Industry Insights: The evolution and impact of advanced playout systems

In the second installment of the Industry Insights roundtable series, industry leaders discuss the benefits and innovations in media orchestration and advanced playout systems.

This conversation explores how automation, cloud-based solutions, and scalability are transforming broadcast operations. Topics include reducing operational complexity, ensuring seamless content delivery across platforms, and meeting the demands of increasingly fragmented audiences.

The discussion also highlights how broadcasters are leveraging intelligent technologies to improve efficiency, enhance reliability, and streamline workflows for evolving media environments.

Industry Insights: Balancing real-time demands, cost in media orchestration

Industry Insights: Opportunities and challenges with cloud-based content distribution

Key takeaways from the Industry Insights roundtable

• Automation reduces complexity: Automated playout systems streamline operations by minimizing manual tasks, lowering errors, and improving content availability across platforms.
• Cloud technology enhances scalability: Cloud-based solutions allow broadcasters to scale operations efficiently, adapting to diverse audience demands and complex workflows.
• Reliability is key: Advanced playout systems ensure seamless content delivery with robust failover mechanisms, pre-rendered assets, and real-time monitoring to minimize downtime.
• Integration supports flexibility: Playout technologies are increasingly designed to integrate with various platforms, enabling broadcasters to repurpose content effectively.
• Energy efficiency and cost savings: Consolidating infrastructure and using energy-efficient systems reduce operating costs and meet environmental goals.

What benefits do broadcasters gain from advanced playout systems?

Klaus Weber, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: Modern playout systems leverage flexible, scalable, cloud-first solutions to address the evolving challenges of diverse media delivery and consumption. By utilizing massively scalable, cloud-native technologies and an efficient microservices architecture, these systems enable high-density channel deployments. This allows playout channels to be deployed at scale — on-premises, in public or private clouds, or in hybrid configurations — ensuring optimal video processing based on media location or signal delivery needs.

Graham Sharp, CEO, BCNexxt: Advanced playout systems improve operational efficiency, simplify supply chains and consolidate distribution silos, resulting in reduced operating costs and increased reliability.

Rick Young, SVP and head of global products, LTN: When specifically speaking about the most valuable genres for new streaming platforms — live news and sports — a new approach to playout workflows is critical. Content created once must be leveraged to create unique — per-platform or region or often younger audience focused — specific experiences. And, in order to do that type of customization, modern playout systems must be built with non-technical users — often editorial and producer types — in mind.

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Neil Maycock, chief commercial officer, Pebble: We understand that broadcasters and media enterprises need to be highly flexible and agile to serve the right content to various audiences across multiple platforms. Today’s intelligent playout systems make that process much smoother by allowing services to be managed in real-time, minute by minute. This means broadcasters can get the most out of the technology and provide the best possible experience for their audiences.

Benjamin Shirley, product manager for broadcast, MainConcept: Advanced playout systems offer a robust file sequencing engine with nested playlist scheduling, live playlist manipulation, integrated graphics, redundancy, multi-channel output, live event support, integration layer and more. By combining all these elements, broadcasters can ensure channel production of the highest quality.

Mārtiņš Magone, CTO, Veset: Broadcasters and content providers are gradually shifting more and more towards a cloud playout infrastructure. Advanced playout systems offer benefits such as flexibility, scalability, cost-efficiency and customisability. By using advanced cloud playout solutions, broadcasters can tailor workflows, layouts and automation rules to their specific needs, supporting a wide range of formats and complex programming.

Stephane Cloirec, VP for video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Feature collapse offers clear infrastructure cost savings by reducing the number of products needed to manage complex workflows. It also accelerates the time to market and simplifies the day-to-day operation of playout workflows. In addition, reducing the number of products required for the job provides significant energy savings — fewer platforms mean lower power consumption and cooling requirements, benefitting environmental-conscious customers.

What role does automation play in media orchestration and playout?

Graham Sharp: Automation simplifies operations, increases efficiency and reduces on-air incidents by automating repetitive tasks and procedures and eliminating human errors, which are the largest cause (of on-air incidents).

Andy Warman, CTO for video, Imagine Communications: Automation ties together the real-time needs for linear ingest and playout services with the non-real-time functions for file-based ingest, media preparation, transcoding, QC, distribution and archive management. It ensures efficient operations by identifying potential issues with content availability, triggering workflows to resolve them, and providing status and completion notification. It inserts and manages SCTE triggers needed for effective ad insertion, enabling monetization of content delivered to consumers.

Rick Young: Tight integration and automation is absolutely at the core of making it all work in a multiplatform world. Systems must be created that include rich APIs, support for common methodologies like MRSS or reliable, well established standards like MOS in newsroom environments. Content assets are now produced in ways that make them ready for use across a variety of direct to consumer alongside traditional linear platforms, and live sources must be acquired easily for re-use throughout the day while also being immediately available to route to air for hungry audiences always looking for a fresh experience.

Michael Demb, VP of product strategy, TAG Video Systems: Automation is critical in reducing the manual burden on broadcast teams by leveraging features like ‘Monitoring by Exception.’ This ensures that only streams with detected issues are flagged for review, allowing operators to focus on resolving problems rather than constantly monitoring every tile in a mosaic across a monitoring wall. Additionally, tools like having a ‘Penalty Box’ isolate problematic streams, making it easier to address issues quickly.

Neil Maycock: From the start, automated playout systems made sure content was delivered exactly when and where it was needed. Now, advanced automation takes it a step further by acting as the central hub that moves and manages content across the operation. As media businesses grow — expanding to more channels and bigger operations — intelligent orchestration becomes crucial to keep everything running smoothly.

James Cranfield, global VP of sales and partnerships, Cinedeck: Automation is a rapidly growing feature in media orchestration systems, providing innovative methods of streamlining and gaining efficiency in our workflows. Automation accelerates tasks such as transcoding, reduces errors, saves time and ensures consistency across media workflows from creation to delivery.

David Edwards, product manager, Net Insight: The media business is highly competitive and dynamic. Operations teams are constantly searching for ways to achieve more, for less. Automation delivers operational efficiency allowing organizations to rapidly react and effectively compete. But for those at the coalface of operations automation enables multiple complex systems to be managed efficiently, at scale.

How does playout technology support seamless content delivery?

Graham Sharp: By time shifting the preparation of file-based content and the use of high levels of automation, content can be QC’d and checked with any fixes made ahead of on-air time. A well architected playout solution should provide versioning for multiple cross platform distribution channels, the ability to manage complex on-air events all with a high level (6 x 9’s) of robustness.

Andy Warman: It is commonplace for playout systems to support a mix of live and file origination for linear services and be able to handle native codec types in real time or leverage pre-processed assets suited for their target platform(s). It includes more effective SCTE decoration that is applicable for broadcast applications and for contextual ad insertion requirements for digital platforms. For today’s complex content delivery environments, advanced playout technology also supports the simultaneous output of multiple resolutions of baseband (SDI, 2110) and compressed outputs, and the ability to run in on-prem and cloud environments to maximize flexibility and optimize operational costs.

Neil Maycock: Ensuring seamless content delivery is the number one goal for any playout centre. What’s key here is efficiency, resilience, and security. Does the system deliver all outputs smoothly while making the best use of the infrastructure? Is the architecture resilient, with proper live failovers and backup resources, whether on-premises or in the cloud? And is the network protected against cyber threats that could harm both finances and reputation?

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Mārtiņš Magone: Playout technology contributes to seamless content delivery in a variety of ways, including the evolution of advanced switching capabilities, global CDN integration and the offer of end-to-end 24/7 playout. Cloud based playout technologies are advancing all the time, with broadcasters and providers looking towards a future of supportive solutions in 2025.

How do advancements in playout technology impact broadcast operations?

Graham Sharp: Migrating playout technology from hardware to containerized microservices-based software is bringing new levels of efficiency and reliability to broadcast operations. This reduces staffing requirements and costs, whilst enabling providers to meet the increasing demands of broadcasters’ multiple delivery platforms and service level agreements.

Andy Warman: There is a continual flow of business and technological changes taking place that are driving the evolution and advancement of playout technology. For example, there is a growing demand for playout technology to reduce or remove the overheads and complexities of operating standalone digital and broadcast workflows, replacing them with a single UI and UX tied to more efficient resource and media orchestration. Meanwhile, migrations to all IP solutions and optimized automation for high-touch (highly interactive) channels and localization are pushing playout to be more scalable and efficient in terms of resource utilization and operational oversight.

Rick Young: We see a general collapsing media creation product verticals. Said differently, the best solutions to complex multi platform distribution workflows must serve many use cases and contain the most important features from a variety of historically separate, narrow focused, products.

Hosted and streamlined playout and orchestration systems must be built for new work environments.

Neil Maycock: The growing use of intelligence and machine learning helps in two major ways. First, it adds resilience by reducing the risk of human error and automatically switching to backup sources if there’s a hardware issue. Second, it frees up staff from repetitive tasks, lowering operational costs and allowing them to focus on more complex services, like premium sports channels, where human input is essential.

Mārtiņš Magone: The rise of cloud playout has changed the way we think about broadcast and media, particularly over the last decade. Playout technology has introduced various opportunities for content providers, including streamlining the process of channel launches, since cloud playout reduces the time and resources required. The shift to cloud based solutions champions the benefits of cost-efficiency, flexibility and scalability.

What trends are shaping the future of playout and content distribution?

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: One of the key trends shaping the future of playout and content distribution is the “produce once, deliver to many” approach, and broadcasters and publishers must adapt to meet the demands of an increasingly fragmented audience. From traditional linear TV to OTT, social media, and on-demand services, the ability to repurpose and distribute content efficiently is paramount. Tools that integrate automation, multi-platform scheduling, and real-time content optimization are essential for staying ahead in this dynamic environment, ensuring broadcasters can maximize reach without overburdening their workflows.

Craig Wilson, product evangelist for broadcast and media, Avid: Being adaptable to future platforms is key, and which of these platforms are most attractive to audiences cannot be ignored. Delivering to different platforms, potentially with different standards, has to be factored into any future looking plan. As audience behavior changes, playout has to adapt to it, otherwise it risks losing audience share.

Rick Young: We are seeing the coming together of a number of historically separate technology market segments. Audiences are scattered, diverse and challenging to reach; a new way of doing business is the order of the day. As such, traditional newsroom and sports production systems, asset management, scheduling, playout and transport (for contribution and acquisition) are coming together to create the nimbleness and versatility required to do more with less with busier content creation teams.

Paul Schiller, product marketing manager, TAG Video Systems: Cloud-based solutions and adaptive monitoring are at the forefront of playout and content distribution, allowing broadcasters to scale operations and monitor streams more efficiently. Tools that enable monitoring by exception or automatic prioritization of critical streams (e.g., isolating issues via a “penalty box”) are also driving the shift towards more automated and reliable content delivery. These trends are key in reducing operational load while maintaining quality across all platforms.

Nivedita Nouvel, VP of marketing at Broadpeak: The future of playout and content distribution is driven by flexibility, efficiency in terms of cost and energy consumption levels, and technological advancements such as AI-driven automation, IP-based infrastructure, and personalized content delivery. Operators that control the access network and the home gateways will play a key part in the optimization of video delivery. Security is another topic that needs to be addressed when designing a content distribution strategy to avoid DDoS attacks, content scraping or token sharing.

Mārtiņš Magone: Generative AI is not a new prospect to the media and entertainment industry with it continuing to be a prominent force. That being said, the power and influence of AI in playout and content distribution cannot be understated. Workflow automation, scheduling, monitoring and dynamic ad insertion are just a few examples of how generative AI, ML and automation are shaping the future of our content.

Stefan Lederer, CEO and cofounder, Bitmovin: As service providers look to improve their ROI, the drive to create new and diverse revenue opportunities is obvious, and this is already shaping the future of content distribution. Already we’ve seen service providers create new revenue streams by monetizing their content with ads, and many are now exploring other ways to diversify monetization such as by offering new features or exclusive content like new episodes or livestreamed content for a “pay-per-feature” or “pay-per-event” fee.

Stephane Cloirec: Besides new formats and delivery platforms, the migration to IP and cloud-based infrastructure are key trends shaping the future of playout and content distribution. Rather than trying to do everything all at once in the cloud, broadcasters are adopting a pragmatic approach that favors hybrid deployments. They are keeping the most efficient workflows on-prem, while only transitioning those workflows to the cloud that truly benefit from its advantages.

How are broadcasters ensuring reliability in media orchestration and playout systems?

Graham Sharp: Broadcasters can ensure reliability of distribution by considering the following: simplify the supply chain by using a platform that can serve all distribution methods from a single content pool; pre-render non-live content, moving the process ahead of the on-air time; automate as many repetitive tasks as possible, especially QC; and move to a software solution that utilizes the high availability of the cloud.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: Reliability falls into several categories — the reliability of the software tools providing the orchestration, the reliability of the underlying platform software and the reliability of the host hardware. Reliability is achieved by the appropriate deployment of resilient hardware (which may be privately, or public cloud hosted), combined with appropriate underlying database architectures. The reliability of the orchestration and control software is fundamental and its use of the core components, such as the database.

Industry Insights: Balancing real-time demands, cost in media orchestration

Industry Insights: Opportunities and challenges with cloud-based content distribution