Is it time for your team to rethink your video strategy?

There's a conversation happening in nearly every broadcast and streaming organization right now: "We need to be on TikTok. We need Reels. We need YouTube Shorts." And inevitably, someone on the production team sighs, because they know what that actually means. Hours of manual reformatting. A second set of editors cropping landscape footage into portrait. Clips that finally go live long after the moment has passed.By the time that vertical clip is ready, the conversation has already moved on. The highlight has been shared by a fan with a phone, a competitor native to the platform, or someone who simply got there first.This isn't a production problem. It's a distribution problem.

The Real Competition for Viewer Attention

When a live sporting event or breaking news segment airs, the competition for attention isn't just other networks. It's every piece of content on every mobile-first platform, created by people and organizations who build for vertical and social.For a growing share of audiences, these platforms are the primary way they consume content. They're engaged in real time, and content that arrives hours later is uninteresting and skippable.The question isn't "should we be creating vertical video?" It's "can we get it there while it still matters?

Process Once, Distribute Everywhere

The traditional approach treats vertical video as a reformatting task that happens after the real work is done. Shoot in landscape, encode, deliver to your primary platform, then hand it off to another team to crop, clip, and repackage for each mobile destination. Every new platform multiplies the work.That workflow made sense when social platforms were just a nice-to-have. It breaks down when that’s where your viewers spend the majority of their time. Vertical content isn’t optional for companies that want to keep up.This is where a fundamental shift is underway. Rather than processing video once for your primary output and then reprocessing it again for each additional format, what if AI could analyze your content a single time and generate multiple optimized outputs simultaneously?That's the approach behind AWS Elemental Inference, a fully-managed AI service that we've integrated into the Nomad Media platform. It applies AI in parallel with video encoding, not as a post-processing step. The system analyzes your live or on-demand video, follows the action on screen, and dynamically generates vertical output in real time.The efficiency gain goes beyond speed. Because the AI processes your video alongside encoding rather than requiring separate passes, you avoid the redundant compute costs and duplicated workflows that come with traditional reformatting. One input, multiple optimized outputs, one process.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For Nomad Media customers, this shows up as a simple activation within the platform they already use to manage, enrich, and distribute content. There's nothing new to learn, no additional tools to add, and no AI expertise required.Whether you're working with a live broadcast or processing your on-demand content library, the workflow is the same: video goes in, and alongside your standard output, a vertical version comes out—intelligently cropped, action-tracked, and ready for distribution to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat, or wherever your mobile audience is.No separate production team. No post-event reformatting queue. No 400-page integration manual. AWS Elemental Inference handles the AI—continuously updating its own models behind the scenes—and Nomad Media provides the complete workflow around it, from ingest to multi-platform distribution.

Treating Vertical as a First-Class Output

The mindset shift we're advocating for is this: stop treating vertical video as a derivative of your "real" content, and start treating it as a first-class output of your production and distribution strategy.For broadcasters and streamers who have built workflows around the assumption that optimization happens in post-production, the opportunity is to rethink that assumption entirely. Intelligent processing embedded directly into the production pipeline isn't a future concept: it's available now.

Where This Is Headed

Real-time vertical video is the first capability available through AWS Elemental Inference, but the underlying architecture—AI that works alongside encoding and learns your content in a single pass—points toward a much broader evolution in how media gets processed in the cloud. The ability to process once and derive multiple intelligent outputs from that single analysis has implications well beyond format conversion.At Nomad Media, our platform already brings together asset management, AI-powered enrichment, and multi-platform distribution in one environment. The integration of AWS Elemental Inference is a natural extension of that mission: helping our customers get their content to every audience, on every platform, without adding complexity to their workflows.If you're a broadcaster or streamer rethinking how to reach mobile-first audiences, we’d love to talk.About Nomad Media: Nomad Media is your brand's asset management co-pilot, making it easy to manage and distribute your ever-growing media content library. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of AWS Media Services, AWS AI/ML, and GenAI to effortlessly manage, enrich, discover, and distribute your media. No more confusing integrations, no more organizational headaches, just content you can quickly and easily put to use. Nomad Media is an AWS Partner.