Industry Insights: Why enterprise production needs people who can bridge IT and production

As corporate production operations grow more sophisticated, the hardest challenges are often organizational rather than technical. Studios need people who can bridge broadcast, AV and IT, while distributed teams need shared standards that keep production moving without creating unnecessary friction.

In the final installment of this three-part Industry Insights roundtable, vendors and integrators examine how enterprise studios are being staffed, where talent gaps remain and how IT, AV and production teams are working together.

The discussion also explores how organizations are establishing common standards across locations, updating approval workflows and using templates, automation and centralized tools to maintain control as expectations for speed and responsiveness continue to rise.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Hybrid skills matter: Enterprise studios increasingly need people who can work across broadcast engineering, AV, IT and cloud-based production environments.
• Silos create friction: IT, AV and production teams need to align early on security, infrastructure, usability and speed rather than designing systems in isolation.
• Standards need ownership: Distributed organizations benefit from a central team or process that establishes common technology, branding and production standards.
• Approvals are evolving: Parallel review workflows and shared access to content can help organizations maintain oversight without slowing production.
• Automation supports control: Templates, predefined rules and centralized tools can improve consistency while reducing repetitive work for creative teams.

How are enterprise studios being staffed, and where are the biggest talent gaps?

Martin Lindsay, head of networked solutions, Sony Electronics: It’s difficult to find professionals who possess both modern IT skills and traditional broadcast engineering knowledge, which is being taught less frequently at most schools. You might find someone knowledgeable of IP and network connectivity who has no idea about “camera shading” concepts. Veteran engineers know SDI, routers, patch bays, and genlock. Next gen talent is IT-focused. They know APIs, cloud, virtualized switching, and UX tools. People need to cross-train in different areas; the ones who are comfortable switching between apps, adjusting code, and multitasking are the ones who are redefining what’s possible in a modern studio or control room environment.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: The right person in charge will probably have enough experience to decide which roles require hires and which can be managed by freelancers. Using freelancers who are active in the broadcast world may have the advantage that they submit fresh ideas regarding workflows, approaches, etc. And to a certain extent, a flexible and agile infrastructure will attract more younger people eager to remain up-to-date with the latest — and for their careers: most promising — industry developments.

What skills are hardest to find when building internal production teams?

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The hardest skill to hire is workflow thinking: someone who can look at how media moves through people and tools and design structure that holds up under pressure. Pure creative talent and pure IT skill are both available, but the people who bridge the two are rare and disproportionately valuable. Strong metadata and asset discipline is a close second, because few creatives are trained to think that way.

How are IT, AV and production teams collaborating in these environments?

Ken Kobayashi, business manager for remote cameras, edge AI, beamforming mics, and professional display solutions, Sony Electronics: Traditionally, video production primarily involved only the AV and production teams, with the production team often directing the AV team. However, current video production demands support for both live and on-demand content, with files increasingly managed, stored, and operated over networks. These three functions are now being consolidated within the IT team, enabling highly efficient enterprise video production.

Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing, Telestream: Successful collaboration happens when enterprise media teams deploy software-defined production tools that natively speak both IT and video languages. By utilizing flexible software platforms rather than rigid, proprietary hardware switches, production teams can ingest professional video feeds and cleanly output them as standard streams that automatically fit within corporate network rules. This software-centric approach allows AV and IT departments to work together smoothly, delivering high-quality corporate video without triggering network security or bandwidth issues.

Advertisement

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The collaboration is far more integrated than it used to be, because shared storage and hybrid cloud mean these teams now design infrastructure together rather than in sequence. IT cares about security and cost, AV cares about the room and signal, and production cares about speed, so the studios that work are the ones where those priorities get reconciled early. Where they stay siloed, you get friction dressed up as a creative problem.

How are executive expectations around speed and responsiveness shaping operations?

Rick Seegull, SVP, technology and business development, Riedel Communications: Executive expectations around speed and responsiveness are compressing the operational margin for error across corporate production environments. Teams must adapt quickly to shifting requirements — reconfiguring infrastructure, absorbing last-minute changes, and supporting everything from executive interviews to large-scale all-hands events with tight schedules. The pressure is driving organizations toward scalable, easily reconfigurable workflows that allow production teams to respond rapidly without compromising reliability or output quality.

How are organizations establishing standards for quality, branding and production across distributed teams?

Phil Rapp, senior director of engineering, Diversified: Often, they are not. Different standards are set in different offices and different parts of the world, causing conflicts that must be addressed later, with associated costs. Good planning from the outset is crucial. If it’s not done in the beginning, then finding a point to level set can be just as valuable in planning a path forward.

TJ Kortlever, senior solutions architect, Diversified: By having a focal point for developing the standards, enterprise organizations can have a single direction for the variety of spaces required. Maintaining a similar technology stack across the enterprise allows for operator familiarity and makes system support easier. Many enterprise clients will have a team who can set the standards, develop next-gen solutions in a lab and help management figure out new space costs and what to deploy.

Where do corporate studios struggle most with consistency across regions, departments or business units?

Phil Rapp, senior director of engineering, Diversified: Not communicating between different parts or branches within the same company. The scene from the film “Apollo 13” comes to mind, where they have to find a way to fit a round filter in a square system because the two manufacturers never considered that they might have to work together at some point.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The struggle is sharpest where teams grew independently and adopted their own tools, naming, and habits before anyone tried to unify them. Travel brands and other multi-site organizations often discover that unifying creative services across countries exposes just how differently each location was working. Consistency is hard not because people resist it, but because there was no shared structure to begin with.

How are approval workflows evolving to balance speed with oversight?

Martin Lindsay, head of networked solutions, Sony Electronics: Approval workflows are incorporating stricter verification steps to combat AI-generated and deepfake content. Media organizations are adding dedicated review teams and adopting provenance technologies like the protocols outlined by the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) to track content origin and edits. The priority is still getting content shot, edited, produced, and delivered faster than the competition. However, the addition of authenticity and verification measures is paramount to maintaining audience trust, without slowing down the process. These measures help ensure authenticity and maintain audience trust without significantly delaying fast-paced production, especially in news environments.

Rupert Watson, VP, go-to-market, EMEA, LucidLink: The old model of sending a watermarked MP4 to legal, brand and comms in sequence is collapsing under volume, because there simply is not time for serial review on the amount of content enterprises now produce. The evolution is towards parallel, in-context review where stakeholders comment directly against the timeline or shared project, with clear ownership of which approvals are blocking and which are advisory. This works far better when reviewers are looking at the same live media rather than at copies, and that is one of the practical benefits of running approvals against a shared cloud filesystem: There is one version of the truth, and oversight happens without slowing the production down.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Approval is shifting from sequential sign-off to structured, parallel review, where the right people see the right version at the right stage without becoming a bottleneck. The aim is oversight that travels with the content rather than a gate that stalls it, which matters more as executive expectations on speed keep rising. Automation handles the routine checks so human review can focus on judgment.

What role do templates, automation and centralized tools play in maintaining control without slowing production down?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Templates and centralized tooling are most valuable when designed as creative guardrails rather than constraints, because they should make doing the right thing faster than doing the wrong thing instead of requiring producers to fight the system. Automated quality checks at defined workflow stages reduce the burden on human reviewers while helping organizations standardize formats, optimize deliverables, and avoid unnecessary duplication of media assets. At scale, automation is becoming just as important for controlling infrastructure growth and storage overhead as it is for improving creative consistency.

Martin Lindsay, head of networked solutions, Sony Electronics: They work together to form a unified management platform, standardizing processes while still enabling speed. Combined, they remove repetitive tasks and embed control directly into workflows through predefined structures, automated rules, and clear visibility. However, these processes require ongoing human oversight to remain current as needs evolve.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Templates and automation are how you get control without friction, because they bake structure, branding, and permissions into the work instead of asking people to remember them. Centralized tools give visibility across teams and sites while still letting creatives work in the applications they prefer, which is the balance that actually holds. Done well, this is the difference between governance that enables production and governance that obstructs it.

Advertisement