Industry Insights: Media workflows are now interconnected supply chains

As broadcasters expand across streaming, cloud production and multi-platform distribution, operational complexity is reshaping how media workflows are designed and managed.

In the second installment of this three-part Industry Insights roundtable on workflows and integration, broadcast technology vendors examine how organizations are rebuilding production and post-production around automation, orchestration and increasingly interconnected media supply chains.

The discussion explores how workflows are shifting from isolated production stages into continuous operational environments, why automation is becoming essential for managing scale and efficiency and how distributed teams are coordinating production across multiple locations. Participants also examine how resilience strategies are evolving as operations become more dependent on software-driven infrastructure, real-time collaboration and cloud-connected systems designed to support faster, more flexible production models.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Workflows converge: Production, post and distribution are increasingly operating as continuous workflows rather than isolated stages connected by manual handoffs.
• Automation expands: Automation is shifting from a competitive advantage to an operational necessity for handling ingest, QC, metadata processing and multi-platform delivery.
• Supply chains mature: Media supply chains are becoming structured operational frameworks with codified processes, orchestration layers and measurable performance metrics.
• Teams decentralize: Broadcasters are coordinating production across multiple locations using centralized orchestration, remote collaboration and real-time operational visibility.
• Resilience evolves: Redundancy strategies are becoming more dynamic, with broadcasters relying on automated failover, distributed infrastructure and scalable cloud-connected backup systems.

How have production and post-production workflows changed over the past few years as organizations move toward more integrated media supply chains?

Thomas Carlisle, senior solutions architect, TAG Video Systems: The bottlenecks we hear about most often sit at handoff points, where content moves from production into post, or from post into distribution, and where responsibility for quality shifts between teams. These gaps create blind spots: problems that originate upstream aren’t caught until they’re downstream and difficult and expensive to fix.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: The emphasis is no longer just on moving files, but on maintaining a continuous flow of information through teams that are often spread across multiple cities or even countries. This has accelerated adoption of shared storage, cloud based workflows and remote collaboration tools. Ultimately, the industry has been shifting toward a model where production, post and distribution are no longer viewed as separate stages, but part of a unified media ecosystem designed to support faster collaboration.

Guillaume Aubuchon, VP, product management, Avid: What’s changing is the expectation that workflows should be continuous, not segmented. Editorial, asset management, storage, and delivery should be aware of each other and operating in real time. This expectation is driving a preference toward platforms that understand media context and editorial intent.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: An open and constantly evolving workflow control system such as Lawo’s VSM has been the backbone of production and post-production scenarios for well over a decade. It allows users to set up signal routes and adjust parameters for all required devices and processing apps, and to change thousands of settings for the next production with one button press. In combination with an orchestration tool like HOME, users are free to design and amend their workflow as often as necessary.

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: There’s been a huge move away from all-encompassing single-vendor solutions and appliances. Agility and a desire for self-sufficiency, not to mention cost savings, are driving this change. But it requires smart design, technical expertise, and the right technologies with open APIs and modern tooling to get the benefits.

Advertisement

Rich Zabel, VP, media supply chain, Diversified: The shift has been brutal in its efficiency demands — smaller teams are now expected to deliver more content, faster, across a greater number of endpoints than was operationally conceivable five years ago. Automation has moved from a competitive advantage to a survival requirement, with metadata-driven orchestration handling ingest, QC, transcoding, and distribution tasks that previously required multiple human touchpoints at every stage. The margin for error has simultaneously shrunk — because when a single automated pipeline feeds broadcast, streaming, social, and syndication simultaneously, a bad file or a broken rule doesn’t create one problem, it creates a cascade across every delivery point at once.

To what extent has the concept of a “media supply chain” become a practical operational framework rather than a theoretical model?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: For our customers, the media supply chain stopped being theoretical a few years ago — the question was never whether it was a useful framework, but whether the technology existed to actually implement it at scale. What’s changed is that cloud-native platforms now make it possible to manage content processing the way a manufacturer would manage a production line: with visibility into every step, clear unit economics, and the ability to dynamically adjust capacity in response to demand. Organizations that have made this shift are now measuring their supply chains the way they measure any business operation — cycle time, cost per unit, throughput — rather than asking IT to explain what’s happening.

Santiago Miralles, founder and CEO, Knox Media Hub: We think there is still a lot to be done. But it’s good that the concept has been coined for the M&E industry. It’s the first step to understand that what has been possible in terms of efficiency and cost savings for industrial companies is also possible in the M&E sector, provided all players accept and contribute to it.

Rich Zabel, VP, media supply chain, Diversified: For most of the industry’s history, the media supply chain was effectively a collection of tribal knowledge and informal SOPs — processes that lived in people’s heads or binders on a shelf, held together by experienced staff who knew what to do and when to do it. Today, that has been replaced by structured, engineered orchestration environments where every stage — from ingest to delivery — is explicitly designed, with defined dependencies, failover logic, and vendor integrations that must meet strict technical and business criteria to participate in the chain. The difference is consequential: when a staff member left before, institutional knowledge walked out the door; now the process is codified in the platform, auditable, repeatable, and no longer dependent on any single person knowing the unwritten rules.

Brett Beers, chief architect and innovation, TMT Insights: The media supply chain is becoming a practical framework because organizations are being forced to manage growing scale and complexity across the entire content lifecycle. It’s no longer just about producing or distributing content, but about coordinating rights, versions, formats, and delivery across global platforms in a more automated and seam. Treating this as a connected supply chain helps bring structure and visibility to what would otherwise be very fragmented operations.

How are teams using automation to reduce repetitive manual tasks while still maintaining editorial oversight?

Yaya Selva, CMO, Net Insight: The most useful automation is usually happening around setup, provisioning, routing, validation and exception handling, not around replacing editorial judgment. The smart organizations are using automation to remove friction and reduce avoidable error, while keeping people focused on timing, content decisions and the moments where human judgment really matters.

Thomas Carlisle, senior solutions architect, TAG Video Systems: The goal isn’t to remove humans from the loop, it’s to remove them from tasks that don’t really require human judgment. Things like automated QC and proactive service health analysis can handle the baseline, freeing operators to focus on anomalies that genuinely require intervention. The key is designing automation with clear escalation paths so that editorial and operations teams retain control over important decisions.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Automation comes in many shapes and guises. Automix is probably the most straightforward form, but it can also be driven by tracking devices and the KICK software, which is used to provide a pristine close-ball miking experience. A control system is able to set thousands of parameters and routes at the press of a single button and can work alongside scheduling software that prepares app-based tech stacks upcoming assignments.

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: This is a strength of a good PAM, like Projective’s Strawberry — it eliminates all the boring manual work, such as workspace creation, assignments, access control, and archival, so that tech and editorial teams can focus on higher-value activities.

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The most effective implementations use automation to handle the high-volume, rules-based work — QC passes, transcoding, metadata normalization — and then use the output from those automated steps to guide operators to exactly where human judgment is needed. In QC alone, a well-implemented first-pass automation can reduce the manual effort by as much as 80%, not by removing operators from the process, but by eliminating the time they spend reviewing content that has no issues.

Clara Aler, head of marketing, Knox Media Hub: There are stages (technical quality control, for example) that have no editorial value: Automate those to free up resources. Well-designed workflows incorporate human supervision and automated triggers to flag errors for review.

Rich Zabel, VP, media supply chain, Diversified: AI-driven ingest has become one of the highest-value entry points — automated logging, speech-to-text, facial recognition, and content tagging on inbound media now arrives with metadata already attached, dramatically reducing the time editors spend on discovery and organization before creative work even begins. Format normalization and aspect ratio derivations for multi-platform delivery have moved almost entirely to automated first-pass processing, with tooling that has matured to the point where human review is an exception workflow rather than the default. Where the editorial application is getting genuinely interesting is in first-pass storyboarding and rough assembly — AI that can propose a structure based on logged content is still imperfect, but it is improving fast enough that editors are increasingly using it as a starting point rather than a curiosity, which is where the real time savings will compound.

Advertisement

What types of processes are proving most effective for coordinating work across distributed teams and locations?

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: One example that springs to mind is the Remote Audio Control Room (RACR) in Germany that produces immersive 5.1.4 mixes in real time for an OB truck that may be hundreds of miles away. Commentary for sports fixtures is also often contributed from a variety of locations across Europe and beyond. As for video applications, some of Lawo’s customers have their slomo operators sitting in one city, while the production takes place elsewhere, using audio and video streams that come from a third location. In addition to a rock-solid intercom system, some users also use monitor screens to show distributed teams what the others are doing.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, at Imagine Communications: The biggest shift has been the move to orchestration as a central control layer that brings automation, routing, content management, and playout into a single operational framework. Once that’s in place, operators can manage services across on-prem and cloud environments without needing to think about where things are physically running. The result is that playlists, media, and distribution stay aligned, and distributed teams can work against the same real-time view of the operation.

How are media organizations approaching workflow resilience and redundancy as operations become more interconnected?

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Organizations that have already migrated to IP usually rely on Seamless Protection Switching/Hitless Merge (SMPTE ST2022-7) for redundancy and resilience. This approach is based on two separate stream routes towards each device or server: as long as one is active, the other is not used, but it will kick in when the first route stops sending essences. For critical applications, device redundancy can be used, which means setting up two DSP processors, using one of them, and switching to the other if the first one fails.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, at Imagine Communications: Resilience is no longer about building 1:1 duplicate systems and hoping you never need them — it’s becoming much more dynamic. With modern orchestration systems, broadcasters can mirror channels for high-value content, automate 1:n failover groupings, and scale backup resources across on-prem and cloud environments as needed. That makes redundancy more flexible, more cost-effective, and much easier to align with how operations actually run day to day.