Industry Insights: Interoperability is reshaping broadcast infrastructure and workflows

As media operations become more distributed, software-defined and cloud-connected, broadcasters are rethinking the infrastructure that connects production, asset management, monitoring and delivery.

In this first installment of our three-part Industry Insights roundtable on workflows and integration, technology vendors examine how orchestration platforms, interoperability standards and unified monitoring are reshaping the operational core of modern media environments.

The discussion explores why open APIs and standards-based architectures are becoming essential to long-term flexibility, how organizations are balancing visibility across increasingly fragmented systems and why governance, consistency and operational control are emerging as strategic priorities. As workflows grow more interconnected, the conversation frames how broadcasters are building infrastructure designed to evolve continuously rather than remain fixed around individual vendors or hardware silos.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Orchestration expands: Orchestration platforms are evolving beyond basic integration into operational control layers that coordinate workflows, metadata and automation across production environments.
• Open architectures matter: Broadcasters are prioritizing open standards, APIs and modular systems to reduce vendor lock-in and preserve long-term workflow flexibility.
• Visibility shifts upward: Monitoring strategies are moving away from device-level oversight toward unified service-level visibility and exception-based management.
• Governance becomes strategic: Organizations are increasingly relying on standardized policies, shared data models and centralized monitoring to maintain consistency across complex workflows.
• Single-vendor fades: The industry is moving away from monolithic infrastructure stacks toward interoperable ecosystems built around best-of-breed technologies.

What role are orchestration platforms playing in connecting traditionally separate systems such as editing, asset management and playout?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: We are seeing orchestration become the layer that gives operational shape to what would otherwise remain a set of disconnected tools. The real benefit is not just passing data or triggering actions between systems; it is creating consistent workflow behavior, clearer accountability and better control across environments that were never originally designed to work together.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP, product management, Avid: Organizations are looking for solutions that are embedded into the platform itself and have an understanding of assets, metadata, users, and deadlines. At Avid, we see orchestration evolving into a control plane that spans tools and systems, coordinating work while keeping people in the tools they trust. This keeps creators as the central point of editorial decision making and removes friction by enriching the right media where it needs to be, when it needs to be there without manual effort.

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: The fact that asset management is separate from editing is part of the issue: MAMs, by nature, get in the way of editing, so the first thing is to separate MAM and PAM (production asset management) functionality. Having a sensible PAM becomes the foundation for editing, providing guardrails for that traditionally highly chaotic process. On that foundation, connection to the broader ingest, playout, and even MAM becomes easier.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The integration question — can these systems talk to each other — has largely been solved; the harder question now is whether your orchestration platform is doing the connective work, or whether that still requires custom engineering between every pair of systems. The best orchestration platforms provide a standards-based integration layer that connects editing tools, MAMs, QC systems, and even AI tools without one-off development work, and then add the business logic on top — routing, prioritization, SLA management — that turns a set of connected tools into an actual supply chain. Organizations that have gotten this right are finding that onboarding a new vendor or capability goes from a months-long integration project to something that can happen in weeks.

Brett Beers, chief architect and innovation, TMT Insights: Orchestration platforms are becoming the connective layer that brings together systems that were never designed to operate as part of a unified workflow. As complexity increases, the value isn’t just in integration, but in coordinating how data and processes move across editing, asset management, localization, and distribution. This is what enables organizations to turn fragmented operations into something more cohesive and scalable.

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Rich Zabel, VP, media supply chain, Diversified: Orchestration platforms have become the connective tissue that enforces consistency across systems that were never designed to talk to each other, replacing manual handoffs with rule-based automation that executes with the same accuracy at 3 a.m. as it does at 3 p.m. The real operational shift is that human expertise is now encoded into the platform — editors, operators, and librarians define the rules once, and the system applies them at scale without requiring daily intervention to keep the pipeline moving. Beyond active production, these platforms are increasingly where AI governance and lifecycle management live — controlling when and how AI tools are invoked, on what content, under what conditions, and determining how assets age, are archived, or are retired based on rights, relevance, and business rules.

How are organizations approaching interoperability between vendor ecosystems as workflows become more software-driven?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: There is much less tolerance now for closed operational islands. As workflows become more distributed and more software-defined, customers are putting real weight behind open standards, open APIs and architectures that let them combine specialized solutions without creating new long-term lock-in. They want the freedom to evolve without rebuilding the whole operation every few years.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: Many are operating a mix of legacy hardware, newer software platforms, cloud services and remote collaboration tools. A modular approach makes it easier to preserve previous investments while still modernizing the overall workflow. The goal is not simply to connect systems, but to create workflows that can evolve as operational needs, distribution models and technology continue to change.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP, product management, Avid: Customers are pushing for open, software-driven architecture that combines best in class tools without risking reliability. That’s why we’re investing in lightweight connectors, open APIs across Avid. The intent is to give customers broader choices, while ensuring tools work together seamlessly, they deliver a deeper, media-aware experience that generic platforms can’t replicate.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Some vendors, such as Lawo, are contributing to the development of the EBU’s open-source Media eXchange Layer (MXL) initiative. It is based on the expectation that apps developed by different manufacturers running on servers or in the cloud should be able to not only exchange essences — to allow users to choose best-of-breed solutions rather than proprietary ones — but also do so with negligible latency. IP-native hardware devices, on the other hand, comply with the SMPTE ST2110 suite of standards as well as AE67 and NMOS to ensure interoperability.

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: Well-documented and open APIs are key; many legacy vendors seem to offer APIs as an afterthought. But if you have smart, modern tooling with open APIs, the interoperability becomes easier and — just as important — can evolve as things change.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The reality of a modern media supply chain is that no single vendor covers the full workflow, and most organizations have stopped trying to force that model. What they’re moving toward instead is a platform-centric approach where a supply chain management layer sits above the individual tools — transcoding, QC, AI processing, storage — and manages how those tools are provisioned, connected, and coordinated. The organizations doing this well are choosing vendors not just for the capability of their tools, but for the quality of their integrations and their willingness to participate in a shared ecosystem.

Santiago Miralles, founder and CEO, Knox Media Hub: We see that organizations are leveraging three primary levels of convenience. One: advanced API capabilities (obviously) to interconnect systems. Two: partnership between vendors to provide advanced jointly built features. Three: a common ground for taxonomy of data.

Clara Aler, head of marketing, Knox Media Hub: We are seeing a rising trend of organizations prioritizing pluggable ecosystems where open standards and robust APIs allow for a seamless exchange, while shifting away from vendors who treat data as a black box. The industry is moving away from single-vendor solutions, as the resulting lack of flexibility and vendor lock-in is proving too costly.

Brett Beers, chief architect and innovation, TMT Insights: Interoperability is increasingly being driven by the need to connect and activate data across systems, not just move files between them. Organizations are leaning into APIs, shared data models, and loosely coupled architectures that allow them to evolve without constant rework. The goal is to reduce fragmentation so that both workflows and the data behind them can operate more seamlessly across vendors.

How are organizations balancing real-time operational visibility with the complexity of monitoring dozens of interconnected systems?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: A lot of teams are moving away from device-by-device visibility toward service-level visibility. That shift matters because operators do not really need fifty separate status views; they need to know whether the live service as a whole is healthy, what is affecting it, and where they should act first. In complex environments, that is the difference between observing complexity and actually controlling it.

Thomas Carlisle, senior solutions architect, TAG Video Systems: As environments grow to hundreds or thousands of services, teams drown in alerts that don’t distinguish signal from noise. The shift we’re seeing is toward visual, context-aware monitoring that surfaces service health at a glance, rather than requiring operators to triage raw alarm feeds one by one.

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John Mailhot, SVP, product management, at Imagine Communications: The answer has really been consolidation — bringing monitoring into a unified environment that provides a real-time view across the entire workflow. Multiviewers are a big part of that, but they’ve evolved beyond just displaying video to showing signal health, metadata, and routing context all in one place. Increasingly, monitoring-by-exception systems are layered on top to highlight what actually needs attention, so operators can focus on higher-value, higher-interactions channels instead of watching everything all the time.

Brett Beers, chief architect and innovation, TMT Insights: The challenge today isn’t a lack of data, it’s that the data is fragmented across too many systems to be easily actionable. Organizations are moving toward unified visibility models that consolidate operational signals into a “single pane of glass.” That shift is what enables more proactive, exception-based management, where teams can focus on what needs more attention instead of monitoring everything equally.

What tools or strategies are helping teams maintain consistency and governance as workflows span multiple platforms and vendors?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: The most effective approach we see is policy-driven control combined with common service definitions and lifecycle governance. In other words, instead of trying to make every underlying system identical, organizations define how services should behave and then govern that behavior consistently across sites, vendors and operational domains. That scales much better than relying on manual coordination.

Thomas Carlisle, senior solutions architect, TAG Video Systems: Consistency requires a single source of truth about what’s happening across your ecosystem. When organizations rely on siloed monitoring tools for each platform, governance becomes a manual reconciliation exercise. A unified monitoring fabric, one that ingests telemetry from every system and presents it coherently, is increasingly how teams maintain operational governance at scale.

Álvaro Montalbán, chief sales officer, Knox Media Hub: Clear project management inside the organizations is a must in order to clearly define the technical needs that will become workflows. When it comes to multiple vendors within the same workflows, it is fundamental that those companies and products embrace interoperability, namely with API-first approaches. Therefore, it is a combination of a clear picture within the company and then the right (and interoperable) tools for the execution of those workflows.

Brett Beers, chief architect and innovation, TMT Insights: Consistency starts with strategy. Standardizing how data is defined, validated, and carried through the workflow, rather than relying on individual systems to enforce governance is the most effective way organizations can maintain control even as processes span multiple platforms and partners. As scale increases, standardization becomes critical to preventing small inconsistencies from compounding across systems and partners.

What role do open standards and APIs play in making integrated workflows more sustainable over time?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: They are critical because they make modernization incremental instead of disruptive. Open standards and APIs let organizations introduce new capabilities, connect different operating domains and preserve existing investments without tying every future decision to a single vendor roadmap. In practice, that is what makes long-term workflow evolution realistic.

Thomas Carlisle, senior solutions architect, TAG Video Systems: Open standards are the backbone of modern broadcast infrastructure. When monitoring and control systems expose open APIs, organizations can build integrations once and maintain them across vendor changes, rather than rebuilding every time a component is swapped out. TAG’s Open SDK, for example, has enabled over 70 third-party integrations precisely because customers need their monitoring layer to be an ecosystem, not a silo.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: They are the cornerstone of effective interoperability, allowing organizations to choose their infrastructure without having to worry about vendor lock-in. APIs have played a crucial role for control and orchestration systems, providing vendor-agnostic access to the HOME management platform, and allowing them to talk to a broadcast control system. There is another open-standard protocol that needs to be mentioned, though: NMOS for control.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Open standards and APIs are what allow organizations to swap components without re-engineering the workflow around them — and in a market that’s evolving as fast as this one, that flexibility is essential. The organizations that invested in standards-based integration five years ago are the ones that were able to adopt AI-powered tools quickly, because the interface layer was already defined. What we’ve seen in practice is that organizations often underestimate the cost of proprietary integrations until they have to replace a vendor, at which point that technical debt becomes very visible.

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John Mailhot, SVP, product management, at Imagine Communications: Open standards are really what make all of this possible at scale, because they allow systems from different vendors to operate together in a single workflow. ST 2110, in particular, has become the common transport layer that everything builds on. That gives broadcasters the freedom to evolve their infrastructure over time without having to replace everything at once or lock themselves into one approach.

Rich Zabel, VP, media supply chain, Diversified: The era of the single-vendor end-to-end solution is functionally over — the pace of innovation across ingest, MAM, editing, AI tooling, and distribution means the best answer for any given workflow stage rarely comes from the same company, and organizations that locked into monolithic stacks are now paying the price in agility. Rich, well-maintained APIs are no longer a feature to evaluate — they are a procurement requirement, because a best-of-breed architecture only delivers its promise when every component can be orchestrated, monitored, and replaced without rebuilding the surrounding pipeline from scratch. One-off custom integrations are a technical debt trap: they work at the moment of build, but they become the most expensive and fragile points in the system the moment either vendor ships a breaking change, which makes API quality and vendor commitment to maintaining them a long-term operational risk calculation, not just a technical one.