Industry Insights: How graphics systems are becoming production platforms

Graphics systems are central to how broadcasters organize, interpret and distribute visual information across platforms.

What once functioned primarily as an on-air design layer now connects live data, editorial decisions, automation, sponsorship and multiple render environments.

In part three of this three-part Industry Insights roundtable, broadcast vendors examine how graphics workflows are evolving to support television, streaming, mobile, social, studio displays and augmented reality from a shared production framework. The discussion explores how real-time rendering and data integration are changing creative possibilities, why multi-platform delivery requires earlier planning and more responsive templates and where AR can provide genuine editorial value.

The participants also consider the infrastructure and operational discipline required to ensure increasingly dynamic graphics remain clear, reliable and purposeful rather than becoming visual complexity for its own sake.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Graphics are becoming infrastructure: Modern systems increasingly connect editorial tools, live data, automation, render engines and business logic rather than functioning only as design and playout tools.
• Multi-platform delivery changes design: Graphics must adapt to different aspect ratios, screen sizes, formats and audience expectations without forcing every platform into the same visual language.
• Real time means responsiveness: Live graphics workflows allow data, layouts and virtual environments to change immediately while moving more creative control upstream to producers and editorial teams.
• AR needs editorial purpose: Augmented reality is most effective when it clarifies data, explains spatial relationships or improves understanding rather than serving as spectacle.
• Automation cannot replace judgment: Smarter templates and data orchestration can support growing output demands, but editorial quality must remain the measure of whether a graphic succeeds.

How have graphic systems evolved versus only a few years ago?

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: Graphics systems have evolved significantly with the arrival of real-time ray tracing, advanced GPU capabilities, and real-time global illumination. A few years ago, achieving realistic lighting often required more manual work, such as baking or faking parts of the environment. Today, modern rendering technologies (like Unreal 5’s Lumen) make lighting behave more naturally in real time, while new geometry and mesh optimization approaches reduce the need for heavy manual optimization.

How has multi-platform delivery changed graphics workflows?

Flávio Maurício, CTO, wTVision: Multi-platform delivery has moved graphics from a single-output mindset to a system-level challenge. The same story may need to appear on television, streaming, mobile, social platforms, LED walls, studio screens and AR environments, each with different timing, format and viewer behavior. That requires graphics workflows to become more modular, data-aware and deeply integrated across control systems, render engines, newsroom tools and media workflows, so consistency of content, data and brand can be maintained without forcing every platform into the same visual language.

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: Broadcast, streaming, and social platforms all have different visual and technical workflows. Which means productions now need to plan outputs much earlier in the creative process. Increasingly, these are being made during preproduction through previsualization and working closely with the director of photography. Teams are spending more time planning formats, aspect ratios, color pipelines and workflows, output quality, camera positions and even lens choices before setting foot on set.

Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: Graphics teams aren’t building solely for a broadcast feed anymore but must anticipate for multiple aspect ratios, many distribution outlets, each with its own format, frame rate and audience expectation. Where broadcast once rewarded complexity and detail, multi-platform demands simplicity, clean layouts, simplified aesthetics and large bold typography that holds up on a 7-inch screen just as well as a seventy-inch one. The answer to that complexity isn’t more people but smarter infrastructure, centralized control, intelligent automation and responsive template systems that build the graphic once and let the system handle the rest.

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Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Graphics workflows are now built for distribution across broadcast, OTT, mobile, FAST channels, and social platforms simultaneously. That expansion creates a much larger volume of assets, versions, and archived content that organizations must store and manage long term. As storage costs rise and procurement timelines become less predictable, efficiency in media storage and delivery is becoming operationally critical rather than just a backend consideration.

How are graphics systems evolving to support more dynamic or data-driven storytelling?

Flávio Maurício, CTO, wTVision: Graphics systems are evolving from playout tools into integrated editorial, data and business logic layers. They now need to connect official data sources, automation, preview, validation, AI-assisted workflows and multi-engine rendering, helping teams decide which visual belongs on screen at each moment. This becomes even more important as brand activations and sponsorship layers become part of the live storytelling environment, requiring graphics workflows to support clarity, consistency, measurable engagement and commercial value.

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: Graphics systems are evolving toward more open architectures that can connect with external data sources, AI tools, and modern web technologies. This makes it possible to pull data from different sources, validate it, and push it into graphics workflows more efficiently. Instead of requiring every part of the graphics system to connect directly to the internet, data can be managed through a centralized workflow before reaching the on-air graphics. 

Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: A generation ago, data in broadcast graphics meant a journalist typing a string of text into a script before air, but today the system connects directly to live data sources and renders visual stories the instant that data moves with no operator intervention and no delay. The real leap isn’t speed but intelligence, because the best platforms now contextualize data rather than just display it, turning raw data into a narrative audiences can actually feel, where a player’s sprint speed means more when the system instantly frames it against a ten-year record and an election result carries more weight when the graphic already shows what it means for the outcome. The most striking development is autonomous storytelling, where the system detects a meaningful data moment, a record broken, a vote threshold crossed or a market spike, and triggers the graphic before the presenter has even had time to react, because the platform isn’t waiting to be told what to show. It already knows.

What does “real-time” mean in practice for graphics workflows?

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: Real time in graphics workflows is often misunderstood as simply meaning speed, but in practice it’s about creative responsiveness and creative composition changes on the spot within a scene that is running on the LED. Need the blues to change to orange? Sure. Want to change day to night or adjust the horizon line? No worries. We can adjust that right in front of your eyes on the LED, fully dressed and lit.

Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: Real-time means the graphic updates the instant the data changes with no delay, no interruption to production and no call to the control room, and whether it is a contested election result, a live weather system, a third-down conversion rate or a social moment breaking on air, the platform detects the change, updates the graphic and distributes it across every output simultaneously with no production steps in between. The part that often gets overlooked is who is driving that, because producers and content creators are now making graphic decisions upstream, well away from the control room, with the system executing their intent live and instantly. Meaning control has moved from being a technical function to an editorial one.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: In practice, “real-time” means graphics systems can ingest live data, update visuals instantly, and render content across multiple outputs with minimal delay. But real-time workflows also generate enormous amounts of high-resolution media and intermediate files, increasing pressure on storage infrastructure. Broadcasters are increasingly evaluating how to maintain visual quality while reducing storage growth, especially as storage pricing volatility is expected to continue over the next several years.

Carol Bettencourt, VP, marketing, Chyron: Real-time means that graphics render and play in tight coordination with live, real-time video. This has always been challenging. Today, the demand has never been greater for graphics that drive engagement. Thankfully, the tools that create efficiency are better than ever. For operator-driven broadcasts, that looks like bespoke playout panels that access just the right tools, the right branding choices and the right data sources. For other workflows that looks like various levels of automation augmented by AI.

How are you approaching augmented reality in a way that feels editorially justified?

Miguel Churruca, marketing and communications director, Brainstorm: Broadcast shows and live events can’t be understood without the supporting graphics that enhance information, label speakers or provide the necessary branding. These graphics can feature different formats and complexity, going from simpler 2D layouts to complex 3D AR graphics built out of data coming from external sources. For applications like elections, sports or entertainment, data-driven graphics are essential to display large amounts of data, often coming from external sources, in a visually attractive manner.

Flávio Maurício, CTO, wTVision: Augmented reality earns its place on screen when it gives the audience something the conventional frame cannot fully deliver: a clearer sense of space, a sharper reading of data, a stronger emotional connection or a more immediate understanding of the story. In sports, elections and live studio programming, AR should not be treated as a visual effect, but as a storytelling layer with editorial purpose, technical precision and measurable impact — always with clear value for the viewer. The real standard is simple: every virtual element must justify its presence by making the live experience more intelligent, more immersive or more meaningful for the viewer.

Kuban Altan, co-founder and CTO, Zero Density: We approach augmented reality as a way to help editorial teams tell complex stories more clearly and visually on screen. To make AR even more practical part of that storytelling process, journalists and production teams need to see how the graphics will appear before it goes live. Journalist preview capability inside their NRCS gives them that visibility, allowing teams to review placement, visual accuracy, and overall fit within the broadcast in advance. This makes AR a more confident, controlled, and editorially connected part of live storytelling.

Gemma Campbell, manager of creative services, EMEA, Disguise: AR needs to be deployed intentionally and should never be used impulsively or at the last minute without purpose or impact. It needs to provide editorial value, context or clarity to the audience. It is, however, an extension of the storytelling toolkit rather than a standalone visual effect. By combining real-time visual workflows with integrated live data and markerless mocap solutions, we are now able to help communicate complex information far more effectively and captivate audiences with visually stimulating broadcasts.

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Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: The most important question in AR isn’t “can we do this?” but “does this make the story clearer?,” and if the answer is “it looks incredible” rather than “it makes the viewer understand more,” that is not enough. There is a meaningful difference between AR deployed for spectacle and AR deployed with editorial purpose, because when the technology is the most noticeable thing about the segment something has gone wrong editorially, but when AR is built around a genuine storytelling need such as explaining a defensive formation, visualizing the spatial scale of an election result or making a weather system tangible and navigable, it stops being a feature and starts being journalism. When it is done correctly, AR illustrates the data and the viewer doesn’t register the technology, they register the insight, because the teams that use it well aren’t asking what they can build but what the viewer needs to understand and building backwards from that answer.

What are the most common mistakes organizations make when implementing AR or virtual elements?

Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: The biggest mistake is treating AR as a display decision rather than a storytelling tool, because organizations invest heavily in what the audience sees without fully accounting for the operational complexity underneath, including camera tracking, data integration, graphics pipelines, and production choreography. None of which is visible to the viewer but all of which determines whether what they see is credible or distracting. The second mistake is building because you can rather than because you have answered the harder questions about what the viewer will understand.

What are we not talking about in terms of graphics that we should be?

Patrick Twomey, director of graphics product management, Ross Video: Output volume has exploded across every platform, but in general the editorial quality and impact of individual graphics may have declined in proportion. Graphics have become the B-roll of news, and the industry isn’t confronting that honestly. Automation and workflow improvements should be completely invisible to the viewer who should only ever experience the impact of a graphic and never the mechanics behind it. Underneath all of it is the repositioning is something almost no one is talking about, where graphics systems are no longer design tools but are becoming the central data orchestration layer of the modern production ecosystem.