The Role of Cloud Services in Shaping Modern Entertainment: An Interview with AWS
When people think of Amazon Web Services (AWS), they often picture endless rows of servers forming the backbone of the modern digital world. Yet, AWS is far more than a global infrastructure provider. It has become a creative and technological powerhouse, playing a growing role in the entertainment industry through specialized solutions for media, sports, and gaming.
To learn more about AWS’s expanding presence in entertainment, MENA Tech sat down with Samira Panah Bakhtiar, General Manager of Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports at AWS, during the company’s annual summit in Dubai. In this exclusive interview, Bakhtiar discussed how cloud technology is transforming creative industries and why the Middle East is becoming a key part of AWS’s global strategy.
Can you tell us about your role at AWS and the company’s focus on entertainment?
I’m Samira Panah Bakhtiar, General Manager for the Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports division at AWS, based in New York. I lead a global team that supports more than 28,000 customers worldwide, helping them expand their reach, grow revenue, and accelerate innovation through AWS solutions built specifically for media and entertainment.
We work with a wide range of clients: storytellers, content creators, broadcasters, streaming platforms, sports leagues, and game developers. My team includes people with deep industry experience, from former game developers and broadcast engineers to production managers and creative technologists. This helps us understand our customers’ challenges from the inside out.
How does AWS support companies in the entertainment sector?
We help our clients accelerate content production, connect workloads more efficiently, and engage audiences through personalized fan experiences and multi-channel monetization. We also use AWS infrastructure to power specialized solutions for cloud rendering, live broadcasting, and real-time analytics.
For instance, AWS technology was used in the production of Avatar: The Way of Water and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, dramatically reducing rendering times for visual effects. Our new service, AWS Deadline Cloud, can cut rendering workloads from days or weeks to just minutes.
In live sports, we collaborate with major leagues such as Formula 1 and Bundesliga, helping them build fully cloud-based live production environments. Content is captured, processed, encoded, and distributed instantly across broadcast, digital, and social channels.
What major shifts are you seeing across the media industry today?
We are witnessing major transformations. The first is changing consumer behavior. Younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha prefer gaming, interactive experiences, podcasts, and short-form user-generated content rather than traditional media. The second is technological acceleration. Advances in cloud computing and AI now enable any company to create and launch new products faster than ever.
At AWS, we use generative AI across three key layers. The first is our custom silicon for model training. The second is Amazon Bedrock, which provides a secure environment for foundation models. The third is Amazon Q, our intelligent assistant. We use these technologies to translate content, generate subtitles, and even sync lip movements with new languages.
In gaming, AI helps personalize non-playable characters, improve in-game marketing, and analyze player performance using data in real time. For example, during F1 races, more than one million data points per second are collected and analyzed to provide live recommendations to drivers.
We also introduced Amazon Nova, a suite of three creative tools: Canvas (text-to-image), Real (text-to-video for clips up to two minutes), and Sonic (interactive voice-to-voice). These tools were recently tested in live esports events to analyze player performance and provide instant insights.
How does AWS ensure the protection of creators’ rights?
We strongly believe in protecting privacy and intellectual property. AWS collaborates with C2PA to enable traceability for digital assets. We also use tools that reduce digital toxicity and support transparency and authenticity in AI-generated content.
Many leading games rely on AWS. Why is that?
We work with global hits like Roblox, League of Legends, and Fortnite. Over 750 million players use AWS services every month. That scale demonstrates the reliability and flexibility of our infrastructure.
There are three main reasons major gaming companies choose AWS. First, our breadth of over 240 services, including tools tailored for gaming and media. Second, our long-standing experience, as AWS was the first cloud provider to launch public cloud services two decades ago. And third, our vast partner network of more than 100,000 partners worldwide, giving clients the freedom to choose the tools that best suit their needs.
How important is the Middle East to AWS’s plans?
We are deeply committed to the region. AWS already operates data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and we are planning to launch a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia soon. This reflects our long-term investment in supporting digital transformation and creative innovation across the Middle East.
