NAB Show Perspectives: Why trust, not technology, is reshaping broadcast teams

There’s a phrase I keep coming back to when I think about what distributed production has changed in live sports broadcasting. It’s not about bandwidth, latency or IP architecture, though they all matter, of course.

It’s this: the geography of trust.

For decades, broadcast production operated on proximity. The director had to be able to tap the vision mixer on the shoulder. The production team’s confidence in each other was built partly on their shared physical space. It gave teams an awareness of what was going on around them, the conversations, the glances.

That model worked. But it also meant that people spent three nights a week in hotels. Crew wellbeing was routinely treated as a casualty of the job and the talent pool for any given production was limited to whoever could get to a truck by 10am.

The last five years forced the industry to confront the idea that trust doesn’t actually require this geography. It requires intention.

From proximity to proof

When football resumed after the pandemic lockdown in 2020, we had three weeks to build a Remote Operations Centre in High Wycombe capable of producing Premier League matches in UHD HDR; the whole production and EVS teams were off-site on socially distanced workstations.

On the first match back, the director of BT Sport described the workflow as absolutely no different to being in the truck. That was the proof of concept right there. Not just that the technology worked, but that a team could operate coherently and confidently without sharing a room. Across the restart season, it saved between 28,000 and 30,000 miles of crew travel.

What made it possible wasn’t just fibre or IP infrastructure. The decision to upsize connectivity to 10+10 Gbps with Tier 1 diversity early, before we knew what load we’d need to carry, was very important. What made it work was the deliberate design of the communication layer: intercom platforms, defined talkback structures and handoffs that replaced the informal channels that’d always existed in person but never needed to be defined.

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Communication is the real infrastructure

Infrastructure makes distributed production possible. Communication design is what makes it work. This is something the technology conversation often misses. When the comms layer is built with the same kind of rigor as the signal chain, the output is indistinguishable from on-site production. When it’s not, it immediately shows on air.

Formula E is one of the clearest illustrations of where this is heading. Around 50 production staff, who’d previously travelled to race locations around the world, now work from our centralized London hub. Each production requires teams to extend trust across a network link instead of a gallery floor. When the communication layer is taken seriously, that trust holds.

Beyond the technology story

The industry has been quick to make distributed production a tech story, and understandably so. SMPTE ST 2110, software-defined routing: these are genuine architectural shifts. But that transformation has largely happened. What’s still being built in production teams across the industry is the operational and cultural confidence to rely on it.

That confidence needs to be earned. For example, a broadcast team on a major live event shares an energy that builds in the hours before transmission. Honestly, some of what exists in a shared physical space doesn’t translate across a network link. But the best distributed teams have learned to compensate in other ways: through preparation, pre-production and communication discipline, making the unspoken rules of a gallery explicit.

The human argument

There’s a dimension to this that the industry has been slow to recognise as a strategic issue: crew wellbeing. When an experienced operator tells you they can now be home in the evenings because they are no longer spending three nights a week in a hotel, that’s not a soft benefit. The best people in this industry have plenty of options, and they’ll choose environments that treat them well and protect their long-term quality of life, so it becomes a retention argument and, in the end, a quality argument.

The scalability case is also well understood by now. Centralized hubs can support multiple simultaneous events from shared infrastructure, offering a level of flexibility that traditional OB deployments aren’t designed to match. Each model has its strengths, but hubs unlock a different kind of scale.

Build for capability instead of cost

I’d caution decision-makers against looking at distributed production mainly as a cost exercise. The remote operations centre wasn’t built to save money. It was built to deliver live production safely with no compromises, while having a transformative impact on the people doing the work. The commercial and sustainability benefits followed from that commitment.

Those who start with “how do we cut costs?” tend to build something that disappoints. But those who start with “how do we produce the best possible live sport from wherever the right people are?” build something that completely changes their business.

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The geography of trust has shifted. The teams that’ll define this industry’s next decade are the ones who understand that distributed production is, at its heart, a question of how you build confidence across distance, and invest accordingly.

Sean Mulhern, Gravity MediaSean Mulhern is the chief technical innovation officer of Gravity Media.