Industry Insights: Connecting creative intent with modern workflows

Creative design in broadcast now extends well beyond the finished on-air look.

As teams produce for more platforms, adopt real-time tools and work across increasingly connected environments, creative decisions are becoming inseparable from workflow design, infrastructure and measurement.

In part one of this three-part Industry Insights roundtable, broadcast vendors and creative leaders examine how creative and technical teams are collaborating, where operational constraints can limit creative intent and how faster tools are changing expectations for iteration.

The discussion also considers how broadcasters can preserve brand consistency across platforms, measure whether visual innovation is improving engagement and use artificial intelligence without surrendering authorship. Together, the responses point toward workflows that reduce friction, support experimentation and allow creative ideas to move from concept to delivery without losing their clarity, identity or impact.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Workflows shape creativity: Creative design increasingly depends on how assets, data, automation, storage and production systems are structured behind the scenes.
• Collaboration starts earlier: Creative, editorial and technical teams must make decisions together from the outset rather than pass projects through a sequential production chain.
• Speed raises expectations: Faster tools enable more iteration but also increase pressure for immediate revisions, making approvals, media access and workflow design critical.
• Impact must be measurable: Visual complexity is valuable only when it improves understanding, engagement, brand performance, production control or commercial outcomes.
• Human judgment remains central: AI can reduce repetitive work and accelerate production, but creative intent, emotional understanding and final authorship still depend on people.

What is the state of creative design in broadcast?

Nic Jensen, integrated marketing manager, TVSetDesigns.com: Creative design in broadcast feels fragmented right now. There’s a lot of uncertainty across the industry, leading broadcasters to lean toward safer design choices. At the same time, audiences are consuming content from new platforms with far more visual diversity and risk-taking. This leaves traditional broadcast design in an awkward position between established conventions and changing viewer expectations.

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: Creative design in broadcast is shaped by two connected layers: what audiences see on screen, and how those visuals are created, managed, and operated behind the scenes. Over the years, established workflows have helped the industry build reliable production practices, but many of these creative and operational processes were designed in a different era. Relatively new tools like game engines and generative AI being tested and slowly integrated into workflows by creative departments.

Carol Bettencourt, VP, marketing, Chyron: Creative design more than ever before must accommodate factors beyond the look of the design itself. Inherent in the design process is data integration, animation that responds to data, logic and automation and overall consideration of what happens to the design throughout the production workflow.

Do broadcasters still need a polished on-air look when competing with YouTube, etc.?

Miguel Churruca, marketing and communications director, Brainstorm: Absolutely! High quality content is essential in today’s competitive landscape. In fact, an increasing number of YT channels are investing in their on-air looks, either with carefully crafted sets or including virtual production into the equation. As YouTubers are becoming production houses rather than single individuals creating content, polished and professional on-air looks are a competitive advantage.

Advertisement

Tim Saunders, president, Broadcast Design International: Broadcasters, TV stations and networks absolutely need to maintain credibility and visual integrity as well as utilizing multiple venues for their segments focused on local consumption. Examples being hard news, breaking news, weather, sports, and traffic. Many news outlets are now expanding their footprint by adding podcasts and vodcasts which can work well from much simpler or casual venues.

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: Viewers still respond strongly to powerful visual storytelling, clear identity and polished experiences, regardless of whether the content appears on broadcast television, YouTube or social media.
What has changed is that modern workflows now make it far more achievable to deliver that same level of quality efficiently across multiple platforms at once. The goal is no longer choosing between premium production and platform-native content, but creating workflows that allow both to exist together without adding unnecessary complexity.

Jason Metcalfe, business manager, Crystal LED, Sony Electronics: Digital creators are elevating their production standards even while traditional broadcasters are adopting more informal, interactive formats like podcasts and vertical videos. However, it’s still critical to maintain high-quality production values regardless of the platform, whether it’s national broadcast, streaming services or YouTube. Quality still matters for audience expectations, reliability, redundancy, and long-term content reuse across platforms.

Nic Jensen, integrated marketing manager, TVSetDesigns.com: The largest digital creators and online productions now operate at a level of visual sophistication that often exceeds traditional television, so broadcasters can no longer treat digital platforms as a lower standard. If we, as an industry, continue to view digital platforms as inferior, we risk being left behind. The challenge now is finding ways to optimize and repackage traditional broadcast content so it can succeed online, because now discovery happens digitally.

Carol Bettencourt, VP, marketing, Chyron: I think various content platforms like YouTube are maturing in the breadth of content they support and in the sophistication of their audiences. We are seeing a trajectory similar to classic linear television. If you think about over-the-air broadcasts of fifty years ago, even those of major broadcasters, they were nothing like what we see today. Over time and with technology advances, broadcasters delivered more polish and more visual engagement.

How are creative and technical teams collaborating differently today compared to even two or three years ago?

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: Technical teams are no longer only protecting stability and uptime, but are increasingly helping creative teams experiment faster, iterate more freely and push creative boundaries in ways that were far harder only a few years ago.
At the same time, creatives should not be forced to adapt to technology. The real breakthrough is happening when integration, collaboration and workflow design become seamless enough that the technology fades into the background and the creative process becomes the primary focus again.

Jason Metcalfe, business manager, Crystal LED, Sony Electronics: Creative and technical teams are collaborating more closely due to the convergence of broadcast and IT systems, especially with IP-based infrastructures like ST 2110. We’re seeing tighter synchronization between on-air and technical design, and greater connectivity between real and virtual spaces. Technical teams are pushing the adoption of new techniques to expand efficient creative workflows, and creative is looking for more flexibility in dynamic, temporary spaces.

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: The delivery pipeline and who needs to do what haven’t changed too dramatically, but the integration of new technology is creating opportunities for more team crossovers. As these workflows evolve, the boundaries between departments are becoming less rigid, but this requires more fluid communication around responsibility to ensure effective delivery.Creative teams are developing a deeper understanding of technical systems, while technical teams are helping shape the creative with opportunities for new techniques utilizing the tech stack.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The relationship has become far less sequential. Editorial decisions, storage architecture, access control, and project structure increasingly need to be designed together from the outset, particularly across hybrid and distributed environments. The collaboration question is no longer just about media access, but whether a project can move consistently across teams, locations, and applications without losing structure or governance.

Where in the process do creative intent and technical constraints most often conflict?

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: The challenge is that creative ideas can easily lose momentum when the effort required to execute them becomes disproportionate to the value they add, especially when time-to-audience is critical.
Modern workflows are expanding the creative toolbox without forcing teams into more complicated processes. The real opportunity is not just enabling more formats, platforms or outputs, but helping creative intent survive across them without losing speed, nuance or emotional impact.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The sharpest conflicts tend to arise around ingest, project setup, and the point at which a project needs to scale beyond a single team or location. Creative teams want immediate freedom to start cutting and sharing, while technical teams are managing performance, security, and version control simultaneously. More often than not, this is a workflow design problem rather than a fundamental tension between creativity and technology.

How are timelines and expectations for iteration changing as tools become faster?

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: Faster tools alone are not the biggest change. The real acceleration is happening through tighter collaboration, where teams can work from the same source material, see edits instantly, keep approvals inside the workflow and create once for multiple platforms instead of rebuilding content repeatedly.
That level of integration is dramatically reducing friction between teams and shortening time-to-audience in ways that were far harder only a few years ago. 

Advertisement

Jason Metcalfe, business manager, Crystal LED, Sony Electronics: Tools are becoming faster, and expectations for quicker iteration and turnaround have also increased, putting pressure on teams to adapt. Organizations are upgrading their technology infrastructures for today’s production requirements, but also designing spaces to be future-ready, even anticipating needs that are not yet fully defined. This often includes building more flexible facilities, with additional fiber capacity and IP-based workflows; for example, building “ST2110/IPMX ready” spaces.

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: What’s changed the most is the expectation around flexibility. Broadcasters and creative teams no longer want to lock a concept early and hope it works on delivery day. They expect to refine, adjust and dial up creative in much shorter time frames. That level of iteration is only possible when you have a strong, well-built infrastructure and a team that is on board with fast-paced, collaborative environments.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Faster tools have not reduced pressure, they have simply moved where the pressure shows up. Stakeholders now expect creative iteration to be near-instant, even when the real bottleneck is still approvals, coordination, or media movement. The teams that benefit most from speed are the ones whose workflows are structured well enough to get out of the way.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Faster production tools have significantly compressed turnaround expectations across broadcast and streaming workflows. At the same time, media organizations are facing rising infrastructure costs, particularly around storage, as AI-driven demand continues to impact HDD pricing and availability. This is forcing teams to think more strategically about asset management, storage efficiency, and how to support rapid iteration without continuously expanding storage footprints.

How do you balance consistency of brand identity with the need for platform-specific variation?

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The practical answer is to decide early what is fixed and what is flexible. Core assets, metadata, permissions, and naming conventions should stay consistent, while output formats, durations, and platform-specific edits adapt freely. Without that underlying framework, platform variation tends to collapse into duplication and lost oversight.

How has the trend towards creative hubs and consolidation impacted creative workflows?

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Consolidation has made workflow design more critical, since organizations are now running more teams, locations, and output demands through a shared operational model. The risk is that centralization creates bottlenecks when workflows are not built to handle distributed collaboration. The goal in multisite and hybrid environments is coordinated flexibility, not just central control.

Carol Bettencourt, VP, marketing, Chyron: Hub and spoke workflows can elevate creative quality by having the “best of the best” do the design work. Where this creative workflow actually loses creative flair is in localization. The key is to have an overarching branding and design intent, but, within certain guidelines allow for regionalized variations. It is important that local television still look and feel like the “hometown news.”

What are we not talking about in terms of creative collaboration and workflows that we should be?

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: Even though the industry conversation often treats the newest technology as the whole story, in most media environments it still represents only a small part of the overall operation. The real opportunity is creating platforms and workflows that allow proven technologies and new capabilities to work together naturally. That is where meaningful progress happens: not by replacing everything at once, but by reducing friction between the systems, teams and creative processes that already power modern storytelling.

Alex Roriz, SVP, solution-market strategy and global partnerships, wTVision: We should be talking more about operational creativity. In broadcast, great ideas only become valuable when they can survive timing pressure, live data, multiple outputs, brand rules and last-minute editorial changes. The real opportunity is not simply bringing creative and technical teams closer together, but designing workflows where creative intent can move through the entire production chain without being diluted, reinterpreted or rebuilt at every step.

Jason Metcalfe, business manager, Crystal LED, Sony Electronics: Spatial content (AR/MR) is the next frontier, but it’s still nascent in many ways, making it difficult to predict exactly which direction it will take. However, the hardware is here, and more content is gradually coming online. Future-proofing through IP-based infrastructure and scalable systems are critical to staying adaptable. Additionally, metadata, asset tagging, and content organization are often overlooked but will play a key role in managing increasingly complex production ecosystems.

Advertisement

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: We should be talking more about how creative collaboration can expand when on-air graphics, augmented reality, virtual studio, video wall graphics, and broader broadcast graphics are part of a more connected workflow. Game-engine-based content creation and rendering is becoming increasingly relevant across the entire broadcast graphics space, including 2D design and everyday on-air graphics. This gives designers, operators, and editorial teams more opportunities to share assets, skills, and creative ideas across different production formats.

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: For much of the past decade, real-time production has largely been led by game-engine-based rendering, but real-time ray tracing and Gaussian splatting are now emerging as additional rendering paths. Game-engine rendering, real-time ray tracing, and Gaussian splatting each bring different creative and technical possibilities for virtual studio production. This points to a future where broadcast teams can explore more rendering options while keeping the core production pipeline consistent. In addition, the days of generative AI models creating 3D environment renders and video streams in real-time are approaching rapidly.

Doss Freel, associate design director, Jack Morton: We should be talking more about preserving space for human interaction within increasingly digital processes. The best creative work often emerges from the spontaneous. As collaboration becomes more distributed and technology-driven, maintaining those moments of “realness” will be one of the most important factors in producing truly original work.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Workflow friction is too often treated as a user problem rather than a systems problem. When editors and producers create workarounds, it usually signals that the underlying project model, storage logic, or handoff design is misaligned with how creative work actually happens. The operational cost of that inconsistency compounds over time, eroding searchability, reuse, governance, and the capacity to scale output across teams and sites.

How do you evaluate whether a visual approach is improving engagement versus adding complexity?

Ricardo Faustino, CEO, wTVision: A visual approach becomes valuable when it transforms attention into understanding, interaction or measurable impact. In live production, engagement has to help viewers follow the story with greater clarity while giving broadcasters better control, stronger retention signals, richer sponsorship opportunities and more accountable brand activations. If the visual layer does not make the story clearer, the production more controllable or the commercial opportunity more accountable, then it is adding complexity rather than impact.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: The most effective visual approaches enhance storytelling clarity without creating unnecessary production or operational burden. Organizations are looking more closely at whether increasingly complex graphics packages and multi-version deliverables justify the associated infrastructure and storage costs. The conversation is shifting from “Can we create more?” to “How do we create smarter and more efficiently while maintaining audience impact?”

What creative risks are easier to take today, and which are harder?

Doss Freel, associate design director, Jack Morton: The greatest creative risk today isn’t trying something new; it’s giving an idea enough conviction and time to become something truly unique and revolutionary.

How is AI influencing design workflows, and where do you draw the line between assistance and authorship?

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: By reducing technical friction and accelerating repetitive tasks, AI gives creators more space to experiment, refine ideas and bring stories to audiences faster than ever before.
As AI increasingly levels the playing field, the real differentiator becomes even more human: creative instinct, emotional understanding and the ability to tell stories that truly connect with people. The creators who embrace AI are not losing their voice, they are gaining a new creative superpower, while the authorship and emotional intent behind great storytelling will always remain fundamentally human.

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: We are very mindful about IP, authorship and looking after creatives, not putting them out of jobs. We primarily see AI as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for existing creatives — we want the specialist creatives to still retain control over the final output and storytelling direction. We’ve recently been working on integrating AI with Unreal Engine for broadcast environments, enabling broadcasters to respond and go live with accurate generative content within their existing studio. In essence, the most valuable role for AI is not replacing creativity, but removing friction from the process so that creative teams can move faster, iterate more freely, and focus their talent on storytelling, brand building and innovation.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: AI is accelerating repetitive tasks such as asset tagging, versioning, localization, and template generation, allowing creative teams to move faster. However, the rapid growth of AI-generated and high-resolution content is also contributing to broader infrastructure pressures, particularly around storage demand and availability. The industry is starting to recognize that workflow efficiency is not only about speed, but also about sustainability, scalability, and responsible resource management.

Carol Bettencourt, VP, marketing, Chyron: AI is touching every aspect of live production and it can be an important advantage as broadcasters and creators seek more efficiency. The line between assistance and authorship can and should be quite clear. Assistance means performing fairly rote tasks, especially those that are time consuming or repetitious, such as replay clipping or gleaning lower third text from the journalists story. Assistance also means that a human has sign of on the result.

What skills are becoming more important for designers as tools become more technical?

Miguel Churruca, marketing and communications director, Brainstorm: Tools and workflows evolve and may become more complex, but from the software vendor’s point of view the objective is to make life easier for the designers. We need to introduce features while speeding up the processes, and the designer/user must be at the center of the process, because the creativity and ingenuity of the designers is what makes the difference. Apart from that, knowledge of video and animation must be coupled with understanding of 3D graphics and rendering technologies, that are taking for granted when creating modern audiovisual content.

Ronny Van Geel, director of product marketing, Grass Valley: If designers are being forced to think like engineers, we are doing something wrong. As workflows become more advanced, the real challenge for technology developers is creating tools that feel intuitive, remove friction and allow creatives to stay focused on storytelling instead of infrastructure. The best creative environments are the ones where the technology almost disappears into the background.

Jason Metcalfe, business manager, Crystal LED, Sony Electronics: The future workforce requires cross-disciplinary skills, blending a knowledge of broadcast, IT, and creative design, plus expertise in the tools that are now central to modern production like Unreal Engine, Blender and Maya. Teams must understand on-set workflows and broader production design to ensure their work translates effectively into both real and virtual production environments. The most valuable professionals will be those who can bridge creative and technical disciplines.

Doss Freel, associate design director, Jack Morton: The strongest designers will be the ones who can connect ideas and translate across teams. As tools continue to evolve, technical proficiency will remain important, but curiosity, judgment, and the ability to connect disparate ideas into a compelling experience will win the day.