AWS for M&E Blog
How FOX fuels innovation with AI on AWS
Media companies harnessing AI are revolutionizing operations, accelerating workflows, and unlocking new creative possibilities. One of the greatest recent examples of this is Fox Corporation. A longtime proponent of innovation, the company has remained ahead of the technological curve by keeping an eye on what’s next and is now reaping the rewards of combining cloud scale and cutting-edge AI.
Game-changing reinvention
In 2019, Fox Corporation made the strategic decision to sell decades of legacy productions and focus on live news and live sports. Partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS), FOX transformed how news, sports, and entertainment content gets created, produced and distributed. FOX consolidated into a unified cloud platform that now powers content operations across FOX Sports, FOX News Media, Tubi Media Group, FOX Entertainment, and FOX Television Stations—delivering three Super Bowls to record-breaking audiences.
“We just didn’t move to the cloud. We basically rebuilt how content is created, produced, and delivered to millions of viewers,” said Mayur Srinivasan, Senior Vice President, Digital Video Platform Team, Fox Corporation. “We shifted from being a traditional broadcaster to becoming a cloud-native media powerhouse. AWS has been critical to our successes.”
In 2025, it launched a new streaming service, FOX One, enabling live and on-demand access to FOX channels. Today, FOX One serves millions of concurrent users with near zero latency, which they’ve achieved through smart, straightforward technical decisions driven by audience expectations.
The following screenshot shows the FOX One highlights experience.
Figure 1: The FOX One highlights experience
Continuing to build on its success, FOX has since implemented an AI-powered vertical video strategy, using AWS Elemental Inference, and named AWS its preferred generative AI provider. Looking ahead, the company is now optimizing other areas with AI, especially as coverage for the FIFA World Cup ramps up.
Doubling down on personalization and user engagement
As audiences increasingly fragment, it’s a huge challenge for media companies to reach viewers where they are. Additionally, changing expectations have upended the very nature of content discovery, shifting from search to proactive recommendations.
With this in mind, FOX created a streamlined user experience for FOX One. The single platform offers live linear and video on demand (VOD) content across sports, news, and entertainment, making it easier for viewers to find and view content of interest. At the same time, this approach helps FOX dynamically serve personalized content to the right person at the right time, whether it’s a news clip, a full season series or episode, or a sports highlight. That same streamlined experience translates to mobile, where live scores, stats, and highlights sit alongside the action.
Figure 2: The FOX One highlights and stats experience
AI solutions are crucial for helping FOX understand its audience to achieve this personalization. Tools such as AWS Elemental Inference, which automatically reformats 16×9 video for vertical viewing, allow the company to implement multi-platform content strategies that engage fans across mobile devices within the FOX environment. An early adopter of the AI-powered service, FOX worked with AWS on the development of AWS Elemental Inference for almost 2 years. Fox Sports editors helped guide the service’s content understanding to more authentically capture the action instead of simply following the ball or player.
Figure 3: The FOX One highlights experience on mobile
Ricardo Perez-Selsky, Senior Director of Digital Production Operations at FOX Sports, explained, “For me and my team, AI is three pillars. Content creation starts from nothing, and I use generative AI to create the content. Content enhancement with Inference is where I’m taking a horizontal video and I’m reformatting it into 9×16 for TikTok, Instagram, or other vertical platforms. Then content understanding is knowing what fans are following so that we can make our strategy decisions around what they want first.”
“At Fox, we’re all empowered to experiment with AI with a focus on driving speed, user engagement, and monetization. We embraced AI as a company and as a technology team, and we’re continuing to see advancements,” added Fox Corporation Senior Vice President of Media Services Whil Reliford. “One area that’s really working very well for us is using AI tools to help us enrich our content and surface key moments from our content libraries to make them available to our end users. We’re also getting into building agents and seeing how these agents can help us move faster.”
Enhanced personalization also creates new monetization opportunities. Metadata tagging and contextual content surfacing serves appealing content to viewers, but also allows for targeted ad insertion, opening additional revenue streams. Recently, FOX One added support for server-side ad insertion, and the ability to generate contextual metadata will help the team identify other areas for enriching their ad experience. Several AWS services are key in these areas, including fully managed machine learning (ML) service Amazon Personalize and AWS Elemental MediaTailor for linear channel assembly and personalized ad insertion. FOX uses these to augment its workflow built on AWS Elemental MediaLive live encoding and AWS Elemental MediaPackage video origination and just-in-time packaging, among other AWS services and solutions.
Accelerating creativity
AI has been transformative for operational efficiency, and it’s also opening new storytelling avenues for FOX. As the Fox Sports team prepares for FIFA World Cup coverage, it’s equipping its creatives with AI agents to handle basic tasks, freeing them to focus on the content instead of the pipeline. It’s also enabling storytelling that wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago due to time and budget constraints.
“Your imagination is really limitless,” said Perez-Selsky. “It’s also understanding what works, what doesn’t, and where to put up guardrails, but it’s been really exciting. Because of AI in the cloud, there are a lot more doors that are open for us.”
New for the FIFA World Cup, the Fox Sports team is building an agentic workflow that inputs social media data and runs it through AI models on AWS to pinpoint areas for post-game analysis. Although some moments are obvious, the bespoke analytics platform predicts which aspects of each game warrant post-show discussion based on real-time fan activity. The AI modeling can infer what game aspects a person is discussing and connect the dots across social platforms, surfacing the insights to producers.
AI also helps FOX with speed to market. “I can have 30 minutes of condensed programming posted on YouTube the second the final whistle blows. Before that was a manual process,” Perez-Selsky added.
Recognizing the cloud potential
The transformative power of the cloud is evident today, but many broadcast professionals can cite a key moment that kickstarted their cloud journey. For Srinivasan, that moment was in 2018, as FOX was preparing the infrastructure to air Super Bowl LIV in 2020. His team was focused on implementing a multi-CDN delivery strategy and building resiliency into the ecosystem, and AWS served both objectives.
Around the same time, Reliford helped oversee the building of a state-of-the-art technology center following FOX’s acquisition of Disney. Recognizing that the previous monolithic approach to streaming wasn’t going to cut it when bringing together two massive entities, Reliford and his team worked with AWS to design and launch a reimagined facility.
Perez-Selsky turned to the cloud out of necessity early in the pandemic. His AWS account rep at the time dropped an AWS Elemental Link encoder on his doorstep that Perez-Selsky integrated into his makeshift control room. Using the small device that connects a live source to the cloud, he ran more than 700 hours of live broadcast television through his garage. When teams began resuming in-person operations, Perez-Selsky and his team built a proper digital studio, taking the learnings from the garage environment and scaling them appropriately for digital content.
These unique experiences help lay the foundation for FOX’s digital transformation. Reliford reflected, “The momentum that we got from building that first environment is still paving the way for us today. As new challenges come up, or as new things need to be built or deployed, we move with that same sort of momentum and pace. It’s made us ready for what’s happening today, with some of the innovations with AI and things like that.”
Expanding capabilities
Since first partnering with AWS to migrate its video workflows to the cloud, FOX has continued collaborating with AWS to ensure it’s delivering the best possible experience to audiences. In addition to its ongoing AI-powered transformation, FOX is focused on bringing its rich content offerings to a broader global audience.
Srinivasan concluded, “Now that we’ve built the platform to conditionally onboard new content, our next big challenge is scaling our ecosystem. We’re seeing so much demand for localization and language translation, and those are things we’ll partner closely with AWS on and figure out how to tailor our offerings in a way that can be easily consumed internationally.”
Find out how to transform broadcast workflows with automated vertical video on Inference, and get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment expert.