Adobe’s Meagan Keane on media intelligence and improving workflows

Adobe is placing media intelligence as a centerpiece of its video workflow vision, positioning the technology as a foundation for future capabilities.

Adobe is focused on building upon established technologies rather than simply introducing isolated features. This strategic approach aims to solve persistent workflow challenges facing broadcast professionals and content creators dealing with ever-increasing footage volumes.

Adobe brings generative extend, media intelligence to Premiere Pro

“Media intelligence is another foundation. Now that we’ve found the key to unlock that door, there’s a hallway of more doors in terms of what functionality can come from it,” said Meagan Keane, director of product marketing, pro video strategy, during an interview at the 2025 NAB Show.

“When we think big picture, all of the new features that you see that we’ve talked about at the show this year are actually either evolutions of sort of foundations that we built years ago,” Keane said.

“If you think about speech-to-text for example, when we launched speech-to-text a few years back we said this is a foundation to unlock more capabilities. So then you saw text-based editing and now you see caption translation.”

Search functionality just the beginning

Keane explained that search functionality is just the beginning for media intelligence, with organization and leveraging of visual content, transcript data and metadata all potential next steps.

“When you’re editing and you’re wanting to tell a story, you’re not necessarily wanting to go in and deal with the like, ‘Okay, where was that?’ Or, ‘How do I find it?’ Or, ‘I know that I have this whole bin of things, but how do I navigate through it?'” Keane said.

The technology appears particularly valuable for media organizations with extensive archives. Keane noted that the “Saturday Night Live” team processed “thousands of hours of footage through media intelligence” as they prepared for the show’s 50th anniversary.

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Balancing craft with convenience

Adobe is working to balance development across different priorities, according to Keane.

“We’re really working hard to strike a balance between core functionality, core workflows, color, sound, graphics, all of the craft editing things along with what we’re calling quality of life,” she said. “Those little things that editors just, they’re annoying, they get in your way, they’re a headache as well as stability and performance.”

Keane indicated that AI tools like generative extend are designed to address these workflow challenges.

“That’s a headache for editors, where you’re like, I just, I don’t even need that much more, but it takes such a long time to solve it without this feature, and now that we have it, it really lets people continue with their creative flow versus being taken out of it,” she said.

Community drives feature development

Adobe has established a practice of releasing features in beta to gather community feedback before final release.

“Over the last few years, establish this practice of putting features and functionality into beta and then really listening to what the community has to say, you know, what feedback we hear, where people are like, you know, this isn’t exactly how I feel like it should work,” she said.

This approach has significantly affected product development. “All of the features that we’re talking about at the show today, we launched into beta, but they’re not the same features that we launched into beta because we’ve been able to evolve with community input and the feedback during those times,” Keane explained.

Social media reshapes video workflows

With a diverse customer base, Adobe tools have to support both traditional video uses and short-form social, with the latter a unifying workflow challenge across all sectors.

“When you look at core workflows, they’re not that different,” she said. “One use case we see across every discipline is short form social content. That every company, whether you’re producing sports for broadcast, you also have some social entity, or you’re producing episodic for television, you also have some social entity.”

This convergence of needs influenced the development of generative extend, pushing Adobe to enhance its capabilities during the beta testing phase.

“One of the main things that happened with Generative Extend between when we put it in beta and launching it here is, it had to be 4K and we had to support vertical video because everybody’s doing social,” Keane said.

Enterprise services for broadcasters

Keane highlighted the recent announcement of Firefly services for broadcast customers.

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“At Adobe Summit last month, we announced Firefly services for video. So things like reframe, auto reframe, things like translate captions that enhance speech that you can put in a whole mass of media from an enterprise environment and run those services in an API state,” she said.

These services offer “a certain element of automation to it so that you’re not using the time of your editors or your post crews to do these things,” Keane explained, noting they can help deliver content “to all the different geos, to all the different platforms, to all the different framing.”

“The most important thing is what we’re hearing from our community and what we’re hearing from our customers in terms of what they need. And that’s what drives us when we talk about big picture. How we’re designing our strategies, how we’re looking to the future is really in concert with our community,” she said.

This customer-focused approach extends to Adobe’s work with the Firefly team. “Our job on the pro video side is, what functionality makes the most sense to actually bring into the tool? Because not all of it will necessarily be relevant to our users,” Keane said.