Digital outages cost media firms up to USD $2 million per hour

A new report has found that media and entertainment companies face an average cost of USD $2 million per hour during high-impact digital outages, with these incidents taking around 40 minutes to resolve.

The State of Observability for Media and Entertainment report, published by New Relic, surveyed engineering leaders and IT team members across the industry. According to the data, the most significant outages occur during major digital moments such as series finales or live sports broadcasts and can attract considerable attention, impacting both revenues and brand reputation.

The research found that 33% of respondents reported that outages cost their organisations between USD $1 million and USD $2 million per hour. The main causes of such outages were identified as security issues, network failures, capacity overloads or constraints, and software deployment errors. Average detection and resolution times for outages in the industry are approximately 30 minutes to detect and 40 minutes to resolve. The consequences, however, are described as much higher than the average, given the importance of uninterrupted service delivery in media and entertainment.

The report notes that the quality of user experience is a direct reflection of the product in the media and entertainment sector. A 40-minute interruption during a significant streaming event may result in the loss of millions in advertising revenue and can also accelerate subscriber churn. Business competitiveness and customer satisfaction are therefore closely linked to digital performance and reliability.

Observability

According to the survey, 51% of media and entertainment organisations reported achieving a 2-3x return on investment in observability-a figure that the report says is higher than averages seen in other sectors such as finance and retail. The research also indicates wider operational benefits, with 39% of respondents stating that observability investments improved system uptime and reliability, and 36% highlighting better real-user experience as a result.

Business leaders are also recognising these impacts at a strategic level. Half of the leaders surveyed said observability initiatives helped them hit technical key performance indicators, while 36% stated it strengthened their ability to execute planned tactics efficiently.

"The audience is the ultimate arbiter in the media and entertainment industry. Any digital downtime can tarnish a platform's reputation in minutes, confirming that flawless, on-demand content isn't a luxury-it's the expectation," said New Relic Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders. "Organisations are under immense pressure to deliver a perfect experience at scale. Our report proves that observability is delivering measurable business value, as over half of respondents are seeing 2-3x ROI on observability spend."

The report highlights a trend towards tool consolidation. The median number of observability tools in use is four per organisation, while 40% of companies now use three or fewer tools-a 10% increase from the previous year. This move to fewer tools is aligned with an industry drive for more integrated and streamlined digital monitoring environments.

AI and customer experience

The findings show that artificial intelligence is now the primary driver of observability adoption in media and entertainment. The report states that organisations are using AI to automate and accelerate manual processes, such as incident detection, delivering personalised customer recommendations, and reviewing system incidents after they occur. These improvements are identified as crucial to delivering strong customer experiences for viewers and end users.

Participants cited AI adoption alongside greater focus on security, governance, risk, and compliance as the top strategies steering their observability investments. Further areas of strategic focus include accelerating software release cycles, integrating business applications into workflow processes, and developing cloud-native application architectures.

Operational transparency

The research emphasises the growing practice of integrating business data such as customer information, human resources, and operational statistics with telemetry data. The report found that nearly half of media and entertainment organisations (48%) have adopted this approach, providing teams with greater visibility into system status and enabling them to gauge the real-time business impact of outages.