Media and entertainment has changed fast. Streaming changed what audiences pay for and watch. Social platforms changed who decides which stories get seen. AI changed how fast a story has to come together once someone decides to write it. Earning this Competency now matters because the companies navigating that change need partners who actually understand it.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
Most of it shows up as the same problem wearing different clothes: legacy systems built for a slower, smaller version of the business now being asked to handle a job entirely outside their original design.
A newsroom CMS built fifteen years ago for one website. A broadcast company running two hundred brands through infrastructure meant for editorial teams alone, when the business now needs real-time content distribution on top of it. An editorial workflow that still depends on someone manually checking dozens of sources every morning, in an industry where competitors automated that step years ago.
Modernizing this work has become a competitive requirement. It's the difference between a publisher who can move at the pace the industry now demands and one still waiting for budget approval to start.
We've worked with a lot of major names in this space, and the work keeps teaching us the same lesson: the platform underneath a media company matters as much as the editorial strategy on top of it. Being close to that work, engagement after engagement, is how we know where the real pressure points are.
A Partner That Builds the Stack With You
AWS runs more partner programs than most companies realize, covering everything from migration funding to specialized technical support to joint go-to-market work. We chose AWS for one core reason ahead of any single program: their team works alongside ours on the actual architecture, helping us land on the right stack instead of just the available one.
That shows up concretely. AWS Solutions Architects sit in on the harder builds. When a workload calls for deeper expertise on a specific service, AWS's specialists help get the design right before it ships. Over enough engagements, that turned into a real working rhythm, the kind that goes well past a standard vendor relationship.
AWS also runs Competency programs across dozens of industries and workload types. Earning one means AWS has reviewed a partner's actual work and confirmed it holds up. We applied for the Media & Entertainment Competency because the partnership had already gotten us there. The application just made it official.
What Earning the Competency Actually Took
A Competency works as an audit of real client work, the kind of review that goes well beyond a class or a certificate. AWS reviews that work across two tracks.
Case study validation checks the business outcomes, well past a phrase like "things got faster." The bar is a number: cost saved, revenue gained, hours of editorial work recovered and converted into what that's actually worth, each one with a baseline and a method behind it.
Technical validation checks how the systems were actually built. AWS looked at:
- How access to each client's AWS account was governed
- Whether a real cost analysis backed the architecture decisions
- Monitoring and incident response practices built to catch problems early
- Whether the architecture diagrams matched what was actually running in production
We submitted four engagements. AWS came back with specific feedback on two, places where documentation needed more depth or a result needed a cleaner number behind it. We went back into the real delivery records and fixed it.
That's the whole point of the process. AWS was checking whether the work underneath each case study would survive being taken apart.
It did.
The Work Behind It
- A global magazine publisher running more than 120 titles on a tangle of separate, aging systems, brought onto one shared platform that still holds up years later under five times the original traffic. Read the case study.
- A US media conglomerate with two hundred brands running through a single WordPress install, given a fast new way to bring content in while everything that already worked stayed exactly in place. Read the case study.
- Cumulus Media's editorial staff, who used to scan dozens of news sources by hand every morning, now get a system that drafts while editors keep the final call. Read the case study.
- MIT Technology Review, who wanted AI-written summaries for readers while keeping their existing platform fully intact, and liked the result enough to open-source it for the rest of the industry. Read the case study.
Four companies. Four different pressures. The same instinct behind every fix: build for where the client actually is.
Why This Should Matter to You
If you're choosing who builds your next platform, your next migration, or your next AI feature, here's the honest version. We've done this work, under real pressure, for major publishers and broadcasters. AWS checked it and confirmed it holds up.
Talk to us.
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