Great IP doesn't stop being great. It just needs to reach audiences where they are, formatted to how they want to watch today.

A+E Global Media sits on one of the most recognizable content libraries in North American television. History Channel. Lifetime. Vice TV. Decades of long-form programming, thousands of hours of finished content, and a growing audience waiting on social, digital, and short-form platforms for the moments that will bring them into those worlds. According to YouGov data, social platforms are now the go-to watch place for 53% of Millennials and 32% of Baby Boomers, in fact, 71% of Gen Z Americans discover new shows on social media.

Speaking during the 2026 AWS Summit New York, David Dunlap, Senior Director of Enterprise Media Solutions at A+E, described the shift in how audiences consume content not as a threat, but as an opening. And the question driving his team forward is a compelling one: how do you take a deep, valuable library and get the best of it to the people who would love it, faster and at a greater scale than was ever possible before?

With a content management and creation platform underpinned by AI video understanding, semantic search, and moment-level indexing — helping teams surface relevant scenes, dialogue, characters, locations, actions, and story beats from long-form programming.

A targeted start, and then something bigger

A+E began working with Moments Lab with a clear, focused brief: take episodic content and produce short-form compilations, cut-downs, and scene lifts for web, mobile, and social platforms. A well-scoped use case, with a clear measure of success. What happened next is a more interesting story. Once the platform was in the hands of A+E's teams, the use cases started expanding on their own. 

Could editorial intelligence help identify scenes in a kitchen or a grocery store as natural locations for virtual product placement, supporting the advertising strategy without disrupting the story? 

Could it flag scenes involving sensitive subject matter so the team could make smarter, more contextual ad placement decisions? "We started off with a basic use case," David said, "and it just continues to grow."

That kind of organic expansion is a reliable signal: when creative and production teams start bringing new ideas to a platform instead of waiting to be shown what it can do, something has genuinely clicked.

More time for the work that matters most

The Moments Lab platform is built around editorial intelligence: AI video understanding tailored to individual shows, characters, storylines, and the way editors think. The result is a platform that handles the foundational, time-intensive work so that the people who know the content best can focus on what only they can do.

For A+E's teams, that means moving from idea to source material to finished content substantially faster. Instead of manually scrubbing hours of footage to find a relevant scene, a producer can search the library in plain language, surface exactly the moments that support their creative vision, and get into the actual work of storytelling.

"It gives them more time to focus on story development," David said. The platform removes the friction between inspiration and execution, and that freed-up creative bandwidth is where the real value compounds.

One of the more exciting discoveries came from a creative team member who, working inside Moments Lab, found an entirely new narrative thread running through existing footage. A story that was always there in the library but had never been practically accessible before. The platform had not just accelerated an existing workflow, it had opened up a creative possibility that simply did not exist without it.

Thinking upstream, building for scale

What distinguishes A+E's approach is the ambition to think beyond the immediate output. David spoke about how the team is now considering short-form earlier in the production process: in script development, in the contracts that establish repurposing rights across platforms, and in the media supply chain infrastructure that handles versioning, rights clearance, and distribution at social scale.

"Creating short-form content out of long-form programming is harder than it sounds," David acknowledged. "You have to consider the creative intent, the tone of the story, the legal and rights dimensions, and then how you're tagging, versioning, chaptering, and distributing everything."

Building those considerations into the front end of production, rather than solving for them after the fact, is how a media company moves from running short-form as a side project to running it as a core capability.

The bigger picture

Publishing consistently to social does more than generate views. It grows the fandom around a show. It builds direct relationships with audiences who might never have found the content through a linear schedule. And that fandom creates new revenue, brand sponsorships, international reach, and the signal that supports the next recommission.

Deloitte predicts that revenue from short-form serialized content will reach $7.8 billion globally in 2026, more than double the $3.8 billion generated last year.

‍A+E has the IP, the creative talent, and the rich library. Moments Lab gives the teams working with that library the tools to activate it at the scale that social demands, without replacing creative judgment, and without starting from scratch.

Audiences are not disappearing. They’re growing across non-linear and social platforms, devouring verticals, discovering shows through a three-minute clip rather than a primetime schedule. And for IP owners with deep libraries, that is the best possible news.

A show that aired five years ago can reach a new, younger audience on social platforms today, grow a fanbase, attract a brand partner, and generate the kind of social signal that convinces a streamer to greenlight a new season. Iconic IP does not age out. The content that built these brands can now build entirely new revenue streams, new audiences, and new commercial relationships, with every clip that lands. 

The libraries that broadcasters and studios spent decades building are, for the first time, genuinely positioned to pay back everything that went into making them. With the right tools, they find the next generation of people who will love them.

Book a Moments Lab demo to learn how the platform helps social and digital teams to scale show content, grow fandoms, and drive revenue.