Artificial intelligence is moving beyond content creation to become an increasingly important commercial tool for media companies, helping them understand audiences, optimise advertising and connect content with new revenue opportunities, according to a new report by the Dubai Press Club (DPC) and Deloitte Middle East.
The report, Arab Media in the Age of AI, examines how AI is reshaping the media value chain across content creation, distribution and monetisation, with audience intelligence emerging as an increasingly important link between content and commercial value.
“AI is strengthening monetisation by improving how media organisations understand audiences, optimise commercial decisions and connect content with revenue opportunities,” the report says.
It adds that audience analytics can identify “viewing patterns, preferences and engagement signals” that can inform advertising, subscriptions, programming, retention and release strategies.
The implications are particularly significant for television and streaming platforms, where audience intelligence can directly influence the value and allocation of advertising inventory.
For broadcast and traditional television, AI can support audience segmentation, addressable advertising, ad-inventory optimisation and traffic optimisation, helping determine which advertising inventory should be allocated, when it should run and against which audiences.
“AI-enabled audience intelligence can also inform media buying and placement decisions by improving the match between audiences, programming and advertising objectives,” the report says.
For OTT platforms, first-party audience data can connect the viewing experience more closely to commercial decisions. The report identifies applications including recommendation, churn prediction, retention, advertising optimisation and customer-value analysis.
As these capabilities develop, platforms can increasingly use AI to determine which proposition, offer or experience is most relevant to particular audience segments.
The report describes this broader shift as part of a changing media economics, with AI increasingly connecting audience behaviour to discovery, programming, release decisions, retention and advertising.
Content value shifts
AI could also change how audiences and buyers perceive the value of content itself.
As AI becomes more visible in the production process, human-led and AI-led productions may not necessarily be valued in the same way, the report says.
For premium films, documentaries and other creatively distinctive formats, human authorship, performance and craftsmanship could become additional elements of perceived value, particularly where they shape the emotional, cultural or artistic quality of the experience.
This could create a more differentiated market in which AI-generated and human-led content are not necessarily perceived or priced in the same way.
At the same time, AI could unlock additional commercial value from existing intellectual property. Once archives and programme libraries are digitised, structured and searchable, content can be identified, packaged, reused and licensed more systematically.
For film and scripted and non-scripted audiovisual content, the report says AI’s most visible impact is currently in content creation, including AI-assisted ideation, scripting and storyboarding, previsualisation, VFX, editing and the creation of synthetic environments, characters and voices.
AI can also support archive searches and footage reuse and automate the creation of short-form and promotional assets.
Newsrooms go multiplatform
In news, AI’s impact extends across both creation and distribution.
The report identifies applications ranging from AI-assisted research, summarisation and script preparation to automated transcription, metadata tagging and archive retrieval. It also points to generative AI-assisted visuals, short-form news production, deepfake detection and content verification.
On the distribution side, AI can automate clipping and rapid multiplatform publishing while supporting real-time translation, subtitling, multilingual distribution and content packaging for television, digital and social channels.
Audience intelligence can then help determine which content is surfaced to different audiences.
For broadcasters, AI is spreading more broadly across the value chain, including production automation, programme scheduling, live-content enhancement and advertising optimisation.
Its commercial applications include audience segmentation and addressable advertising, audience-informed programming and scheduling, advertising inventory and traffic optimisation, data-driven media buying and placement, and archive and programme licensing.
OTT focuses downstream
For OTT platforms, the strongest impact remains in distribution and monetisation, according to the report.
Personalised recommendations, semantic and conversational discovery, adaptive interfaces and content surfacing can influence the viewing experience, while churn prediction, first-party audience segmentation, advertising targeting and optimisation, subscription optimisation and customer-value analysis can influence revenue.
The report says OTT-specific AI impacts are “concentrated primarily downstream”, with content creation typically taking place upstream within the wider film and audiovisual ecosystem.
Across the four video sub-segments, the concentration of AI impact therefore differs. Film and audiovisual content are seeing the strongest visible effects in creation; news is being transformed across creation and distribution; traditional television is experiencing broader change across the value chain; while OTT is seeing particularly strong effects in distribution and monetisation.
The report argues that the next opportunity for media organisations is to connect these different capabilities rather than treat them as isolated applications.
“Lower production costs and faster workflows are important, but they should not become the only objective,” it says. AI-enabled production, localisation, scheduling and content operations should ultimately support “better content, faster distribution, stronger discovery, deeper engagement or improved monetisation.”
The report also identifies audience intelligence as a strategic asset, arguing that organisations that understand audiences more precisely can make better decisions about what to distribute, what to commission, when to schedule or release content and how to monetise it.
The wider report covers 10 MENA markets and four major media segments — video, audio, gaming, and strategic communications and public relations. It says AI is creating new opportunities across advertising, subscriptions, licensing and digital commerce.
