Industry Insights: Navigating budget shifts and digital transformation

By NewscastStudio January 15, 2025

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As the broadcast industry navigates significant economic shifts in 2025, technology vendors offer insights into the changing financial landscape and operational priorities.

This Industry Insights roundtable explores how broadcasters are balancing investment strategies between capital expenditure and operational costs while adapting to evolving market demands. The discussion examines budget considerations, infrastructure decisions, and the distinct challenges facing both traditional and non-traditional broadcasters.

Industry leaders address critical questions about sustainability, revenue generation, and the impact of emerging technologies on business models as organizations seek to maintain competitiveness in an increasingly complex media environment.


Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

  • Budget transformation: Organizations are shifting away from traditional capital expenditure models toward hybrid approaches that combine on-premises infrastructure with cloud services to optimize costs and flexibility.
  • Revenue pressure: Traditional broadcasters face increasing competition for advertising revenue and content rights from digital platforms, forcing adaptation of business models and monetization strategies.
  • Infrastructure evolution: The transition from traditional broadcast engineering to IT-based systems represents a significant technical and cultural shift, requiring new expertise and training.
  • Market competition: Non-traditional broadcasters face challenges in content discovery and audience retention while working to match the production quality of established media organizations.
  • Cost management: Budget constraints are driving broadcasters to seek operational efficiencies through automation, AI implementation, and streamlined workflows.

What shifts do you anticipate in the economics of broadcasting in the next year? 

Vincent Noyer, director of product marketing, Lynx Technik: Decentralized productions enable more staff to work remotely, which results in savings on travel, logistics, and operational costs, while also reducing CO2 emissions.

Dan Goman, CEO, Ateliere Creative Technologies: The media and entertainment industry is navigating a fragmented landscape where myriad small players vie for attention, leading to complex vendor relationships and inconsistent services. A rise in mergers and acquisitions highlights a strategic move towards cohesion and innovation. This consolidation trend is reshaping the industry, offering both challenges and opportunities for collaboration and growth among smaller entities.

Russell Johnson, director, Hitomi Broadcast: We’re seeing a cooling in the bidding wars for sports rights from streaming giants, while major sports organizations are exploring direct-to-consumer models. Production companies are being asked to deliver higher production values with increasingly constrained budgets, driving innovation in efficient workflow solutions.

Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo: The industry has been severely challenged over recent years, where macro-economic weakness has stalled the growth of advertising revenues, and the cost of living crisis among consumers have put some limits on consumer spending on content. However, we’re also seeing that consistent price increases over the past two years together with frugality among most media companies have made wonders for their income statements.  As we move into 2025, when many media companies have managed to prove that they can make streaming video services a new source of profitability, which can compensate for the inevitable decline in legacy business, I believe we will see the focus shift back to growth and innovation.

James Eddershaw, managing director for Shotoku: There is always significant pressure to do more with less. Most major broadcasters are now in competition with small “home” news streamers, so they must differentiate with production quality and utilize every inch of studio space to maximize the viewer experience. This can potentially be achieved with more VR/AR/XR, or simply with more interesting camera positions and motion.

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Peter Docherty, CTO and founder, ThinkAnalytics: Broadcasters are likely to prioritize operational efficiencies to streamline costs and maintain competitiveness. Pay-TV providers will focus on safeguarding their ad revenues, while FAST platforms will work to grow their advertising income. A big focus will be on reducing churn by enhancing user engagement and retaining audiences more effectively.

Steve Reynolds, CEO, Imagine Communications: I think the industry will stay at the 50/50 point between linear and digital revenue through 2025, because where we’re currently seeing real growth is on the live linear side of streaming. We’ll also see continued audience fragmentation drive the industry toward a Total TV trading model that rejects the artificial divide between linear and streaming, instead focusing on the supply vs. demand economics of non-premium and premium ad inventory. Premium inventory is about making more by optimizing yield and price, non-premium is about spending less by automating sales and execution — together, they create a path to sustainable profitability.

Sergio Brighel, EVP, robotics and prompting technology, Videndum: 2024 showed a greater focus on monetization rather than cutting costs. In the next year, I anticipate broadcasters will increasingly look to repurpose existing content and optimize their assets, leveraging strategies like content syndication, contextual advertising, and subscription models to unlock new revenue streams. This cost-conscious approach will drive innovation in how broadcasters maximize the value of their content and engage audiences, shifting the focus from cost reduction to revenue generation.

Ciro Noronha, president, The RIST Forum: There’s likely to be a few sizeable shifts occurring in broadcasting for 2025, perhaps most notably is the cost of IP bandwidth going down, meaning connectivity is becoming available to everyone at a lower price. This trend makes remote production more appealing for broadcasters, allowing them to save on travel costs and re-use equipment where they couldn’t before.

Do you see 2025 as a CapEx or OpEx year? 

Sergio Ammirata, founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: OpEx was never really widely adopted in the media industry, and we see a firm move back to CapEx. The big OpEx cloud models work well in different industries but do not suit the unique demands of large media files and streams across workflows, resulting in extremely high costs. Media businesses are realizing that just buying the kit they need is actually a significant cost saving, and the trend will be firmly towards on premise implementations.

James Eddershaw, managing director for Shotoku: We see CapEx (modestly) increasing over the coming years. After many recent delays and postponements, we feel expenditure will be necessary now. 2024 was a big election year with many uncertainties, now that they are over there is at least more clarity and we anticipate there will be more appetite to invest.

Neil Maycock, CCO, Pebble: Commercial models from technology suppliers should align with the need to operate across different infrastructures. For some companies, CapEx may suit their requirements and corporate budgeting, especially in cases with predictable usage patterns. However, operations requiring flexible broadcast patterns can benefit from OpEx, which better aligns costs with revenues.

Peter Watling, senior sales director, EMEA, Perifery: Yes, I believe 2025 will be a year of change and investment. Legacy technologies are becoming unsustainable for modern workflows, and with purchasing happening in cycles, 2025 presents the opportunity for core infrastructures to be re-evaluated. Cloud solutions are proving their value by offering flexibility with operational spending, and similar cost-effective options are now available for on-prem infrastructure.

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: Only for all things AI. But good luck buying anything unless you’re already in the front of the line. If you aren’t, the cloud providers will be the only place to go. So CapEx for the early birds and OpEx for the rest.

Erling Hedkvist, sales and business development, Arkona Technologies and Manifold Technologies: We are seeing an increased demand for OpEx based pricing from a selection of our customers, although still a minority. With interest rates at a record high, it’s becoming more difficult for some of our customers to get cheap financing so, in particular for software, the possibility for doing an OpEx based model that maps to the contract length is very attractive.

Sanjay Duda, CEO, Planetcast Media Services: No, 2025 will likely see a decline in traditional CapEx spending. Instead, investments will focus on cloud-driven and OpEx models to provide greater agility and innovation. Media companies will selectively upgrade infrastructure for hybrid models while leveraging cloud-first solutions to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market​​.

Philip Grossman, VP, business development and solutions architecture, DigitalGlue: I see 2025 as a rebalancing of OpEx and CapEx as I believe organizations have been able to better evaluate the variability of cloud OpEx cost against capital cost for their operations. We will see things move towards more private based cloud operations where cost can be more predictable and balance OpEx and CapEx investments. Public cloud offerings will assume more of a “burst” or expansion role.

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How are budgets changing for 2025 and beyond? 

Peter Docherty, CTO and founder, ThinkAnalytics: With increasing budget pressures, the emphasis is shifting toward initiatives that deliver proven value by enhancing consumer engagement, loyalty, and average revenue per user (ARPU), while also defending and growing advertising revenues. Operational efficiencies are becoming a priority, particularly for editorial and curation teams, with greater reliance on automation tools such as content intelligence tools such as ThinkFAST and personalization systems to optimize workflows and maximize impact.

Peter Watling, senior sales director, EMEA, Perifery: Spend has gone down and technology improvements take a back seat. We need to continuously improve and evolve while being cautious with our spend. With that in mind, the budget will be available for the right things, the technology of the future and the platforms that will make a difference, but it has to be directly related to cost savings, efficiencies and revenue generation.

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: We serve a global market. Budgets are generally down, with noticeable exceptions where flagship events (mostly sport-related) and elections can drive peak spending. Those offering solutions that help with consolidation and drive scales of efficiency, like ours of course, can thrive in these market conditions.

Duncan Beattie, market development manager, Tuxera: I feel one of the biggest shifts we have seen is in high-quality content by OTT providers. This, of course, increases production costs and I see more of this content being produced. To counteract these increased costs, we have already seen additional streaming subscription tiers being added.

Nick Anderson, product manager, DigitalGlue: Budgets will be tighter as the shift from broadcast to digital media consumption reaches its apex. Spending decisions will need to be made through the lens of reducing operational costs, analyzing the history of variable priced options like cloud and the labor costs of complexity. Transitioning to innovative and predictable solutions will be the only way to cut costs as broadcast revenues inevitably shrink due to generational audience loss.

What is the biggest challenge for tier one broadcasters in 2025? 

Content & Audience Retention

Sergio Ammirata, founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: Audience behaviors are changing in ways which are very significant for major broadcasters. While they still value the concept of channels as brands, audiences no longer tolerate being told when to watch. As linear channels break down, so the fundamental business model of commercials embedded in linear streams breaks down.

Simon Hawkings, director of sales and business acceleration, Ross Video: The biggest one is that where linear TV subscribers are dropping, those viewers are still watching content elsewhere, arguably more than ever. Live sports were one of the remaining areas of differentiation for traditional broadcasters, but we’re increasingly seeing non-traditional broadcasters like DAZN, Amazon, and even Apple buying up sports rights that were traditionally the domain of the big broadcasters. They’re competing directly, and it’s hard for traditional broadcasters to match their spending ability.

Megan Fasy, CEO and co-founder, Grithaus Agency: The US election made clear a seismic shift that has taken place in the media landscape, one that has particularly impacted tier one broadcasters and media companies that have generally “owned” the news cycle. Which is, simply, that they no longer own the news narrative – as consumers have become more wary of mainstream media, they’ve turned to alternative sources across the digital landscape. In 2025, broadcasters will have to grapple with changing consumer viewing habits and fragmentation by embracing digital channels, reinventing the way news is presented, and cultivating trustworthy personalities that can frame stories in a way that is both approachable and informative.

Neil Maycock, CCO, Pebble: Audiences turn to the top broadcasters for the best content, trustworthy news and live sports. These are all very expensive, especially as production values continue to rise. Their big challenge is to find cost savings which do not impact on-screen.

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Gatis Gailis, CEO and founder, Veset: Most notably, tier one broadcasters will likely experience significant competition from DTC solutions, such as streaming services and mobile-first device workflows. To adapt to this change in consumer demand, tier one broadcasters will need to provide for changing viewer habits by implementing new engagement strategies. Another challenge for tier one broadcasters will be the constant change in regulations, specifically content standards and advertising practices. Broadcasters will need to ensure compliance, while also maintaining a competitive edge.

Peter Watling, senior sales director, EMEA, Perifery: Making good programming that continues to attract audiences and investing wisely in technology that is suitable for tomorrow’s world. This is in addition to managing the financial restrictions and corporate responsibilities. Keeping up with the Jones’s isn’t enough. We all need to strive for more and better while using fewer resources.

Technical & Operational Transformation

Russell Johnson, director, Hitomi Broadcast: The transition from traditional broadcast engineering to IT-based systems represents perhaps the biggest cultural and technical shift our industry has seen. Training broadcast engineers to be comfortable with networking concepts and managing complex IP infrastructures will be crucial.

Peter Docherty, CTO and founder, ThinkAnalytics: Striking a balance between internal teams’ preference for building in-house solutions and the time-to-market and cost advantages of adopting best-of-breed solutions from external vendors.

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: They have to make the transition to IP solutions to reduce operating costs, while maintaining the reliability and quality audiences expect. Moving from SDI architectures and satellite and fiber delivery requires a massive shift in infrastructure, workflows and mindset. Broadcasters will need to develop a comprehensive understanding of the new technologies so they can plan for robust redundancy and optimized workflows, all the while maintaining quality and controlling costs.

Costa Nikols, executive-team strategy advisor for media and entertainment, Telos Alliance: One of the biggest challenges for tier-one broadcasters in 2025 will be managing the complexity of multi-vendor solutions and the diverse pricing models that come with cloud-based and virtualized production systems. As broadcasters increasingly rely on a combination of different vendors’ technologies, navigating multiple subscription models, licenses, and cost structures becomes more difficult. To address this, the industry will need to push for more standardized consumption models across vendors, simplifying the integration of various solutions.

Sanjay Duda, CEO, Planetcast Media Services: Tier-one broadcasters will need to navigate the operational complexity brought by increasing platform diversity and consumer demand for personalization. To maintain leadership, adopting scalable, unified workflows that integrate cloud and AI technologies will be crucial. This will enable broadcasters to achieve greater agility and efficiency in meeting evolving market needs​​.

Yang Cai, CEO and president of VisualOn: As the media landscape continues to evolve, broadcasters must adapt to the shift towards digital platforms and streaming services. This requires significant investments in technology, content creation, and distribution strategies. Balancing these new digital initiatives with traditional linear television will be a delicate act, especially as consumer preferences shift and advertising revenue models change.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: Tier one broadcasters must balance delivering premium, high-quality content with managing the complexity and cost of scaling workflows for global events. They’ll also face pressure to integrate advanced audience personalization without sacrificing operational efficiency. Appear’s flexible, high-performance platforms help meet these demands by enabling broadcasters to scale production seamlessly while maintaining control over quality and costs.

Business Model & Monetization

Meghna Krishna, chief revenue officer, Magnifi: The rise of streaming platforms has intensified competition, pushing traditional broadcasters to invest heavily in digital transformation and rethink how they engage audiences online. Advertising revenues, a mainstay of traditional broadcasting, are also in decline as viewers shift to on-demand services, forcing broadcasters to explore new monetization models like subscriptions and targeted ads. At the same time, emerging technologies such as AI, augmented reality, and advanced broadcasting standards offer exciting opportunities but require significant investment and operational changes. 

Sergio Brighel, EVP, robotics and prompting technology, Videndum: The biggest challenge will probably be understanding how to control technological transformation, audience fragmentation, and financial pressures. Audiences are progressively turning to on-demand and streaming platforms over traditional tier one broadcasters. To counter this tendency (which dilutes the advertisers’ addressable market) tier one players must react by monetizing additional/exclusive content, managing costs by adopting leading-edge technologies (like robotics, AI driven control platform and innovative interfaces between man and machines), and maintaining a strong brand identity to differentiate from the relative anonymity of diverse streaming/social media opponents.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: In 2025, broadcasters will need to balance cost-efficiency and audience engagement amid growing competition and shifting viewer behaviors. The focus will be on adopting technology solutions, like hybrid cloud, that deliver tangible results — reducing operational costs, optimizing workflows, and enabling faster, high-quality content delivery. Success will depend on aligning these innovations with strategic goals such as monetization and audience expansion.

What is the biggest challenge for non-traditional broadcasters in 2025?

Content Discovery & Audience Retention

Dan Goman, CEO, Ateliere Creative Technologies: In 2025, non-traditional broadcasters will grapple with making their content discoverable amidst market saturation while balancing personalization with privacy concerns. They face challenges in standing out against established players due to algorithm biases and must innovate monetization models beyond ads and subscriptions. Success will hinge on leveraging AI for personalization without breaching data trust or compliance.

Mathieu Planche, CEO, Witbe: A frequently overlooked challenge affecting broadcasters and video service providers – of all sizes — is content discoverability. In a fragmented media landscape, providers need to ensure content reaches their intended audience through an increasingly complex distribution ecosystem. To rise to this challenge, broadcasters need to innovate metadata management, search optimization, and recommendation systems.

Megan Fasy, CEO and co-founder, Grithaus Agency: Non-traditional broadcasters appear to have the upper hand as we go into 2025 as audiences are turning to influencer and other non-broadcast media personalities for news, opinion, and entertainment, who often have free rein to present that content in any fashion they so desire, and even conflate in their “broadcasting.” That said, their capacity to hold audiences’ attention could be considered more tenuous than a more traditional broadcaster’s would be, as their market share of that attention may be fleeting, depending on a number of factors. Their challenge will be to retain audiences in a crowded marketplace, where viewers/listeners are seeking out news and opinion that reinforces their beliefs – ideally, without sacrificing journalistic integrity and the facts in favor of a “good story.”

Sergio Ammirata, founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: They must seize their agility to find new and sustainable business models. Much is talked about FAST, and the ability to spin up and shut down services in response to consumer demand is potentially valuable. But they need to find new ways of bringing viewers to audiences – not least through excellent content – if they are not to become just a different way of delivering linear television.

James Cranfield, VP, sales and partnerships, Cinedeck: As consumer demand increases, particularly with a focus on personalization and monetization, broadcasters will need to streamline workflows and implement more efficient methods of distributing content. Another challenge for broadcasters will be to adapt to the evolving technological changes caused by AI, ML and direct-to-consumer (DTC) models. Content delivery and production workflows will need to quickly adapt to these growing technological advancements as they are introduced into industry workflows.

Technical Quality & Infrastructure

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: For almost 80 years traditional television has built an expectation in the minds of audiences for seamless, high-quality, low latency, uninterrupted delivery. New entrants into the market have to recognize and respect these expectations, while providing engaging audio and video under enormous cost pressures. The upside is that they are not encumbered by traditional infrastructure, and can build the best workflows to meet their requirements, working with companies like Intinor to deliver exceptional experiences cost-effectively, without compromising quality.

Suzana Brady, SVP, worldwide sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital: Bringing SMPTE 2110 to the pro-AV and corporate communications world is significant challenge and the key technology to watch is IPMX. The pro-AV world is currently fragmented into multiple proprietary and closed solutions. Users are forced to choose a vendor and must live with the limitations of that choice.

Adam Marshall, CPO, Grass Valley: One of the biggest challenges is ensuring their content stands out in an increasingly saturated market. Quality and originality are critical for capturing and retaining audience attention, but many smaller, compression-based solutions that once dominated cloud and software workflows struggle to scale or meet the needs of more complex use cases. As a result, content producers are turning to more adaptable, scalable approaches, such as AMPP, to help them grow efficiently without the heavy infrastructure associated with traditional broadcasting, providing the flexibility needed to meet evolving demands.

Richard Rees, CEO, QuickLink: The biggest challenge for non-traditional broadcasters in 2025 is that there are huge demands from audiences for non-traditional broadcasters to deliver content on the level of broadcasters. While that seems like an unachievable task, it is very much achievable with the right tools. For example, StudioPro allows users to create and deliver content on-level with broadcasters by utilizing their existing skills, through a “scene-based” methodology. 

Business & Competitive Challenges

Neil Maycock, CCO, Pebble: Competing for audiences is the big challenge, and non-traditional services face the reality that they may be serving a small, highly selective audience. Part of the business case for these services is the opportunity to leverage more targeted advertising. This requires greater sophistication in planning systems and in the automation that delivers the advertising, ensuring both efficiency and effectiveness in reaching their audience.

Erling Hedkvist, sales and business development, Arkona Technologies and Manifold Technologies: The continued pressure on price is a significant factor. By utilizing COTS hardware, broadcasters can lower capital expenditures and avoid vendor lock-in, resulting in more cost-effective solutions. Moreover, software solutions enable OpEx and usage-based pricing, which offers greater financial flexibility and predictability.

Duncan Beattie, market development manager, Tuxera: Competing with the established players and OTT services the challenges will include investments in constantly evolving technology, infrastructure and distribution whilst scaling production and attempting to change existing consumer habits.

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