Industry Insights: Remote production, automation and efficiency in broadcast workflows

In this second part of our three-part Industry Insights series on workflows, we examine the forces driving efficiency and innovation in broadcast production processes.

Today’s industry faces growing demands for faster, more adaptable production processes, balanced by the need for cost-effective solutions. Experts discuss advancements in IP-based technologies, cloud-based tools, automation and remote production that are challenging traditional workflows, from reducing physical infrastructure to enabling seamless content collaboration across distances.

Industry Insights: Navigating the future of broadcast workflows

Dive into their insights on how these changes are helping broadcasters achieve operational efficiency, flexibility and strategic growth in an increasingly competitive environment.

Key takeaways from the Industry Insights roundtable

• The shift to IP-based workflows is creating new efficiencies, reducing infrastructure needs and offering flexible, scalable options for broadcasters.
• Cloud-based solutions and remote production workflows allow for decentralized content creation, enabling broadcasters to cover events from virtually anywhere.
• Centralized asset management and automated indexing are helping broadcasters maximize the value of large media archives.
• Broadcasters are increasingly adopting integrated platforms, allowing for collaboration across roles and more user-friendly, unified workflows.

What is driving efficiency (and cost savings) in broadcast production today?

Paul Turner, director of product management, AJA Video Systems: The move toward the IT transport of baseband video is driving new efficiencies and cost savings in broadcast production. With SMPTE ST 2110, for instance, you can get a couple of 4K/UltraHD or a significant number of HD signals across a single 25 GigE SMPTE ST 2110 cable. SMPTE ST 2110 is also bi-directional, so you can send signals back and forth between multiple destinations while decreasing your rack space and reducing power consumption.

Sergio Ammirata, founder and chief scientist at SipRadius: The ability to send signals anywhere, to be viewed on any device with ultra-low latency, is transformational. Using techniques like rist2rist means distribution networks — to remote editors, to supervising producers, to final delivery — can be spun up via the cloud when needed; dropped the moment the production ends.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: Automation, cloud-based solutions, and centralized asset management are key drivers of efficiency and cost savings in broadcast production. By using streamlined workflows and optimized resource allocation, broadcasters reduce operational expenses while accelerating production timelines.

James Fraser, VP of U.S. sales, Moments Lab: AI tools are rapidly enhancing efficiency and driving cost savings in broadcast production. For example, multimodal AI technology — a type of machine learning that is designed to mimic human perception — can analyze, index, and make vast media libraries discoverable, allowing users to pinpoint specific moments in record time. One of Moments Lab’s U.S. broadcast customers has more than 200,000 hours of content in its archives and is now able to index and find valuable clips in seconds.

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Rick Young, SVP and head of global products, LTN: There are two major trends we see — both are driven in part — by technology advancements. First, editorial, producing and content creation teams are now extending their roles to include historically more production and technical type roles. Second, this efficiency play is a result of solutions now finding their way to market that collapse previously complex features and functions to more user-friendly, automation driven, workflows.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Blackmagic Design: A significant driving force in this area is the shift towards IP-based workflows but executed in a more accessible, flexible and cost-effective way; for example, by using 10G Ethernet, SMPTE-2110 IP video products can be smaller, lower power and more affordable. Another major hurdle for SMPTE-2110 adoption is needing an IT department to keep video systems running, but Blackmagic 2110 IP converters, for example, solve this because they connect point to point. You don’t need to use a complex Ethernet switch if you don’t want to, and you can reap the advantages of SMPTE-2110 IP video using simple Ethernet cables, remote power and bidirectional video. 

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Operational efficiency hinges on a unified platform where all required tools seamlessly work together towards a desirable outcome. In Home’s case, this includes an intuitive user interface, the discovery and registration of production tools, user privileges for security, and the ability to configure the processing tools from a central location. Production efficiency, on the other hand, can be achieved through hardware-agnostic processing apps that all run on the same IT platform and offer the ability to start and stop them as needed.

Costa Nikols, strategy advisor for M&E, Telos Alliance: The business fundamental of ‘doing more with less’ has the same implications for audio as it does for video. The rapidly growing number of downstream formatting requirements and global distribution endpoints make it incredibly challenging to manage and mix all the required audio tracks in an efficient, reliable way. We’re seeing content providers increasingly lean on automated processing to achieve the levels of scale required today while managing production costs.

Aaron Kroger, product marketing lead, Dalet: Ultimately, technology is the main driver of efficiency and cost savings today with scalability and elasticity, but it’s not just the technology itself, it’s also the new workflows it enables. With today’s connectivity and collaboration enabled by new tech we are seeing massive efficiencies with mutualized resources across teams, locations and organizations avoiding duplicate efforts while delivering better results.

How does automation enhance efficiency in broadcast production workflows?

Andy Hooper, SVP of live products, Ateliere Creative Technologies: Automation and related approaches to infrastructure provisioning and orchestration, that have long existed in enterprise IT and telco for example, will enable the automated setup of platforms and workflows for a production. The resources will be provisioned and deprovisioned on a just-in-time basis. Unlocking this ability to use the right tools for the right job, and removing decades of traditional broadcast overhead where it’s not absolutely required, will be a key productivity boost.

Sam Peterson: Automation eliminates repetitive tasks, accelerates content processing, and reduces human error, leading to faster, more efficient production workflows. With a technology partner skilled in workflow automation, broadcasters can automate routine functions like file transfers and metadata tagging, allowing teams to focus on creative and strategic tasks.

James Fraser: Our ongoing conversations with customers have revealed that it can take as long as five minutes to find just one specific shot in raw video footage, and painstakingly an entire day to find content to build a 10-minute video story. With automated AI-powered media indexing and search, that content discovery process is reduced to a matter of minutes. This efficiency allows production teams to work faster, focus more on creative tasks, and accelerates workflows, enabling broadcasters and content creators to maximize the value of their media archives.

Chris Scheck: Adding to the normal stress of any broadcast production is a growing tendency to achieve more with less. As a result, every person in a control room is there for more than one reason, and, depending on a production’s complexity, an operator may have so much to do and supervise that every bit of automation is welcome to keep the workload bearable while also encouraging creative storytelling.

Sergio Brighel, EVP of robotics and prompting technology, Videndum Production Solutions: Automation allows to have repeatable, consistent and robust workflows. It allows orchestrators to condense articulated sequences of tasks on different sub-systems to happen synchronously in agreement to a given storyboard.

How can broadcasters leverage automation to improve production processes?

Paul Turner: Automation is all about doing things at an exact time, in an exact way, which can be challenging in a broadcast environment, where there’s always going to be some level of unpredictability. That said, evolutions in AL and ML are opening new doors to automate select elements of the live production process, from culling through and presenting live and historical stats that broadcasters can add to graphics to enhance the fan experience to assisting with closed captioning. As for improving production processes through automation, the possibilities are still being explored, and there are likely more developments to emerge in the next few years.

James Fraser: Automation effectively eliminates some of the more tedious, mundane, and time-consuming elements of video production – like sifting through raw footage to extract sound bites and specific shots to assemble a rough cut. What we’re seeing with AI automation is a significant amount of time saved for broadcasters through the automatic detection of video highlights, so content producers can focus on the storytelling element much sooner and allow them to work on creating more engaging content.

Chris Scheck: Audio production is a perfect case in point: audio-follows-video and Automix functionality are must-haves. Automix needs to be clever enough to preserve a constant, natural-sounding ambience level without phase issues, while also responding instantly to changing speakers. Lawo’s Kick close-ball mixing software helps A1s to serve crisp kick and other on-pitch noises in the expected larger-than-life format.

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Sergio Brighel: Automation, orchestrators and AI could assist with content generation by adding flexibility, rapidity of re-deployment of a given set of resources. Centralized control systems could be capable of controlling multiple subsystems at once, leveraging on creativity for a better visual appearance of the gathered pictures.

Aaron Kroger: There are many areas where automation can be used to increase speed and efficiency of production workflows such as automating ingest workflows which allows for content to come in, be converted, analyzed, tagged, and more in a single process vs many manual steps. Localization and versioning is another area where automation plays a big role. With the increasing global audience, the need for additional versions is critical and automation combined with AI can drive the creation of multiple versions with ease.

How is remote production influencing broadcast workflows?

Sergio Ammirata: Traditional wisdom is that the whole system has to be synchronized to a single master clock, but the non-deterministic IP circuits in remote production make that very difficult. Treating PTP like the old station clock system really does not work: We have created a simple device which takes time from GPS or cellular services and creates a PTP grand master at each location, ensuring synchronisation to broadcast standards. 

Sam Peterson: Remote production allows for more flexible, decentralized workflows, reducing the need for large on-site teams and making it easier to cover events worldwide. When combined with cloud and automation tools, remote production becomes a powerful way to ensure continuity and reduce costs while maintaining broadcast quality.

Will Waters, principal product manager, Audinate: REMI workflows have been possible in the industry for years. Now, with the introduction of cloud-based production software tools, this offers additional options that make it easier to spin up complex production workflows in a more expedient, cost-effective and efficient way — remote production evolves to distributed production.

Robert Szabo-Rowe, head of engineering and product management, Tata Comms Media: Remote and distributed production seem a logical sustainability response that simply makes good business sense. Broadcasters can produce more content using fewer resources while maintaining high production standards. Smaller onsite crews, less equipment, and fewer vehicles mean less travel and transport — which in turn leads to lower emissions and reduced expenses.

Jay Ganesan, SVP, APAC, Amagi: Remote production enables broadcasters to access and oversee their operations from any location, eliminating the need for on-premises playout infrastructure. This shift offers increased flexibility and efficiency, allowing broadcasters to focus on content creation and monetization while leaving technical aspects to cloud specialists.

Bob Caniglia: Remote production is revolutionizing broadcast workflows by enabling seamless collaboration from anywhere, for example, video converters like the ATEM Streaming Bridge allow broadcasters and bloggers to collaborate on shows and create a global network of high-quality remote broadcast studios. Moreover, one of the particularly groundbreaking aspects of Blackmagic Cloud and the URSA Broadcast G2 camera that demonstrates the impact and influence of remote workflows is the ability to upload videos directly to Blackmagic Cloud, so that media becomes instantly accessible at the studio. Live syncing and editing media on DaVinci Resolve while the camera is recording enables editors worldwide to access footage immediately and means that, even with remote workflows, breaking news can be delivered to air within seconds.

David Isola, director of product marketing, Black Box: With the transition from SDI to IP, we are now seeing cost savings and an increase in collaborative flexibility that has opened the door for IP-based news, sports and other live productions. First, it provides access — from anywhere in the world — to media assets, editing tools, and playout systems, all of which can now be managed remotely. Second, because IP is an open standard, it is extremely versatile and can be used in almost every type of network — including LANs, WANs, and the internet — and integrate seamlessly with IT tools, giving broadcasters the ability to adapt to future advancements with ease.

Chris Scheck: The most obvious effect of remote or distributed productions is that producers and directors can work with their favorite team members more often, and that less travel is involved for most operators. Concurrently, a growing number of venues is being outfitted with the infrastructure needed to ingest and backhaul signals to the production hub. Depending on how far broadcasters and venue owners go, a small van is enough to cover sporting or election events.

Industry Insights: Navigating the future of broadcast workflows