New research from New Relic shows how observability is being used to inform performance, reliability, and revenue across industries. In 2025, the company surveyed more than 1,700 IT and engineering leaders globally, including 120 from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector, to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices.
The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out.
1. Outages cost M&E organizations an average of $2 million per hour
The M&E industry's average incident detection and resolution times — around 30 minutes to detect and 40 minutes to resolve — are in line with the global average, but the stakes are higher for this industry. An outage for an M&E organization can mean that millions of people miss out on a sporting event, a highly anticipated content premiere, or a livestream from their favorite gamer. It only takes minutes for downtime to significantly damage a streaming platform's brand.
Further, organizations that fail to deliver a reliable digital experience face substantial penalties in the form of lost subscriptions and ad revenue. 79% of respondents reported that outages cost one million dollars or more per hour, with the majority (33%) reporting an average cost of one to two million dollars per hour. 40% of respondents point to security failures as the primary cause of outages, followed by network failures (34%) and deployment errors (30%).
2. Observability pays off in less downtime and better customer experiences
Fortunately, M&E organizations report that their investments in observability are paying off in reduced downtime costs, improved ad performance, and subscriber retention. More than a third (39%) say that observability is increasing uptime and reliability, and a similar percentage (36%) say it's directly improving the user experience.
But the benefits of observability extend beyond technical metrics, increasingly helping organizations deliver more effectively on business objectives. Half of leadership respondents say observability helps them hit technical KPIs, and 36% say it strengthens their ability to drive tactical execution.
As a result, more than half (51%) of respondents report a 2-3x return on investment from their observability initiatives, higher than in industries such as finance and retail. And for a third of respondents, that ROI is showing up on their bottom line as business or revenue growth.
3. AI adoption is creating disruption and increasing complexity
M&E organizations have been eager to integrate AI across their businesses, from content recommendation engines and personalization algorithms to incident response, but they're cognizant of the risks it poses to stability and uptime. Nearly a third (30%) of respondents call AI adoption the primary driver of their observability strategy.
AI has complicated the observability landscape by introducing a more complex tech stack that is harder to manage than traditional software. At the same time, AI-powered observability is strengthening resilience by automating manual processes to accelerate incident detection and response. Observability platforms can detect quality drops in real time, roll back problematic deployments, and deliver ads without interruption.
4. Organizations are integrating business data and telemetry
To better quantify the business impact of downtime — and the benefits of observability — M&E organizations are increasingly integrating business data with telemetry. Nearly half (48%) of respondents say they have integrated, or plan to integrate, customer data, allowing leaders to see not just when a service goes down, but how outages immediately affect subscriber retention, ad delivery, and content engagement.
Many are extending this approach beyond customer data, integrating human resources (48%), operations (48%), and logistics data (46%) to create a more complete, real-time view of business health.
5. M&E organizations are making headway on tool sprawl
As software landscapes grow more complex, organizations use several observability tools on average that can handle a sprawling ecosystem of architectural patterns and applications. In M&E, tool sprawl is often exacerbated by the fact that content delivery, ad tech, and backend systems are monitored separately. The median number of observability tools in use by M&E organizations is four, and 18% of organizations run eight or more.
But a shift toward unified observability platforms is helping the industry chip away at tool sprawl. 40% of organizations now use three or fewer tools, up 10% from 2024. By moving away from siloed dashboards and toward unified platforms that provide full-stack visibility, organizations are strengthening their ability to deliver uptime and reliability while spending their observability budgets more efficiently.
Together, these findings show that observability is no longer a technical nice-to-have, but a business-critical capability for M&E organizations. As complexity and audience expectations continue to rise, teams that invest in unified, AI-driven observability will be best positioned to protect revenue, safeguard their brand, and deliver the seamless experiences viewers expect.