Industry Insights: How orchestration is reshaping playout and delivery

As broadcasters navigate increasingly hybrid infrastructures, the boundaries between orchestration, playout and delivery are blurring.

In part one of this two-part Industry Insights roundtable, technology providers assess how shifting audience habits, platform fragmentation and rising operational complexity are reshaping the media chain. Participants discuss the growing pressure to produce channel variants efficiently, the challenge of synchronizing linear, OTT and FAST outputs, and the need for unified control layers that span on-premises, cloud and edge environments.

They also examine how modern orchestration platforms are evolving — from API-driven interoperability to topology-aware automation — and what broadcasters must consider as they integrate previously siloed systems. The conversation highlights the operational, cultural and architectural changes required as playout and delivery models continue to converge.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Hybrid complexity grows: Broadcasters blending on-prem, cloud and edge resources require orchestration layers that communicate through standardized APIs.
• Variant creation expands: Linear, OTT and FAST outputs increase the need for unified content sources and automation to maintain synchronization.
• Unified control matters: Integrating orchestration, playout and delivery reduces duplicated infrastructure, improves visibility and accelerates channel deployment.
• Automation minimizes errors: Standardized, repeatable processes reduce human error, validate media earlier and support exception-based operations.
• Operational models shift: Orchestration supports leaner teams, more resilient architectures and faster adaptation to new content and platform demands.

What are the modern challenges in orchestration and playout? What about in delivery?

Peter Blatchford, CMO, Starfish Technologies: The real pressure now comes from audience fragmentation. You’ve got linear, OTT and FAST platforms — and each one may need its own variation of the same channel. Workflows that were built for a single output are suddenly being asked to do much more. The challenge is producing all those variants efficiently without letting operational complexity spiral out of control.

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: What doesn’t work is clinging to workflows and assumptions that only made sense when broadcast meant hardware boxes bolted in racks. We’ve proven you can run 64 channels of HD playout from a single physical server, but you can’t do that if you’re still thinking in terms of one box per channel. The challenge isn’t the technology; it’s letting go of outdated mental models.

Stephane Cloirec, VP, video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Today’s broadcasters and content providers are seeking greater operational efficiency, agility and cost control across increasingly complex hybrid workflows. Operating playout and delivery as separate silos results in duplicated infrastructure, fragmented workflows and higher operational costs. By leveraging advanced playout-to-delivery solutions within a cloud-centric architecture, media companies can streamline operations, reduce total cost of ownership and accelerate the rollout of new video channels and services.

Matt Lukens, director, global business development, NDI: One thing I notice is that most broadcasters are running a hybrid mix of legacy SDI, IP, and cloud workflows, which can get messy quickly. Delivery adds another layer because keeping linear, OTT, and FAST streams perfectly synchronized isn’t as simple as it sounds. Teams are trying to find a balance between keeping things organized while not increasing overhead costs.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: As broadcasters adopt a mix of on-prem and cloud-based ingest and playout, they gain flexibility, but also inherit new layers of complexity across routing, resource allocation, and redundancy management. Orchestration must deploy and manage these dynamic services, as well as link automation and traffic systems to enable the flexible stacking. Dynamic media motion systems ensure content and ads reach the right playout engines on time. 

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Paul Calleja, CEO, GlobalM: Delivery has become a moving target because contribution, distribution and OTT all demand different transport guarantees and different scaling behaviors. Broadcasters now need to deliver the same event simultaneously across linear, digital, FAST and social channels, each with unique latency and synchronization expectations. Add geo-compliance and rights restrictions on top, and the delivery layer becomes the most legally sensitive part of the chain.

How are orchestration systems evolving to manage increasingly hybrid environments that combine on-prem, cloud and edge workflows?

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: We’re seeing customers realize that cloud isn’t automatically better or cheaper when you’re moving massive media files around. Smart hybrid approaches blend on-premises reliability for heavy processing with cloud flexibility for specific use cases. But none of that matters if your orchestration layer can’t communicate cleanly through standardized interfaces.

Stephane Cloirec, VP, video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Broadcasters are embracing hybrid operations, with automation systems now managing channels seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments. This flexibility allows broadcasters and content providers to deploy each workflow where it makes the most sense, keeping 24/7 channels on-prem while leveraging the cloud for pop-up and event-based channels. The key is unified orchestration, enabling consistent operation and monitoring across all environments to simplify management and reduce operational complexity.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Today’s orchestration platforms, even those that are fully cloud-based, must be able to manage across both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. While many media workflows are migrating to the cloud, it’s a process, and accessing content that may still reside in on-premises storage is often required. Orchestration platforms must also exchange information with legacy systems, which may also be either cloud-based or on-premises or both.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: Modern orchestration platforms are designed for hybrid environments, enabling seamless connectivity across on-prem, cloud, and edge locations. The goal is to deliver a single, actionable view of the entire workflow, empowering teams to make informed, real-time decisions. This unified approach improves efficiency, scalability, and operational confidence.

Richard Andes, VP, product management, Telestream: Modern orchestration and workflow automation systems have to take into account that requirements of functioning in a multi-homed environment and the ability to smoothly move across tenancies. This can be working in multiple cloud hosts and regions, as well as hybrid mobility for on-prem and transient remote contribution. Key layers of logic and control to identify not only the media source and destination locations, but automated business logic to determine the most cost effective and efficient method of media processing all play a major role in how solutions are evolving.

Aaron Kroger, product marketing lead, Dalet: Modern orchestration platforms are cloud-native and API-driven, enabling dynamic resource allocation across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. They integrate containerized services and microservices for flexibility, allowing broadcasters to scale workflows based on demand. This evolution supports cost efficiency and resilience even in hybrid infrastructures.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: Modern orchestration platforms provide a unified management layer that abstracts whether resources are on-premises or in the cloud, enabling operators to move services between environments with minimal friction — maintaining operational resilience. Orchestration allows teams to spin up redundant channels or linked lists for regional splits, mirror primary operations, and coordinate resilience all from one interface. This evolution supports seamless disaster recovery, regional splits, overflow operations, and event-driven scaling, while minimizing CapEx cost of the base facility.

Paul Calleja, CEO, GlobalM: Modern orchestration is moving toward protocol native, API driven control that abstracts each environment on-prem, cloud, or edge, into a single operational plane. Systems are becoming topology aware, choosing the best execution point automatically based on cost, latency, and availability. The next step is real-time re-routing and failovers that happen without an operator even seeing the fault.

What benefits come from integrating orchestration, playout and delivery systems into a unified control environment, and how are broadcasters approaching that transition?

Steve Hassan, senior director, playout, Grass Valley: Integrating orchestration, playout, and delivery within a unified control environment provides a single source of truth for schedules and metadata, ensures consistent automation across channels, simplifies failover and disaster recovery and accelerates channel provisioning through centralized monitoring and reduced handoffs. Broadcasters typically adopt this model incrementally, starting with new or non-critical channels (such as FAST or pop-up services), validating integrations with traffic and ad ops systems, and then extending it to legacy and master-control workflows. A control-plane-first migration minimizes disruption by retaining existing I/O where needed while introducing cloud-native processing and automation modules to modernize operations.

Stephane Cloirec, VP, video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Integrating orchestration, playout and delivery into a unified control environment allows broadcasters to manage the entire media chain more efficiently. A playout-to-delivery approach can help broadcasters drastically reduce operational costs, maintain exceptional video quality and lower overall workflow latency, which is particularly valuable in cloud-centric operations.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The more orchestration management platforms are integrated with other systems across a media organization, the more efficient media operations will be. Orchestration that is connected to upstream and downstream business and delivery systems becomes the single source of truth about the status of content, the steps that need to be completed, and the confirmation that content has been delivered to the proper destination.

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Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: Having a single view of the workflow is important. As broadcasters expand across multiple channels and platforms, unifying orchestration, playout, and delivery gives them real-time visibility, streamlines workflows, and minimizes human error. Broadcasters are transitioning by modernizing legacy systems and embracing software-defined architectures built for flexibility.

Adam Leah, creative director, nxtedition: Integrating orchestration, playout and delivery systems into a single control environment brings substantial benefits, particularly for broadcasters facing tighter budgets, shorter deadlines and greater platform diversity. It eliminates the need for multiple interfaces, redundant data entry and fragile third-party integrations. Broadcasters adopting this approach benefit from tighter synchronization across the production chain, faster turnaround times and improved accuracy in content delivery.

Matt Lukens, director, global business development, NDI: It is extremely useful to have visibility of all aspects of the workflows in one place, it makes it easier to pinpoint an issue when something goes wrong. Most teams I talk to don’t rip out old systems; they are slowly layering orchestration on top.

Graham Sharp, VP sales and marketing, BCNexxt: At a macro level It consolidates silos by creating linear (including live), streaming and FAST channels as well as VOD assets from a single content pool and UI and management platform. In turn this dramatically simplifies supply chain, creating a single end point and format for content, and a single processing engine that creates all the encoded assets required to support all forms of distribution. This is exactly the philosophy we have with Vipe. The challenge is how to sell it and to whom — the current structure of most large broadcasters means there is often no overarching managerial authority over the silos, other than financial, and as soon as the CFO realizes you are talking technology, he punts you to a CTO in one of his divisions and the conversation stops there, as it is not in a divisional CTO’s best interest to bring in technology that could threaten his division and future role.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: A unified control environment ties automation, routing, content management, and playout into a single operational picture, allowing operators to focus on content and revenue events instead of infrastructure. This integration ensures playlists, media prep, and distribution are consistently aligned across all deployed services. Broadcasters are adopting orchestration layers that dynamically represent real configurations, linking lists across regions and variants to simplify operations.

How can automation within orchestration platforms help reduce human error, improve consistency and accelerate time-to-air?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: A key function for an orchestration platform is to utilize and activate tools to perform automated functions across the media supply chain. Properly set up, orchestration is driven by repeatable rules and settings, ensuring that content is processed accurately and consistently. An intelligent orchestration platform also monitors the output from each automated step so that any errors are flagged and directed to an operator for analysis or correction.

Adam Leah, creative director, nxtedition: Automation within orchestration platforms aims to coordinate tasks across disparate systems, but this often relies on glue code and external integrations which can introduce fragility and complexity. A more sustainable approach is to consolidate all core broadcast functions into a single, unified environment with tightly integrated microservices. This architecture removes the need for orchestration middleware entirely, enabling consistent behavior across ingest, editing, scripting, graphics, studio automation, playout and publishing without handovers between disconnected systems.

Matt Lukens, director, global business development, NDI: Automation handles the repetitive tasks that when done manually can cause small mistakes, like making multiple versions or checking compliance boxes. It doesn’t remove human judgment, but it frees teams to focus on the challenging or creative parts of the workflow. I’ve seen it shave hours off delivery timelines in some cases.

Richard Andes, VP, product management, Telestream: Scheduling content delivery is empowered by intelligent orchestration, by pre-calculating the required processing and QC effort based on the analysis of previous work and ensuring new jobs are started in time to meet the needs of to-air. Content consistency is improved via automated checking and monitoring of processing, to validate content along the way and raise alarms as early in the processing chain as possible. Human error is reduced by the integration of QC tools using a combination of objective testing and AI assisted subjective testing to validate content, with only those items that raise an altar being handed off for secondary review.

Ivan Verbesselt, chief strategy and marketing officer, Mediagenix: There is the obvious low hanging fruit of digitally connecting the workflows with data seamlessly flowing through and thus reducing human error. But here the efficiency challenge goes well beyond the scope of pure orchestration in ensuring that both the content line-ups and resulting schedules are achieving cost effective editorial alignment between content and audience at all times, e.g. by automatically adjusting the content line-up based on measured ratings.

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Aaron Kroger, product marketing lead, Dalet: Automation within orchestration platforms minimizes manual tasks, content gathering and media validation, reducing human error and improving consistency. By automating ingest, transcoding, and distribution, broadcasters can accelerate time-to-air and respond quickly to last-minute changes without compromising quality.

Graham Sharp, VP sales and marketing, BCNexxt: This is a two-step process: We pre-assemble all file-based content, auto QC it and encode it into the transmission stream format as soon as it is available and present the results in an exception driven dashboard. This negates the requirement to eyeball it on playout, as issues can be found and fixed in yesterday’s office hours. Secondly, we automate as much as possible, even on live events, presenting any detected issues by exception and enabling the operators to focus on managing the live content in a stress-free environment.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: Automation ensures that dynamically created playout and ingest services are correctly triggered, scheduled, and supplied with required media, reducing the opportunity for operator mistakes. It standardizes workflows so that repetitive or variant-heavy tasks are executed reliably. This automation also accelerates time-to-air by enabling rapid creation and teardown of pop-up channels and new programming concepts.

Paul Calleja, CEO, GlobalM: Automation works when scheduling information directly drives actions in the orchestration layer, removing manual steps that often cause misfires or timing mistakes. A built-in scheduler ensures that events, device states, and routing changes follow predictable, repeatable rules every single time. This not only protects operators from last-second chaos but also shrinks time-to-air because the system does the heavy lifting.

What are the biggest challenges in ensuring reliability and synchronization across diverse output channels, from linear broadcast to OTT and FAST platforms?

Peter Blatchford, CMO, Starfish Technologies: Different platforms have different requirements — formats vary, timing needs to be adjusted, local inserts come into play. Keeping everything aligned becomes genuinely complex. The key to reliability is making sure each variation comes from a single, consistent source rather than being maintained separately by hand. You need automation and a clear separation between your content, your metadata and your substitution rules to maintain that stability.

Jan Weigner, CTO, Cinegy: Most people try to sync the outputs instead of syncing the source. If everything generates from the same engine, alignment happens naturally. The complexity comes from duplicated pipelines and legacy thinking, not from the platforms themselves.

Stephane Cloirec, VP, video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Ensuring high reliability across linear, OTT and FAST platforms requires a resilient architecture designed with redundancy from the start. While traditional on-premises systems have long addressed reliability, cloud-based workflows demand new strategies such as geo-redundancy and multi-cloud deployment to mitigate potential outages. These advanced capabilities are available on premium SaaS platforms.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: The biggest challenge is understanding which metrics matter most across increasingly fragmented ecosystems. Broadcasters are adopting data-driven methodologies, similar to DMAIC in supply chains, to pinpoint and measure the variables that impact synchronization. This discipline helps focus resources on the signals that actually drive performance improvement.

How is orchestration influencing staffing and workflow models in master control and network operations centers?

Adam Leah, creative director, nxtedition: When the routine bits run themselves, operators can spend their time watching for quality issues instead of firefighting last-minute changes. Takes the heat off during live output, and it means leaner teams can handle more channels without breaking a sweat. The creative calls stay at the heart of it, which is exactly where they should be.

Richard Andes, VP, product management, Telestream: Primary operation centers typically suffer from the pressure and time consumption of repetitive and menial tasks. Proper orchestration systems can relieve the burden of this by automating those functions that detract from the operational capacity of the staff. Better system awareness, and techniques like managing by exception, allow the operational staff to focus their attention on those items that truly need hands-on attention and not have to repeatedly touch each component of the operation for manual review or assessment. In facilities that can also support orchestration based self-recovery, this is even more beneficial, as operators can focus on the analysis of the root cause of an issue and proper remediation, while the orchestration system protects the continuity of the business.

What role does orchestration play in future-proofing broadcast infrastructure for scalability, redundancy and evolving content demands?

Stephane Cloirec, VP, video appliances and software product management, Harmonic: Orchestration plays a central role in ensuring that broadcast infrastructure is future-ready, especially for platforms running micro-services architectures in a public or private cloud. It enables instantiation, optimizes resources and supports automatic scaling to match workload demands and seamless fail-over for redundancy. As broadcasters migrate to SaaS platforms and hybrid playout environments, micro-services orchestration is a baseline requirement.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Cloud-native orchestration platforms take advantage of the resiliency and elasticity capabilities of cloud infrastructure to ensure redundancy and virtually unlimited scalability. These platforms also manage and activate a variety of third-party tools that are needed to perform functions across the supply chain. Orchestration platforms that embrace a wide range of third-party applications make it easy to try new tools and make changes as content needs evolve.

Adam Leah, creative director, nxtedition: We’re reshaping workflows in master control by reducing the need for manual coordination and allowing smaller teams to manage ever more complex operations. At WIN TV in Australia, we automated the MCR rundown creation by capturing each studio recorded story and automatically populating the transmission playlist in real time. This removed the traditional manual process of compiling and verifying playout rundowns, cutting down on handovers. By connecting live-to-tape recordings directly with MCR operations, the system enables a just-in-time workflow where content is assembled and queued automatically for broadcast.

Aaron Kroger, product marketing lead, Dalet: Orchestration ensures scalability by supporting modular workflows and integration with third-party systems, making it easier to adapt to new technologies and content demands. Built-in redundancy and intelligent business reporting provides resilience and operational visibility, safeguarding against disruptions while enabling continuous innovation.

Graham Sharp, VP sales and marketing, BCNexxt: Utilizing the resource flexibility of the cloud, FAST channels and event pop ups can be created in minutes on pay per use financial models. Redundancy models can be created based on the channel and the financial requirements, for example a premium channel might run a full hot 1+1 architecture with automatic failover, but for a lower cost FAST channel a cold failover or dropping back to evergreen content might be sufficient. There has never been so much financial flexibility available to broadcasters and content owners.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: Orchestration enables broadcasters to treat all processing elements as deployable, network-addressable resources, whether they are deployed on-prem or in cloud. This makes the playout chain inherently scalable and adaptable. It simplifies building redundancy across on-prem and cloud environments and allows operations to expand playout capacity on demand. This flexibility ensures control rooms can respond quickly to new revenue opportunities, evolving audience needs, and ever-changing programming requirements.

What are we not talking about that we should be?

Aaron Kroger, product marketing lead, Dalet: We often overlook the cultural and operational shifts required to maximize orchestration benefits such as standardizing processes and embracing agile deployment models. Additionally, the role of AI in orchestration for predictive analytics and automated decision-making is emerging as a critical conversation for future workflows.

Graham Sharp, VP sales and marketing, BCNexxt: All of our large broadcast and media companies are financially overhung, due to historic structures and the fragmentation of revenues due to the accelerated rise of streaming. Most have started talking about it, but very few are acting due to the silos and politics of seeing empires dismantled. However, over the past five years, the balance of power in the media industry has shifted. Technology companies have moved directly into the creative and content ownership landscape.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: One overlooked topic is how deeply orchestration reshapes programming and advertising strategies — not just technical workflows — by enabling rapid experimentation with thematic or event-based channels. Another is the cultural shift required as operators transition from fixed air chains to dynamic, software-defined environments. As orchestration matures, organizational workflows and staff roles will evolve as much as the technology itself.