Industry Insights: How broadcasters are managing the business of cloud production

In the final installment of this Industry Insights roundtable series on cloud production, broadcast vendors and technology leaders examine how organizations are adapting operationally and strategically as cloud workflows mature across production and post-production environments.

As cloud infrastructure becomes more deeply embedded into media operations, the conversation is shifting beyond deployment models toward governance, cost management, organizational change and long-term workflow sustainability.

The discussion explores how broadcasters are approaching FinOps, security and cross-functional collaboration while rethinking the relationship between production, engineering and IT teams. Participants also examine how vendors are redesigning products around cloud-native architectures, orchestration and interoperability expectations.

Looking ahead, many describe a future where cloud production becomes less of a distinct workflow category and more of an invisible operational layer integrated across the media supply chain.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Cost discipline grows: Organizations are becoming more selective and operationally disciplined about how cloud resources are deployed and managed.
• Teams are converging: Cloud workflows are driving closer collaboration between production, engineering and IT departments while creating demand for new skill sets.
• Security shifts earlier: Broadcasters increasingly view security, identity management and content protection as foundational workflow requirements rather than add-on features.
• Platforms replace silos: Vendors are moving away from isolated products toward integrated, cloud-native platforms built around orchestration and interoperability.
• Cloud becomes invisible: Participants expect mature cloud production environments to focus less on infrastructure location and more on seamless operational performance across workflows.

How are organizations approaching cost management as cloud usage expands across production and post-production workflows?

Golan Simani, director of cloud and technical operations, TAG Video Systems: What we see consistently is that the $500K cloud budget can easily become $1.5M without disciplined FinOps built in from day one because unmonitored infrastructure is expensive infrastructure. Cost visibility and operational visibility are the same challenge: teams that can see what’s running, what’s idle, and what’s generating alerts no one is acting on are the ones that control their spend.

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: The conversation is getting more honest. Customers are looking beyond raw compute cost and asking what unpredictability costs them in over-provisioning, manual work, recovery time and operational risk. In our experience, the most expensive live workflows are usually not the ones with the most infrastructure, but the ones that become difficult to govern as they scale.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP of product management, Avid: Cost visibility and control are top of mind. Organizations are becoming more disciplined about when and how they use cloud resources, favoring architectures that allow them to scale selectively. Media‑aware platforms help here by reducing unnecessary data movement, avoiding duplication, and ensuring that only active working media consumes premium resources. Hybrid models also allow customers to balance cost with performance and predictability.

Ian McPherson, head of business development, TMT Insights: Companies look for continuous optimization to better control costs, while implementing more effective cost controls and forecasting. Instead of viewing the cloud as the default for everything, companies are looking at creating hybrid models that optimize cost based on latency, availability, and criticality of data. 

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What operational changes have teams had to make when moving from hardware-centric workflows to virtualized infrastructure?

Golan Simani, director of cloud and technical operations, TAG Video Systems: The technical gaps, legacy infrastructure lacking the telemetry interfaces that cloud-native tools expect, are real but solvable. Use the right monitoring layer to bridge SDI-era signals and IP-native streams. The cultural challenge is harder. Teams built around hardware-centric, never-fail operations often struggle to accept that replicating existing workflows in cloud won’t deliver cloud economics, because the workflows themselves were designed around constraints that no longer exist.

Nina Walsh, global leader, business development, GTM & solutions, media & entertainment, games and sports, AWS: While how you implement new technology is important, successfully navigating workflow evolutions hinges on education and training so that the new way of working feels inclusive. It also often requires traditional roles to evolve, which we’re seeing with the increased adoption of virtualized workflows and rapid expansion of AI. To that end, companies are considering the long-term composition of their teams, including adding new roles alongside training existing talent for workflows of the future.

Heather Best, advisory services, Diversified: Teams are typically built around physical signal chains and dedicated hardware rooms. We now need to operate in environments where the infrastructure is passing, software defined and shared on the backbone of IT. That means retraining how we think and investing in operators who once thought in terms of physical routing matrices and hardware I/O to now think in terms of IP streams, containerized workloads, and orchestration.

How are organizations approaching security and content protection when production systems operate in the cloud?

Rene van Koll, senior solutions architect, Big Blue Marble: As operations rely more on IP infrastructure, mechanisms such as DRM, forensic watermarking, and access control are integrated into the delivery chain to scale alongside distribution. Maintaining stable system behavior remains critical, particularly during live events where issues are immediately visible. Monitoring capabilities provide early insight into potential risks and help ensure consistent performance. The focus is on building environments where protection is integrated into the workflow rather than introduced later.

Ian Wagdin, VP, technology and innovation, Appear: The key change is that in cloud and hybrid production security has to be built into the workflow from the start. Architectures are now designed around zero-trust principles and the tools and protocols used in a modern production suite are designed to be accessed by those that need to and lock out those who don’t. Interchange formats such as SRT and MXL are designed from the ground up with sprivacy and security as a priority.

Nina Walsh, global leader, business development, GTM & solutions, media & entertainment, games and sports, AWS: From an AWS perspective, security and content protection remain top priorities and we build enterprise-grade security into every layer of the stack. We also provide clear guidance on security and digital rights management, so that customers have a deep understanding and complete control over who can access what through their entire pipeline. With the rise of AI and use of external tools, content owners want to make sure any data they’re sharing remains private and isn’t used to train base models.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP of product management, Avid: Security expectations have continued to grow year after year. Customers expect enterprise‑grade identity management, role‑based access, encryption, and auditability, regardless of where workflows run. The focus needs to be embedding security into the platform itself. That includes federated identity, policy enforcement, and consistent governance across on‑prem and cloud environments.

Heather Best, advisory services, Diversified: When production workloads run on shared platforms, ownership of critical functions shifts to IT. If this shift isn’t clearly defined and managed, it can create friction, especially when production teams need speed and flexibility but must now go through IT for access, changes, or vendor support. The solution to something like this is converged teams such as MediaOps that embed broadcast and AV expertise alongside cloud architects and network engineers (2110) while establishing a shared governance framework so that agility isn’t sacrificed during IT change management processes that were not designed around such things like latency requirements.

How are vendors adapting their product strategies as customers increasingly expect cloud-native capabilities?

Golan Simani, director of cloud and technical operations, TAG Video Systems: Customers are no longer asking whether a product supports cloud, they’re asking how cloud-native it is at the architecture level. Vendors that repackaged on-prem software for cloud deployment are hitting limits around scalability and elastic resource use that weren’t designed in from the start. The fail-fast, design-for-failure operating model that cloud enables requires fundamentally different engineering assumptions, and products built under the old assumptions tend to expose that in production.

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: The market is clearly moving away from isolated products toward platform thinking. Customers still care about individual capabilities, of course, but increasingly they expect orchestration, visibility, automation and open interoperability across the full workflow, not just another function hosted in software. That is a healthy shift because the operational challenge today is almost always systemic.

Ian Wagdin, VP, technology and innovation, Appear: From Appear’s perspective, that is exactly why the conversation is about combining dense, high-performance hardware with software capabilities in a way that lets customers move at their own pace. That is the only realistic approach for broadcasters with mixed estates, different business models and different stages of transition. The vendors that will matter most are the ones that help customers make that transition cleanly, rather than asking them to conform to a single technology ideology.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP of product management, Avid: Customers now expect software that can run anywhere without forcing disruptive migrations. As a result, vendors are re‑architecting products to be cloud‑ready by design while preserving performance and reliability. That means evolving solutions to operate seamlessly across environments, and delivering cloud‑native services that provide shared intelligence and orchestration across the ecosystem.

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Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: In Lawo’s case, the decision to evolve its product portfolio towards cloud-native processing apps was based on the finding that developing dedicated hardware for a relatively small target audience no longer makes sense when you can rely on giants that keep releasing increasingly powerful servers at a breathtaking speed. Lawo’s core business is the development of cutting-edge solutions — the hardware that delivers the expected results is only a means to an end, a commodity.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: Vendors are building systems that can operate consistently across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments, so customers have flexibility in how they deploy, while keeping a consistent operational workflow regardless of deployment model. At the same time, there’s a clear shift toward tighter integration, with solutions expected to work as part of a complete workflow rather than as standalone tools. The goal is to give customers financial flexibility of hybrid deployment, while managing the added complexity through consistent operational interfaces and orchestration systems.

How are cloud workflows changing the relationship between production teams, engineering and IT departments?

Nina Walsh, global leader, business development, GTM & solutions, media & entertainment, games and sports, AWS: With on-premises workflows, production, engineering, and IT operate separately and the cloud brings them together as a more integrated team. Today, instead of production functioning as a customer of IT and engineering, they’re more like partners and the development timeline is accelerating with the cloud. Engineering and IT are evaluating new AI tools and ways of working, then production is testing them, and vice versa. Cloud-based creative studio Untold Studios is a great example of this.

Looking ahead, what will define a mature cloud production environment five years from now?

Rene van Koll, senior solutions architect, Big Blue Marble: A mature cloud production environment will be defined by how reliably it performs at scale within a fully software-driven ecosystem. As the distinction between broadcast and streaming continues to narrow, cloud-native pipelines will be expected to support large-scale live events with stable quality across devices. At the same time, platforms will operate with greater intelligence, using data to optimize performance and respond more effectively to changing demand.

Chris Pulis, CTO, Globecast: A mature cloud production environment will be defined by seamless integration between cloud, edge, and on-prem systems, with an orchestration layer assisted by Agentic AI. Multi-agent AI will play a larger role in optimizing performance and even cost in real time. Ultimately, the goal is an infrastructure that is both highly adaptable, predictable and operationally hyper-responsive, supporting a wide range of production needs that can easily manage dynamic changes and complexity in real time.

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: A mature environment will not be defined by how much of it sits in the cloud. It will be defined by whether operators can move live workflows across facilities, cloud, networks and partner domains while keeping behavior predictable, recovery structured and operational control intact. That is when cloud production stops being an architecture discussion and becomes a reliable operating model.

Ian Wagdin, VP, technology and innovation, Appear: A mature cloud production environment will be defined by how effectively the entire production system operates as a whole, rather than by how much of it sits in the cloud. The most successful environments will be those that can move smoothly across edge, core and cloud without creating operational silos. They will also give content creators and broadcasters the freedom to choose where different functions run, based on performance, economics and workflow needs rather than on a fixed choice of architecture.

Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN: A mature cloud environment will be defined by the ability to manage multiple live events simultaneously while creating tailored versions for different audiences and platforms from a single workflow. This includes generating regionalized feeds with localized graphics, language-specific commentary, and platform-specific advertising without duplicating infrastructure or teams.

Nina Walsh, global leader, business development, GTM & solutions, media & entertainment, games and sports, AWS: I think before too long, production will just encompass cloud aspects and we won’t necessarily differentiate cloud productions. There likely will always be some workflow aspects that remain on premises, but cloud will increasingly become the norm as more people become comfortable with it.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP of product management, Avid: A mature cloud production environment will be invisible to users. Teams won’t think in terms of “cloud” versus “on‑prem”. They’ll simply work with the platform continuously optimizing performance, cost, and scale behind the scenes. AI will increasingly act as a co‑pilot across the media lifecycle, guiding decisions and automating routine work, while professionals remain in control. The organizations that succeed will be those that make the shift.

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