Industry Insights: Storage strategies in broadcasting, from on-prem to cloud

As broadcasting workflows evolve, effective storage strategies have become paramount for media organizations seeking scalability, efficiency and resilience.

In this first installment of our two-part Industry Insights roundtable on storage and media asset management, we discuss how cloud, on-premises and hybrid solutions are reshaping both operational dynamics and budget considerations.

From the move toward more nimble MAM approaches and flexible third-party integrations to the intensifying role of AI-based automation, broadcast professionals are exploring fresh ways to optimize content workflows across every production stage.

Our experts share insights on performance trade-offs, interoperability challenges, and the growing emphasis on balancing high-speed access with long-term cost management. Whether you’re looking for improved collaboration, future-proof archives, or a holistic approach to metadata, this conversation illuminates the trends that deserve close attention.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Nimble MAM: Broadcasters increasingly favor more flexible, interoperable platforms that are easier to scale and enhance user acceptance.
• Cloud caution: Cloud technologies offer unprecedented accessibility but require careful cost and security strategies for long-term success.
• Hybrid advantage: Combining on-prem and cloud balances local performance and remote collaboration, maximizing flexibility.
• Tiered storage: Automated content movement between high-performance and archival systems optimizes budgets without sacrificing accessibility.
• AI efficiency: AI-driven features in MAM accelerate workflows with faster metadata tagging and improved content discovery.

What trends in storage and MAM technologies should broadcast professionals be paying attention to?

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: The move away from gigantic, monolithic MAM systems to more nimble solutions that better solve individual problems is worth watching. Designing intelligent integration points between systems becomes vital, but independence and flexibility can be improved, and financial and technical risk can be minimized. User acceptance can also be greatly improved as platforms more tailored to their needs can be selected.

Sean Lee, CEO, OpenDrives: Broadcasters will be experimenting with various types of workflows (traditional, remote, hybrid, cloud, IP) as they search for faster and more cost-efficient ways to produce compelling, profitable content. Storage and MAM technologies will therefore be evolving to allow broadcasters to optimize their workflows and streamline collaboration and overall production times and will either choose to be an all-in-one platform with “integrated” storage and MAM technologies or a storage platform that can work with specific third-party MAMs. Closed storage and MAM technologies that do not interoperate and cannot flex to fast-changing broadcast workflow expectations will not survive so the pressure is on for storage and MAMs to ensure they are flexible enough to help broadcasters capture, edit, organize, transform, and deliver their content as fast as possible — and within budget.

Ryan Stoutenborough, president, Studio Network Solutions: While some automation technologies — particularly those involving AI — are still evolving, their potential to accelerate broadcast workflows is evident, and certainly worth keeping an eye on. Broadcast professionals are always exploring ways to improve the viewer experience, and automation can help them reach higher audience expectations by allowing creative team members focus on creative output while the automation or AI handles the technical minutia of metadata tagging, media backups, and so on.

Laquie TN Campbell, media and entertainment product marketing manager, Backblaze: Broadcast professionals should be paying attention to the continued push towards more interoperability between different MAM platforms and cloud storage systems, providing greater collaboration capabilities and easier content management through anywhere access across the production life cycle. The deployment of more AI and machine learning features enable intelligent archival processes, automated metadata tagging, content categorization, etc., so staff can focus more on compelling storytelling. Several enterprise-grade companies are also offering more democratization of choice regarding their pricing models via offering both consumption-based storage and capacity-based options, allowing broadcasters of all sizes to scale their infrastructure as they see fit.

Advertisement

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: The days of MAM systems being glorified digital filing cabinets are over. Today’s systems need to focus on automatic metadata generation because let’s face it – metadata models are like New Year’s resolutions to use that gym membership, great in theory but rarely followed through. The real trend is towards what I call the “active Archive” — keeping content alive and accessible down to the frame level, with accumulated metadata that actually makes your content library worth something

Claire Humphries, product manager, news and production, Grass Valley: Broadcast professionals should keep a sharp eye on AI trends, especially for enriching archives and creating secondary content from approved media through automated workflows. Migrating content to the cloud is another essential shift, offering flexibility while moving away from aging LTO technologies. These advancements empower broadcasters to unlock hidden value, streamline operations, and stay ahead in an evolving media landscape. 

Sam Peterson, media technology leader and COO, Bitcentral: Broadcast professionals should focus on the rapid adoption of hybrid cloud solutions, which combine the scalability and accessibility of cloud storage with the security and control of on-premises systems. Additionally, the integration of AI in MAM systems is revolutionizing workflows by automating metadata management, enabling real-time insights, and improving content discoverability for faster and more efficient production processes.

Sam Bogoch, CEO, Axle AI: Video is transitioning from being a massive, un-searchable “bulk” medium, to being searchable at a highly granular level, which makes repurposing for social media much more practical on short turnaround times. Expensive legacy MAMs are giving way to affordable, lighter-weight solutions that bring searchability to workgroups and distributed teams.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: Broadcasters need to focus on how they can best leverage cloud-based storage solutions and workflows, so they can tap into the power of seamless global collaboration. By leveraging the cloud and its ability to sync media files in real-time from remote locations, broadcast professionals have access to live footage from anywhere across the globe. Additionally, robust cloud-based collaboration tools, such as shared timeline editing, enhance efficiency and adaptability in dynamic production environments, ensuring broadcast teams can work together effectively and meet deadlines whether they are in-person or remote.

How do advancements in cloud storage impact the accessibility and scalability of media archives?

Derek Barrilleaux: Storage has always been a means to an end and needs to serve the business needs. Cloud storage is no different and has the obvious promise of improving collaboration and remote work, but without guardrails in place to keep traffic moving in the right direction, chaos ensues. Now that chaos is on an infinitely scalable storage medium, meaning costs can explode exponentially.

Sean Lee: A few years ago, broadcasters decided to adopt cloud-first or cloud-only strategies because it seemed cheaper to maintain, manage, and scale data in the cloud rather than on-premises hardware. Now more broadcasters are deciding to repatriate to on-premises or a hybrid of the two because they’ve discovered that relying primarily on the cloud meant having less control over performance, security, and even cost. When choosing where to best store your data, it’s important to consider that broad data accessibility is now less critical than the overall ROI and the total cost of that deployment.

David Phillips, senior solutions engineer, infrastructure, LucidLink: In the early days, cloud providers focused on solving scalability — both storage capacity and concurrent access. In recent years, however, media teams have shifted their attention to accessibility: how to access cloud archives using the file protocols required by creative applications and workflows. Next-generation cloud storage solutions, such as LucidLink, are now emerging to meet these needs.

Laquie TN Campbell: Cloud storage has evolved to provide seamless scalability from terabytes to petabytes and global expansion without performance compromises or additional costly infrastructure planning. Regarding accessibility, user-friendly cloud interfaces enable both technical and non-technical team members to seamlessly work with media assets without specialized training or equipment from anywhere in the world, while disaster recovery features ensure valuable IP is protected and accessible even in worst-case scenarios. As a real world use case, the integration of Backblaze and Mimir into the Philadelphia Eagles workflow allows Director of Production Stacy Kelleher to “easily share entire broadcasts by copying and sharing a link from our MAM without FTP downloads or uploading to other platforms.”

Jan Weigner: Cloud storage presents three specific pressure points: risk, latency, and cost — it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. However, when implemented thoughtfully, cloud enables true global collaboration. Just remember that if you can’t access your content in real-time, you can’t make money from it, and if you can access it all digitally, you can slice, dice, package, and sell it dozens of different ways immediately.

Whit Jackson, VP, global media and entertainment, Wasabi Technologies: With a bottomless cloud storage solution, media archives can be scaled instantly to levels that are not possible with on-premises storage. These bottomless archives can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world and enable collaboration that is just not possible with on-premises storage. The more progressive providers of cloud storage also have added features to their service to improve accessibility, such as automatic bucket replication across geographic regions and AI-powered metadata tagging to enable highly refined search of media libraries stored in the cloud.

Claire Humphries: Advancements in cloud storage significantly enhance the accessibility and scalability of media archives, but challenges persist. For instance, proxies from existing on-prem archives often can’t be seamlessly migrated to cloud MAM solutions like Framelight, requiring the creation of new proxies for user accessibility. This can prolong the transition process, but once completed, cloud storage offers unparalleled scalability and flexibility for managing and utilizing media archives.

Advertisement

Sam Peterson: Cloud storage has transformed media archives by offering virtually unlimited capacity and enabling access to content from anywhere, facilitating seamless global collaboration. Its ability to scale dynamically based on production needs helps companies manage costs effectively while accommodating growing libraries of high-resolution content.

Sam Bogoch: Probably the biggest benefit of cloud storage for media archives is that it helps accelerate the shift away from legacy, siloed archive systems. While cloud storage offers the promise of scalability and remote access, uncontrolled costs have also prompted many users to explore hybrid solutions. By combining on-premise and cloud storage, organizations can optimize costs while retaining the flexibility to scale as needed.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Migrating on-premises media archives to cloud storage brings significant improvements to both accessibility and scalability. When content is maintained in a cloud archive, it can be accessed more easily by authenticated users, no matter where they are working. The elasticity of the cloud makes scaling archives almost limitless and much faster and easier than scaling typical on-premises storage.

Bob Caniglia: Recent advancements in cloud storage enable real-time syncing of media files across global teams and make it easier to retrieve files from one central location compared to traditional server-based systems. Cloud storage solutions can also now support massive datasets such as 12K digital film RAW files and provide local caching through distributed cloud sync, ensuring fast and seamless access without latency. Furthermore, cloud storage allows media archives to scale as needed without having to invest in physical infrastructure.

Are broadcasters more comfortable with cloud solutions or are they still preferring MAM to be on-prem?

Derek Barrilleaux: The potential for exploding costs and experience with egress fees is scaring a lot of the companies we work with. Hybrid architectures offer the flexibility to hedge, and Projective’s creative project framework enables companies to push projects to the appropriate system, maximizing that flexibility.

Philip Grossman, VP of solutions architecture and business development, DigitalGlue: Broadcasters remain divided on cloud solutions versus on-premise MAM. Many are hesitant to fully embrace the cloud due to unpredictable costs from storage and data transfer, making budgeting difficult. Larger organizations often prefer on-premise or private data center setups for better control, cost stability, and to avoid the logistical challenges of managing massive content volumes in public cloud environments. However, broadcasters already using cloud-native workflows are more comfortable with cloud-based MAM, valuing the flexibility, collaboration, and reduced infrastructure it offers.

Jochen Bergdolt, global head, MAM business unit, Vizrt: Broadcasters have become more comfortable overall, although attitudes still vary on a customer-to-customer basis. Typically, a lot of MAM workflows are not particularly burstable in comparison to compute functions that were maybe quicker to adopt cloud. But as other factors have moved to the forefront of broadcasters’ thinking, such as IT security, or remote production – coupled with the shift from older technologies designed around linear TV delivery – broadcasters have seen cloud as a way to adopt and trial new MAM solutions more quickly.

Leanne Tomlin, marketing director, EMEA, Perifery: Public cloud solutions may dominate, but they’re not always the best fit for every need. We’re now seeing private cloud options and custom infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions tailored to specific industry demands. Hybrid cloud setups, which combine the scalability of the cloud with the control of private systems, are becoming a go-to choice.

Bob Caniglia: Broadcasters today are balancing between innovative cloud solutions and reliable on-prem MAM systems, as each offers distinct advantages in a modern workflow. There have been advancements in broadcast cameras and live production switchers that support cloud-based workflows with cloud sync capabilities, streaming protocols and integrated hardware streaming engines. However, many broadcasters also value the security and control offered by on-prem systems for certain applications, leading to a growing preference for hybrid models that support both options.

What are the primary considerations when choosing between on-premises, cloud and hybrid storage solutions?

Nick Anderson, product manager, Creative.space, DigitalGlue: Managed on-premises storage eliminates many of the drawbacks associated with traditional setups, such as upfront costs, ongoing maintenance, and limited remote access. These systems now provide the performance and control of local storage while enabling seamless remote workflows without excessive data transfers. Similarly, hybrid solutions should mean unified access to data from any device — desktop or web — without creating duplicate systems or redundant workflows.

Advertisement

Julian Wright, CEO, Blue Lucy: The considerations are largely as they have been for 25-years: security, cost, and ease of management. But the current focus for senior management is cost and, while there are pros and cons to both cloud and ground solutions, cloud storage is definitely not a less expensive option. I believe a hybrid strategy is the true answer to optimizing costs and to balancing predictability with agility. Eighty percent of Blue Lucy’s BLAM deployments manage both cloud and on-prem storage including LTO libraries, within that there is a mix of content effectively stored in both or distributed between them.

David Phillips: End users want fast, easy access from anywhere — on-premises or remote — and on any host system, whether physical or virtual. Legacy on-premises hardware vendors often struggle to provide this secure, high-speed access for media creatives because they rely on outdated file protocols designed for local networks. Cloud-native, software-defined solutions like LucidLink are needed to meet these three critical requirements: speed, ease, and security.

Jochen Bergdolt: It starts with deciding what you need from your overall storage solution, as to what kind of storage you choose. For those with long-term archiving needs, it is essential to deploy more than one solution to handle DR requirements, whereas for those with more of a production focus it becomes more about the speed of access to the storage and balancing that against overall costs. While an evaluation on a TCO basis should be made, placing content onto cloud storage should provide a benefit beyond cost saving, such as an increased ease of sharing and connecting with other services, and a higher degree of reliability.

Leanne Tomlin: Essentially, it comes down to your organization’s specific requirements, but scalability, cost, security, and collaboration are key factors. The industry has matured in understanding the benefits of cloud, and organizations are evaluating cloud vs. on-prem solutions on a case-by-case basis. For many, hybrid is becoming the norm as it provides the flexibility to balance scalability and collaboration in the cloud with the control and security of on-prem storage.

Whit Jackson, VP, global media and entertainment, Wasabi Technologies: Accessibility to stored content is a key consideration when choosing storage solutions with cloud and hybrid solutions allowing ready access to stored content from anywhere in the world. Security is of course a critical aspect and any storage strategy should include multiple file copies along with an immutable cloud storage repository to protect against hardware failures, local disasters and hacker attacks. Finally, cost is often the determining factor when choosing between storage solutions, and users need to find the right balance between high-performance (and expensive) on-prem hardware for tasks like video editing and lower cost solutions for nearline storage and archive.

Sam Peterson: When selecting a storage solution, broadcasters must weigh factors like scalability, data security, latency, and cost efficiency, alongside their operational control requirements. Hybrid storage models are increasingly popular, as they combine the best of both worlds by enabling flexible cloud workflows while keeping sensitive or critical data secured on-premises.

Bob Caniglia: Cost-effectiveness, reliability, latency, flexibility and security are pivotal factors, with cloud solutions excelling in scalability and global accessibility, particularly for teams requiring real-time file syncing and collaboration across multiple locations. On-prem systems have traditionally offered strong security and control, but advancements in cloud technologies have introduced strong security features, including encryption and compliance with various certifications. Hybrid systems combine the strengths of both, offering broadcasters the flexibility to store critical data securely on-site while leveraging the cloud for scalable and efficient remote workflows.

What strategies can help balance storage costs with the need for high-performance access?

Derek Barrilleaux: The archive can’t be a black hole. If the archive looks and feels like the primary storage, then both can be optimized, and storage costs dramatically reduced without impacting user experience. The key to this is to archive projects as a container, not individual assets.

Nick Anderson: OpenZFS and its Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) technology has revolutionized storage by enabling high-performance real-time access with affordable spinning disks, eliminating the hardware overhead and redundancy required by legacy solutions. This makes proprietary enterprise systems obsolete, offering streamlined efficiency for demanding workflows like high-resolution video playback. While implementing ZFS typically requires technical expertise to configure and maintain, a managed solution removes this barrier, allowing users to benefit from its game-changing capabilities without the complexity.

Sean Lee: Broadcast professionals will turn to deduplication or tiering data management solutions to combat the high storage costs that are ever associated with their constantly growing/sprawling workflows, often at the expense of risking higher performance. A storage solution that can help broadcasters understand their overall storage consumption, along with how their data is performing in their respective slow and cheap tiered storage locations, automatically, or better yet transparently, can greatly lower the administrative burden as well as automate and improve production times. In addition, the traditional storage practice of charging more for larger capacity and for higher performance is currently being challenged as modern storage solutions disaggregate physical size away from capacity and performance and instead offer value-added data and storage management services that are worth the cost associated.

David Phillips: Traditional storage management relied on moving datasets to “offline” archives, such as tape libraries, to control long-term costs. However, as the media industry steadily adopts cloud workflows, automated storage tiering has emerged as the preferred way to manage cloud storage expenses. By combining these tiering policies with cloud-hosted file services — allowing cloud storage to function as a high-performance local mount point — media organizations can deploy solutions that are both cost-effective and high-performing.

Laquie TN Campbell: A crucial strategy to balancing storage costs with the need for high-performance is first assessing your needs in regards to access, speed, capacity, and compliance. Focus on storage providers with deep understanding of broadcast workflows and transparent, predictable pricing models, paying special attention to whether they offer low to no-cost egress fees and other cost-saving features like lifecycle rules and data migration services. You should also consider intentional alignment with technology partners that demonstrate a commitment to providing tangible solutions to industry-specific challenges without compromising on performance to maximize cloud storage benefits while avoiding unexpected long-term costs.

Jan Weigner: Hybrid solutions that blend on-premises and cloud storage offer the perfect mix of performance and flexibility. Our approach lets customers design different strategies for basic and premium content through storage tiering. By automatically moving assets between high-performance and archival storage based on usage patterns, we’re ensuring quick access to hot assets while keeping costs down.

Whit Jackson: In media production, there is no one single storage system that can effectively serve all needs from editing to finishing to archive. So, it can be very helpful to use a top-notch data management or asset management application that provides a detailed view of all your storage environments and what content lives where, how long it’s been there, and the state of each piece of media. Users can then optimize their use of various storages and save on costs by identifying, for example, files that can be moved from a high-performance (and expensive) shared storage system for active creative work to a hot cloud storage tier (less expensive) where the media is still instantly accessible for re-work or review.

What are the challenges of ensuring long-term storage and preservation of media assets?

Denise Soto, director, product and QA, TMT Insights: The long-term preservation of media assets presents significant challenges, including outdated file formats, aging storage systems, data corruption, rising storage costs, scalability concerns, and heightened security threats, all of which jeopardize accessibility. To address these issues, it is essential to implement strategies such as regularly updating formats, establishing redundancy, enhancing security protocols, and utilizing scalable cloud-based solutions to guarantee the long-term accessibility and reliability of assets.

Philip Grossman, VP of solutions architecture and business development, DigitalGlue: Ensuring long-term storage and preservation of media assets involves challenges like deciding what to archive, managing costs, and maintaining accessibility. Over-saving content can significantly raise storage expenses, while retrieval costs and delays in cloud-based solutions often lead organizations to consider alternatives like LTO tapes, which offer lower per-terabyte costs but require infrastructure and ongoing management. Physical media and technologies face durability and obsolescence issues, necessitating regular migrations to newer formats and compatibility updates to avoid data loss.

Peyton Thomas, product manager, Panasonic Connect: There are several challenges of ensuring long-term storage, like cost and scalability, but a big challenge for cloud-based storage is security. As more and more data pushes to the cloud, this could lead to more tampering of data and will require additional layers of security.

Sean Lee: Ensuring successful, cost-effective long-term storage and preservation requires having a solid understanding of how often assets are accessed and used, along with when and where they should be accessed and moved, and often this type of data analysis or awareness extends beyond the capabilities of traditional storage and MAMs. Obviously, one should not be archiving “hot” or “active” assets only in the public cloud, which is insecure and makes retrieval more expensive unlike hybrid or on-premises. “Cold” or “old” assets would be better stored in a long-term, “cheap and deep” archive tape or cloud storage solution where support, performance, capacity, and capital expenditure costs are not so heavily evaluated.

David Phillips: Key challenges include the rapid growth of file sizes, the obsolescence of storage media and formats, and the need to maintain data integrity and security. Balancing costs while ensuring accessible archives often requires tiered, cloud-based workflows and robust backup strategies. Finally, preserving metadata and supporting global collaboration are critical for reusability and long-term value, and this is where cloud-hosted services provide critical benefits.

Laquie TN Campbell, media and entertainment product marketing manager, Backblaze: The inevitability of physical storage degrading over time is one of the biggest challenges of ensuring long-term storage and preservation of media assets while also meeting budget limitations on managing and maintaining traditional archival systems, service contracts, and preparing for future content distribution. Workflow efficiency is more important than ever, so any options that better support quick accessibility, scalability (as file and resolution sizes continue to increase), and easier distribution must be explored and implemented. New monetization opportunities are challenging to capitalize on in a timely manner if content isn’t readily accessible, not to mention traditional methods of remastering, restoring, distributing, etc. being more costly compared to many cloud-based solutions available now.

Jan Weigner: As content resolutions increase and file sizes balloon, storage systems have had to evolve from simple repositories to intelligent solutions. The key is implementing proper hierarchical storage management — automatically moving assets between high-performance and archival storage based on usage patterns. After all, the show must always go on, which is why robust backup and recovery options aren’t optional anymore — they’re essential.

Jochen Bergdolt: Perhaps most pressing is the issue of long-term support for video codecs, and how to manage large scale transfer of content from older to newer formats. This is not a new problem for the broadcast industry, where older material held on analogue formats had to be transferred to digital tape storage, followed by the digitization to file. AI tooling is likely to play a role here, upscaling and repairing older material as part of the transcode process to more modern formats.

Leanne Tomlin: Organizations are faced with the challenge of maintaining the integrity, accessibility, and security of their valuable content over time. On the key topic of security and compliance, organizations need to make sure they have built-in encryption, immutable storage options, and support for compliance standards. This will help to safeguard assets from unauthorized access or tampering.

Whit Jackson: The most fundamental challenges to long-term preservation of media assets in the digital era are ensuring data durability and security over time while maintaining usability of the media assets and controlling costs. Content owners must manage against storage media obsolescence and digital format obsolescence. In today’s media landscape where there is a mandate to re-use, re-purpose and re-monetize media assets where possible, content needs to be readily accessible from the archive and not stored offline in some remote location.

Sam Bogoch: As ever, the biggest challenges involve finding multiple relatively safe (and affordable) locations for the media to reside in. This is especially true now that 4k media is increasingly prevalent, and additionally now that source footage of 4k and 8k resolution may often need to be preserved. This, along with higher shooting ratios for most professional content, means that much more footage now needs to be archived, on the chance that it will be needed for future variants of a show, or social media and promo edits.

What role does storage tiering play in optimizing cost and access for media libraries?

Denise Soto: Storage tiering plays a crucial role in managing media libraries by aligning storage solutions with data access patterns. By assigning frequently accessed data to higher-performance storage and moving less-accessed files to economical long-term storage tiers, it ensures both cost efficiency and operational flexibility.

Sean Lee: Broadcast and other types of media workflows that have remote workforces commonly rely on shared storage to help solve data accessibility, transfer, and performance challenges. Data management services and intelligent storage tiering capabilities are not always offered by the same storage provider and might be offered by different tools altogether. Having a comprehensive, single data storage and data management workflow solution that can streamline accessibility and collaboration, plus help users make intelligent management decisions on where, when, how, and how much data to move can provide so much value by optimizing workflows.

Ryan Stoutenborough: It’s important that your online storage supports high-performance editorial work, but when a project is completed, there is often a period before archival when the completed project is simply taking up space on an online server. Offloading completed projects and their associated assets to nearline storage can reduce costs while maintaining accessibility before deep archival. EVO is available as an online and nearline storage solution, with automations to send media back and forth between the two systems as needed.

What are we missing in this conversation?

Derek Barrilleaux: The market needs to differentiate between MAM and PAM (production asset management, or project asset management). MAM is great for final assets, repurposing, and monetization. PAM is all about the work-in-progress, and the requirements of the two different worlds are different enough to warrant more distinct discussion. Also, most customers we see now are also thinking beyond just video, but also graphics, stills, brochures, audio workflows, etc.

Nick Anderson: Creators don’t want to manage assets — they want to create, and systems should fade into the background, seamlessly capturing context from workflows without adding complexity. Current solutions fail because they treat media as isolated files rather than as interconnected content tied to projects, communications, and workflows. The future lies in systems that autonomously capture context, map relationships, and anticipate user needs without requiring manual effort.

Sean Lee: Broadcast professionals are having to evolve as quickly as the technologies, like storage and MAMs, that underpin their workflows. As broadcast workflows become more nuanced, traditional, monolithic, and single-vendor technologies will be replaced by more modular, interconnected tools that can work harmoniously with each other to form truly tailored workflow solutions. Since broadcasters will be considering more workflow tools, or perhaps upgrading to more comprehensive platforms, it’s crucial to make purchasing decisions based on value-added services rather than just high capacity, e.g. interoperability, cost-efficient capacity and scalability.

Julian Wright: Time to value. There is significant pressure to reduce operational costs in the M&E sector. The c-suite can see that technology in the form of automation and orchestration (and possibly AI) can greatly reduce operating costs and accelerate time to market. But the protracted projects in which the return on investment takes many years cannot be tolerated in a market which is expanding and changing at the current rate.