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AI² Research

Field notes on AI in Media & Entertainment, from the AI² Research program.

August 2026

The Locus of Control: Inside the Three-Layer AI War for the Living Room

The battleground moved from the database to the dialogue. If you do not capture the viewer's intent, your catalog becomes a silent, interchangeable commodity.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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April 2026

NAB 2026: From AI Exploration to AI Industrialization

The curtain closed on AI Theater. The industry has accepted the not-if-but-when and moved to the surgical, high-stakes work of the how.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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March 2026

The 10-Minute Reality Check: Reporting from the AI Front Lines at Connected TV World Summit

A year of deep-tissue research, 600 seconds to deliver it. What survives that compression is the only thing executives actually needed to hear.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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March 2026

From AI Features to AI Foundations: The 2026 Imperative

Bolt-on features and shiny demos are over. Five fronts will decide who controls the viewer relationship for the rest of the decade.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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February 2026 · Visual Semantic Search — Part 2 of 2

The Semantic Moat: Unlocking the Media Economy with Visual Semantic Search

The engineering and governance realities behind the headline economics — and why the moat belongs to whoever solves them first.

Fernando Amendola & Steve Hawley — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League and The Piracy Monitor

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February 2026 · Visual Semantic Search — Part 1 of 2

The Semantic Unlock: Turning Dark Data into a Realistic Strategic Treasury

If a logger never typed it, the market cannot find it. Visual Semantic Search makes meaning — not metadata — the basis for retrieval across petabyte archives.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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February 2026

The Agentic Super Bowl: How AI Is Transforming Live Sports Delivery

Seventeen hours of continuous 4K HDR in a single day. Human-gated supply chains cannot scale to that. Failure is not an option, and neither is manual.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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February 2026 · AI Efficiency — Part 2 of 2

The Efficiency Revolution: How Tiny AI Models Are Disrupting M&E Workflows

Two years of brute force are ending. Distillation broke the AI tax, and in an industry built on narrow tasks, bigger stopped being better.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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January 2026

Dispatches from CES 2026: The Edge AI Ascendant

Anyone who skipped CES assuming nothing happens there made a strategic error. The cloud-AI umbilical cord is being cut, and intelligence is moving onto the device.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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January 2026 · AI Efficiency — Part 1 of 2

The Measurement Mandate: Survival in the Age of Paradox

Nobody is losing sleep over polar bears. They are losing sleep over power and compute bills. Sustainability just moved from marketing to engineering.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 6 of 6

AI in M&E: 2026 Predictions

2024 was discovery, 2025 was experimentation. 2026 is when AI stops being a feature and becomes invisible, essential infrastructure — or the industry falls behind.

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 4 of 6

Operators and AI in 2025: A Controlled, Operator-Led Transformation

Operators do not own the content they distribute, and that single constraint dictates everything. Their AI strategy optimises around the content, never the content itself.

Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 1 of 6

2025 AI in M&E, A Retrospective: The Year of Stealth Transformation

The industry spent 2025 tweaking the pipes rather than replacing the plumbing. Do not mistake the measured pace for hesitation — it was the warm-up.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 2 of 6

Content Providers and AI in 2025: From Experimentation to Productized Creativity

Content owners have freedom operators do not, and they used it. AI moved into live services and creative pipelines — along with the reputational risk of getting it wrong in public.

Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 3 of 6

Broadcasters and AI in 2025: Trust, Scale, and Monetization Over Disruption

Public trust obligations shaped a different adoption curve. Broadcasters accept AI as an assistant in the newsroom — never as an autonomous editorial voice.

Thierry Fautier — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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December 2025 · AI in 2025 — Part 5 of 6

The M&E AI Infrastructure Gap: Why the Massive OPEX Savings Haven't Hit the Bottom Line

948 vendors promise to automate first frame to last mile. So where is the growth? The industry traded a human payroll for a compute tax.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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November 2025

The Paradox of Choice: How AI-Native Thinking Resets the Content Discovery Value Equation

Viewers spend ten minutes hunting for something to watch, and a fifth of them give up entirely. That is not a content failure. It is a connection failure.

Fernando Amendola — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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October 2025

Content Enrichment and User Experience: Where Are We With AI?

Generative AI stopped being a lab curiosity and became a financial lever. The real battle is no longer attention — it is holding on to AI feature value before commoditisation erases it.

Fernando Amendola & Simon Trudelle — AI2 Research, in collaboration with The Media League

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AI² Research Contributors

The people behind the AI² Playbook.

Fernando Amendola

Lead Marketing Strategist · The Media League

Drives high-impact business strategy and market transformation, aligning GTM execution and portfolio evolution to technology innovation.

Thierry Fautier

Lead Business Strategist · The Media League

Silicon Valley veteran in video strategy and standards; Technical Emmy winner for work on Ultra HD and real-time compression.

Ben Schwarz

Technology Strategy · The Media League

Sustainability and media technology strategist, focused on efficient, low-carbon streaming architectures.

Simon Trudelle

Marketing & GTM · The Media League

B2B distribution, security and CMS strategist, translating product vision into monetisation strategy.

Steve Hawley

Managing Director · Piracy Monitor

Tracks and interprets global content theft, and an early advocate for AI-powered detection.

AI² in the Press

Bylines and coverage in the industry trade press.

CSI Magazine

From AI Features to AI Foundations: The 2026 Imperative

Fernando Amendola & Thierry Fautier · Spring 2026

Print edition, pages 26-28

Read at CSI Magazine Extract (PDF)

CSI Magazine

AI in M&E Workflows: From Hype to Deployment

Thierry Fautier · October 2025

Read at CSI Magazine

AI² Events

Summits, breakfasts and industry sessions hosted with The Media League.

13 SEP PAST

SundAI Breakfast 2026

Van der Valk Hotel Amsterdam Zuidas

The 2nd Annual IBC SundAI Breakfast. An invitation-only forum on the practical impact of AI across media and entertainment, including the launch of the AI² platform.

14 SEP PAST

SundAI - The Media League AI Breakfast

Van der Valk Hotel Amsterdam Zuidas

The inaugural SundAI Breakfast at IBC 2025, where The Media League introduced the AI² research initiative.