Industry Insights: Media supply chain optimization requires strategic automation and cloud infrastructure

The modern media supply chain has evolved into a complex ecosystem where efficiency gains can make or break competitive advantage. As content creators face mounting pressure to accelerate time-to-market while managing costs, traditional workflows built on manual processes and fragmented systems are becoming unsustainable bottlenecks.

This Industry Insights roundtable brings together leading broadcast technology vendors to examine how organizations can optimize their media supply chains through strategic automation, cloud-native architectures and consolidated toolsets.

The discussion explores practical approaches to eliminating time-wasters, enabling faster decision-making in multi-stakeholder environments and designing scalable infrastructure that adapts from baseline operations to peak demand periods. Part one of this two-part series focuses on workflow optimization and cost management strategies that are reshaping how media companies approach their content production and distribution pipelines.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Manual processes bottleneck: Traditional media workflows suffer from time-consuming manual tasks like metadata entry, content tagging and promotional tracking that significantly slow time-to-air and reduce operational efficiency.
• Automation enables decisions: Implementing customizable multi-level review workflows with automated routing and orchestration removes human bottlenecks and accelerates decision-making in complex multi-stakeholder environments.
• Cloud scaling is essential: Elastic cloud infrastructure with hybrid deployment options allows media supply chains to automatically adjust capacity from baseline operations to peak demand periods without fixed overbuilding costs.
• Integration reduces waste: Consolidated, centralized platforms eliminate redundant software licenses, reduce context-switching between tools and deliver measurable ROI through faster asset discovery and reduced labor hours.
• Shared visibility accelerates: Providing all stakeholders with a unified source of truth on content performance and standardized metrics reduces confusion and shifts focus from data interpretation to actionable decision-making.

How do you define the media supply chain?

Aaron Kroger, director of product marketing and communications, Dalet: The media supply chain refers to the entire journey of media content — from the moment it is captured by a camera to when it reaches the audience. It encompasses every step in between, including editing, management, distribution, and archive. The media supply chain is the underlying movement throughout all of this although there is often more focus on the final stages of delivery to distribution.

Ian McPherson, global M&E business development, media supply chain and generative AI, Amazon Web Services: Media supply chain refers to the workflows that power end-to-end content production, management, delivery and monetization. It comprises everything from content ingest to quality control (QC), storage and localization. It also includes video processing to produce packages for distribution, playout and beyond.

What are the biggest time-wasters in traditional media workflows, and how do you systematically address them?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Having operators manually review entire pieces of content is a huge time waster when automated tools can handle 90% of the work. QC is one area where having automated QC do a first pass can shrink the manual effort by as much as 80% and make operators more productive by guiding them to exactly the points in the content where they can add value.Another waste is simply the time spent waiting for basic automatable functions such as transcodes, file moves, analysis, etc. to complete before being able to progress to the next job.

Eric Chang, marketing content architect, Telestream: Traditional media workflows often suffer from manual processes like metadata entry, compliance review, and content tagging, all of which slow down time to air. Additionally, siloed tools and lack of integration across systems create bottlenecks, especially when media must move between ingest, edit, QC, and distribution. Streamlining metadata capture during ingest, integrating with editorial tools, and embedding quality control into the workflow are key to reducing delays and increasing efficiency.

Lucas Bertrand, founder and CEO, Looper Insights: Manual tracking of promotional activity across platforms is one of the biggest inefficiencies in streaming workflows. It slows down the ability to respond, optimise, or even confirm what’s live. Automating visibility capture eliminates that blind spot, streamlines reporting, and frees up more time for meaningful decision-making.

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Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, TMT Insights: In traditional media workflows, time is often lost to manual processes, disconnected tools, and constant context-switching between teams and platform; like trying to run a relay race without knowing where the next runner is. These inefficiencies slow down the entire content supply chain and create a lack of visibility that hampers both creative and operational teams. Moving to a cloud-based architecture with a single, centralized interface allows teams to manage ingest, QC, approvals, and delivery all in one place.

Kathleen Barrett, CEO, Backlight: Traditional media workflows are often slowed by time-consuming manual tasks — searching for the right file, renaming and tagging assets, or navigating fragmented approval processes across disconnected tools. These inefficiencies multiply when teams rely on manual transfers and lack intuitive search capabilities. The path forward is a centralized, AI-powered media asset management platform that can dramatically cut search time, automate routine tasks, and streamline collaboration.

What strategies enable faster decision-making and approval processes in complex multi-stakeholder environments?

Daniel Medina, business development, NPAW: Companies should concentrate efforts on gaining a clear understanding of how their services operate. Decisions are often made based on partial information or incomplete views of what is actually happening. The mindset shift must guide organizations toward having a complete and gap-free view.

Eric Chang, marketing content architect, Telestream: Ingest workflows are at the heart of content creation, production, and distribution: efficiency and quick decision-making starts at ingest and depends on timely access to usable information. Rich metadata, real-time playback, and integrated collaboration tools allow editorial, compliance, and operations teams to review and act on content without waiting for processing to finish. Platforms that support proxy-less playback and ingest-based metadata enrichment help reduce review cycles, while automation tools that handle routing and orchestration can minimize manual coordination, keeping workflows moving while reducing the burden on teams.

Aaron Kroger, director of product marketing and communications, Dalet: To enable faster decision-making and approvals in complex, multi-stakeholder environments, automation is one of the biggest factors. This automation needs to include customizable multi level review workflows that provide visibility and notifications as to where the content is and ensure it continues moving. In today’s technologically powerful media supply chain world, humans are almost always the bottleneck.

Lucas Bertrand, founder and CEO, Looper Insights: Decisions move faster when all stakeholders have a shared source of truth on content visibility and performance. Standardized metrics reduce confusion and provide a clear baseline for discussion. With better alignment upfront, the focus shifts from interpreting data to taking action.

Chris McCarthy, VP, media solutions, TMT Insights: Simplifying solutions to reduce manual touchpoints and increasing automation across workflows minimizes delays and reduces the need for constant coordination. Just as critical is designing those workflows collaboratively with customers from the outset. When all stakeholders are aligned on goals and have shared visibility into processes, handovers become seamless, accountability is clear, and consensus is reached more quickly, which enables a more agile and responsive operation overall.

How do you calculate the ROI of consolidating your media supply chain onto a single management platform?

Ivan Verbesselt, chief strategy and marketing officer, Mediagenix: ROI calculation for supply chain consolidation centers on three key areas: operational efficiency gains, revenue optimization, and risk mitigation.

Operational Efficiency: Our clients typically see 50% reduction in content curation effort and 60% workflow efficiency improvements. When you eliminate duplicate systems, manual handoffs, and data reconciliation across fragmented platforms, labor costs drop significantly while velocity increases. Revenue Optimization: The unified platform enables that Self-Optimizing Content Monetization Flywheel—where intelligence from personalization feeds back into content strategy and scheduling. We’ve documented 35%+ conversion improvements and 4x increases in Effective Catalog Size, meaning more content generates revenue before license expiration. Risk Mitigation: A single source of truth eliminates costly rights violations, missed licensing opportunities, and write-offs from content that never gets properly monetized.

The ROI compounds because each improvement amplifies the others.

This is particularly the case for so-called Automation Gains: getting all the above right is the crucial foundation for AI/ML automation of labour intensive tasks allowing people to focus on more creative work: automation can both increase quality (e.g. ratings prediction accuracy can increase by 25% through AI/ML) and throughput (e.g. both ratings prediction and content scheduling get 75-80% more efficient). But all this is highly predicated on getting the basics right: converge your content supply chain around one source of truth with high-quality metadata. Automation stands on the shoulders of a connected content supply chain.   

How do you design media supply chains that can scale from baseline operations to peak demand periods?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The key to meeting bursts in demand is leveraging cloud infrastructure for media operations. Cloud infrastructure is by definition almost infinitely scalable and always available, which makes it a good fit for operations where demand is not always predictable. Supply chains that utilize cloud infrastructure have an inherent advantage of being able to rely on elastic infrastructure when needed and business as usual infrastructure when that is sufficient.

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Eric Chang, marketing content architect, Telestream: Scalable media supply chains require flexible deployment options and modular architecture. Whether handling day-to-day operations or spikes in volume due to live events or seasonal surges, organizations benefit from systems that can scale elastically, on-premises or in the cloud. Hybrid is emerging as the go-to model for organizations that need both operational control and the flexibility to scale, combining the security and performance of on-prem environments with the advantages of dynamic, cloud-based workflows.

Aaron Kroger, director of product marketing and communications, Dalet: To design media supply chains that scale from baseline operations to peak demand, organizations can leverage cloud infrastructure for its flexibility and scalability. Using elastic resources allows systems to automatically adjust capacity based on real-time needs. A hybrid distributed architecture can also help balance performance with cost efficiency and predictability.

Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, TMT Insights: Think of a well-designed media supply chain like a great streaming service — it works flawlessly at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday and holds up under pressure when a Friday night premiere drops. The key lies in building on cloud-native infrastructure that supports elastic scaling, ensuring resources expand when demand spikes and contract when things normalize, with no fixed overbuilding required. A unified operations interface gives teams the tools to orchestrate this flex in real time, without introducing unnecessary chaos

Ian McPherson, global M&E business development, media supply chain and generative AI, Amazon Web Services:Cloud-based services provide the flexibility required to provision resources up and down to accommodate media supply chain peaks. As an example, Tubi used its cloud-based architecture built with Kubernetes on AWS to quickly scale its platform and ultimately support a peak of 15.5 million concurrent streaming viewers who watched the Philadelphia Eagles take on the Kansas City Chiefs during this year’s Super Bowl. Tubi’s broadcast ultimately reached more than 24 million unique viewers across game day programming, making Super Bowl LIX the most streamed NFL event in history.

How do you transition from fixed infrastructure costs to dynamic, demand-based pricing models without sacrificing reliability?

Chris McCarthy, VP, media solutions, TMT Insights: By starting with less intensive efforts like migrating disaster recovery storage, then gradually moving into content ingest, processing, and distribution, organizations can test performance, validate reliability, and minimize disruption at each step. Equally important is preparing internal teams for the shift. Change management, training, and fostering a shared understanding of the benefits of virtual environments help mitigate resistance and ensure alignment throughout the migration.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The first part of this transition is recognizing that fixed infrastructure costs, by definition, include over-provisioned resources that sit idle almost all the time. Fixed infrastructure costs for on-premises infrastructure mean that processing capacity is fixed at some level, which, for most organizations exceeds the average utilization level (resulting in underutilized assets). A dynamic, demand-based pricing model ensures that users of content processing infrastructure pay only for what they use, both at the application layer and at the infrastructure layer.

What approaches help organizations right-size their media processing resources to match actual workload demands?

Aaron Kroger, director of product marketing and communications, Dalet: Organizations can right-size their media processing resources by adopting a pay-per-hour model, which aligns costs directly with usage. A hybrid approach can also help stabilize or reduce expenses depending on workload fluctuations. Crucially, analytics and monitoring are essential to determine the optimal model and resource allocation.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Moving away from on-premise infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure is one of the most effective approaches to right-sizing resources to match actual workload demands. Cloud infrastructure is inherently elastic, meaning that it can be scaled up or down to match actual workload demands on an almost instantaneous basis. When workloads are high, supply chain platforms can provision additional cloud processing resources as needed, and they can deactivate them once demand recedes.

How can media companies eliminate redundant software licenses and underutilized infrastructure across their supply chain?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Moving to a cloud-based architecture provides the opportunity to move away from perpetual software licenses and underutilized infrastructure for the media processing elements of a supply chain. Media processing tools—such as video transcoding, audio processing, subtitle modifications, and—more can all be utilized on an on-demand or consumption-based model. This approach avoids long-term software licensing and ensures that the infrastructure provisioned is only what is needed to complete the work

What are the hidden costs of fragmented vendor ecosystems, and how do you quantify the ROI of consolidation?

Kathleen Barrett, CEO, Backlight: The hidden costs of fragmented media tech stacks add up quickly: Teams lose hours each day searching for assets across disconnected platforms, switching between editing, storage, project management, and review tools, and managing version conflicts that stall production. These inefficiencies are amplified in remote environments, where what should be a simple revision can devolve into a week of back-and-forth emails. Consolidating your media ecosystem isn’t just operationally cleaner — it delivers measurable ROI through reduced software spend, faster asset discovery with AI-enhanced metadata, and fewer labor hours spent on file transfers.

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