AWS for M&E Blog
Accelerating creative workflows with the AWS Creative Innovation Hub in London
A phrase often heard in the media industry is: We’ve always done it this way. As an industry, we need fresh ideas and new approaches to keep pace with with rapid technological change and evolving audience demand for content at unprecedented scale and speed.
As Amazon Web Services (AWS) specialists working with creative businesses, we spend much of our time talking to customers about moving their creative workflows into the cloud. The value and benefits of this shift can be hard to quantify for three main reasons: technology gaps, commercial considerations, and cultural blockers.
The media industry is transforming; $210 billion was invested in content in 2024 and this number looks set to increase. However, high-budget films and TV series are now competing with user-generated content and the creator economy for commissions. Content owners are diversifying their investment strategy. The net result is that budgets are shrinking, and media organizations are becoming increasingly familiar with the feeling of needing to do more with less.
As such, the return on investment regarding moving creative work into the cloud is often misunderstood. Will the cloud perform as well as an on-premises workflow? Where are the production efficiencies? How will creative teams adapt and re-skill?
Meanwhile, technology from film, TV, social media, sports, and games is converging. The way we create and consume content has changed. How can we keep up with the leading edge of cloud-powered creative workflows? What role will AI play in supporting and augmenting creative processes?
Quite often in these conversations, words are not enough. We must quantify the value that the cloud brings to these creative workflows and shift the mindset from we’ve always done it this way, to we can do it like this.
We bring the cloud to life. Seeing is believing.
Announcing the AWS Creative Innovation Hub
AWS is launching the Creative Innovation Hub in London. This interactive space brings together technologists, creatives, and production teams. It provides hands-on access to creative tools running on AWS, with a focus on real-world, tangible examples of how the cloud is supporting industry transformation today and shaping the workflows of tomorrow.
Explore how AI can support your workflows and remove the heavy lifting of content creation, leaving creative teams free to innovate and do what they do best. We’ll also provide examples of AI acting as a creative tool, and agentic workflows that can assimilate business logic and act on it without manual intervention.
These are professional broadcast and post production suites where creatives will instantly feel at home. The main difference? There’s no equipment room with racks of gear continuously humming, it is all in the cloud, ready to be deployed on demand.
Open to all and supported by industry-specific offerings from the AWS Partner Network, the Creative Innovation Hub showcases how cloud technology is transforming creative workflows. It demonstrates how the convergence between technology from film, TV, games and sports is creating new interactive and immersive experiences that engage new audiences and unlock new opportunities.
What you’ll experience
Attendees to the Creative Innovation Hub will come face-to-face with a range of workflows from across media, entertainment, games, and sports:
- Editing and color grading: Get hands-on with industry-standard creative tools including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve. See how different deployment options deliver an uncompromising user experience while leveraging the full power of the cloud.
- High performance file storage in the cloud: Whether it’s visual effects on a tight deadline, or video editing for film and TV, there’s a storage solution to suit your needs. Explore emerging hybrid solutions that bridge the gap between on-premises workflows and the cloud.
- Live cloud production: A showcase of mature, production-proven workflows that emphasize interoperability, distributed production, and operational resilience. This setup illustrates how established industry leaders are leveraging AWS to provide scalable, sustainable, and highly reliable live production solutions that meet the evolving demands of modern broadcasting.
- Time-addressable media store (TAMS) on AWS: Discover how fast-turnaround workflows are being transformed by an open, interoperable, and cloud-native approach. Underpinned by the TAMS API specification from the BBC Research & Development team, this demonstration shows the use cases and opportunities being offered by TAMS.
- Innovation in audio post production: Where milliseconds matter. This purpose-built suite showcases cloud-native audio workflows that meet the industry’s exacting latency requirements, while pioneering next-generation solutions with AWS Partners.
- Gaming and interactive technologies: Accelerating game development from hours to minutes. See Horde with Unreal Build Accelerator (from Universal Foundry) deploy to devkits in minutes with granular cost allocation and real-time performance dashboards. It is transforming how studios build, test, and optimize with AWS Partners.
As technology evolves, the demonstrations offered by the Creative Innovation Hub will be continuously updated. Keep visiting our website regularly for the latest demonstrations and newly added workflows.
Figure 1: Post production review at the Creative Innovation Hub.
Why it matters
When you ask, ‘will this work in the cloud?‘, we don’t only say, ‘yes.’ We will show you your workflows running in environments you recognize and in context. You can sit at a real color grading panel, touch the broadcast switcher, hear the audio with studio-grade monitoring. The result? Creatives can rapidly build confidence by experiencing the cloud firsthand.
The Creative Innovation Hub gives you a space to support conversations around the transformation of creative workflows, and the culture shift that accompanies this change. We encourage stakeholders from across creative businesses to come and experience these developments for themselves, whether they work in technical, creative or leadership roles.
Beyond customer conversations, the Creative Innovation Hub is where tomorrow’s creative workflows take shape. AWS collaborates with leading partners to innovate for the industry at large, creating new capabilities that customers can adopt and integrate into their workflows.
Figure 2: Color grading panel at the Creative Innovation Hub.
Join us for industry events
The Creative Innovation Hub will host industry events including Tech Breakfasts. Creative professionals will be invited to join their peers, and AWS specialists, in exploring the latest and greatest in cloud-powered creative workflows.
London is a global hub for creative industries, and the AWS Creative Innovation Hub represents a tangible investment in driving innovation for creative workflows in the cloud.
Contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.