Industry Insights: 2020 elections and technology advancements

With 2020 on the horizon, we recently gathered a panel of broadcast industry veterans to look ahead.

In this Industry Insights panel, our group previews the 2020 United States general election along with the technology advancements to watch for in the year ahead. 


Make sure to read the rest of our 2020 Industry Insights series, including:


Does the United States general election impact your business in 2020?

“Yes, of course. Any Election year, especially in large countries like the US, do impact in business, as elections require follow up, increased coverage and, at the end of the process, the Elections’ Day show, which makes all broadcasters compete for the audience delivering their best-of-breed, impactful graphics to better present the data,” said Brainstorm’s marketing and communications director, Miguel Churruca.

“Yes, we have already seen positive trends from this globally, not just in the U.S. as the presidential election coverage has grown into sort of another global sporting event,” said Straker Coniglio, head of global product management for Vizrt.

“Without a clearer idea on who the Democratic candidate will be it is too early to tell. The economy has been pretty stable under the incumbent and while there are some indications it would react poorly to some of the plans that have been put forward. Zixi is also at the forefront of modern internet economics, so as organizations look to cut costs we are involved in those conversations,” John Wastcoat told us. He’s the senior vice president of alliances and marketing at Zixi.

“The election will sure create a lot of content across many platforms which is always good news for Signiant but in terms of the final result, probably best not to comment,” said Signiant’s CMO Jon Finegold.

“Given one of our products’ biggest advantages is cost reduction versus legacy approaches, we feel our business may increase if the election was to cause the financial markets to drop, that will slow the consumption of the media services and force more cost reductions in the supply chain to maintain profits. That’s where expensive infrastructure and software maintenance fees get evaluated more and a cloud/pay as you consume the service financial model makes more sense,” said Aaron Sloman, chief technology officer at Ownzones.

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“Chyron is the U.S. market leader in broadcast graphics, and a majority of our customers use Chyron Graphics together with a NewsTicker back-end for elections data. For these reasons, we expect the 2020 U.S. elections to have a massive impact on our business in the coming year. Because Chyron solutions are perfectly suited to telling election stories in new and different ways, we also expect to see increased investment in our CG, ticker, video wall, touch-screen, and augmented graphics or virtual set technologies,” explained Olivier Cohen, head of commercial strategy at Chryon-Hego’s broadcasting business unit.

“Yes, when elections occur, ad revenue goes up, which means there’s more money to spend on technology. In 2020 I think that spend will be focused on IP/OTT distribution technologies and cloud,” stated Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions at Avid.