scalable storage to support rapid growth in training data and model output 

• Integrated data pipelines to automate ingestion, labeling, and content organization 

• Seamless cloud workflows to give AI teams fast, reliable access to compute and storage 
• Performance and reliability to ensure uninterrupted collaboration across creative and technical teams 

NetApp enables studios and platforms to move faster with AI, building flexible environments that meet the demands of today’s tools and tomorrow’s breakthroughs. 

Streaming economics are brutal. Content is expensive. Churn is high. Ad revenue is concentrated among a few platforms. Media companies need new levers, and efficient infrastructure is one of those levers. 

Hybrid and multicloud architectures enable you to: 

• Burst into the cloud for peak demand without overbuilding 
• Tier archive data automatically to lower-cost object storage 
• Repurpose live sports content across platforms, instantly 
• Use real-time analytics to personalize streams and reduce churn 

  As media companies pivot to bundles, ad-supported models, and spinoffs, they’re also rethinking the backbone that supports it all, consolidating infrastructure, modernizing workflows, and tightening control over spending. 

As streaming fragments further, we’re entering a world of hyper-personalized, on-demand everything. Viewers are no longer tied to schedules or devices. That puts pressure on infrastructure to be: 

• Always on 
• Geographically distributed 
• API-driven and automated 
• Cost aware yet performance guaranteed   

NetApp media and entertainment solutions help customers navigate this fragmentation. Whether you're distributing live sports to millions, running AI tools on massive video libraries, or bundling content across multiple platforms, we can help you to make sure that your data is in the right place at the right time. 

Streaming isn’t just a content story. It’s a data story. It's about delivering massive files, globally, instantly, and reliably. It's about enabling creators, platforms, and AI to work at the speed of culture. As platforms battle for attention and creators compete with algorithms, NetApp is building the foundation for what comes next, because behind every binge-worthy show, viral video, or live stream is an infrastructure stack that makes it possible.

Modern media workflows demand more than fast storage; they require intelligent infrastructure that adapts to the needs of creators, platforms, and audiences in real time. The NetApp intelligent data infrastructure gives studios, broadcasters, and streaming platforms the tools to manage content at scale, improve collaboration, and unlock new revenue from data. 

Here’s how the NetApp intelligent data infrastructure helps you: 

• Unified data management. Manage assets across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments with a single control plane. No silos. No bottlenecks. 
• Built-in automation and AI integration. Automatically tier, classify, and protect media assets, while supporting AI-driven tools for tagging, localization, and content discovery. 
• Always-on performance. Deliver predictable, low-latency access to high-resolution media, even during peak demand or collaborative postproduction workflows. 
• End-to-end protection. Keep content secure with integrated ransomware protection, versioning, and compliance-ready backups — without slowing down performance. 
• Cloud flexibility. Seamlessly extend production and archive workflows into Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud with services like Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. 

With NetApp, media organizations don’t just store data, they make it work smarter. Whether you’re producing feature films, running a global streaming service, or building AI-powered workflows, NetApp helps you move faster, reduce costs, and protect what matters most. 

Whether you're scaling your streaming platform, adopting AI for content creation, or modernizing legacy workflows, NetApp can help. Our media experts work with top studios, streamers, and platforms to design infrastructure that’s ready for the next disruption, and the one after that. Talk to our Media & Entertainment team to explore how NetApp can support your content, your data, and your growth. 

Contact us today or visit netapp.com/media-entertainment/ to learn more.