Industry Insights: The changing economics of broadcast infrastructure

Modern broadcast infrastructure rarely comes from one vendor, one generation of technology or one architectural model.

In the final installment of the multipart Industry Insights roundtable on broadcast infrastructure, vendors consider how organizations can build reliable operations from specialized products, open standards, software platforms and legacy systems that were not necessarily designed to work together.

The discussion examines where multi-vendor strategies deliver flexibility and where complexity begins to accumulate, particularly at the handoffs between platforms, support teams and operational responsibilities. Participants also explore how continuous software development is changing vendor relationships, system upgrades and the total cost of ownership.

As broadcasters pursue phased modernization instead of wholesale replacement, infrastructure decisions increasingly depend on whether systems can integrate, scale and evolve without creating new operational bottlenecks.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Integration extends beyond connectivity: Systems must remain observable, secure, supportable and reliable under real operating conditions.
• Handoffs multiply complexity: Technical gaps, divided responsibilities and inconsistent data create risk between otherwise capable products.
• Standards need adoption: Open specifications provide meaningful value only when enough vendors implement them consistently across the workflow.
• Upgrades become continuous: Software-defined and containerized systems are replacing infrequent major migrations with smaller, more regular releases.
• Replacement becomes selective: Organizations are preserving useful infrastructure while targeting systems that restrict automation, remote access, scalability or API integration.

How are organizations managing increasingly complex multi-vendor environments?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Organizations are increasingly prioritizing interoperability and open APIs to connect best-of-breed solutions across the media workflow. Rather than relying on a single vendor, broadcasters and streaming providers are building flexible ecosystems that integrate encoding, playout, DRM, analytics, advertising, and playback technologies. At VisualOn, we see seamless integration and standards-based compatibility as critical to reducing operational complexity and accelerating deployment.

Heather Mellish, VP of global sales, Zixi: Most media organizations recognize that no single vendor provides every component required for modern production and distribution. As a result, interoperability, open standards, and multi-protocol support have become increasingly important. Organizations are prioritizing platforms that can integrate diverse technologies while providing centralized management, monitoring, and operational consistency across the workflow.

Narinder Ball, director, technology, Gravity Media: The industry has moved beyond the idea of a single-vendor ecosystem. Most organizations now rely on a combination of specialist technologies, making interoperability and integration more important than ever. The most successful projects start with operational objectives rather than technology choices, making sure different systems work together to support the production rather than forcing teams to adapt their workflows around the technology.

Adam Leah, creative director, Nxtedition: Best-of-breed multi-vendor environments are fragile, not because the individual products are poor, but because a horizontally federated solution has gaps between each product that need to be bridged by protocols, standards or APIs, creating multiple sources of truth rather than one and introducing dependencies that compound over time into something too brittle to perform reliably. When you collapse those individual products into a single deterministic vertical stack you create a genuine single source of truth where everything knows the state of everything else in real time, which is a fundamentally different and more resilient operating model. As the industry moves into an age of agentic engineering this distinction becomes even more significant, because a federated horizontal architecture requires an agent on top of each individual product just to understand the workflow, whereas a consolidated vertical stack needs only one agent to understand and direct the entire operation.

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Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble: Open standards are scoped to solve specific, well-defined problems, but real-world deployments inevitably encounter the gaps between them, with areas that fall outside the scope of any individual standard. Bridging those gaps requires hard-won practical experience that is rarely surfaced in the public domain, and documents like JT-NM TR-1001 were a valuable first step in capturing this kind of practical knowledge. The industry now needs to build on that foundation with deployment best practices documentation that reflects the current state of technology and helps organizations understand how everything works together in the real world, as most organizations, including vendors like ourselves, are still navigating this through experience and engineering effort rather than through any elegant systemic solution.

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: Organizations are abandoning proprietary, single-vendor lock-ins in favor of IP-native, standards-based ecosystems. They are relying heavily on adaptable gateways and routers that can natively ingest, convert, and distribute signals across different vendor equipment, acting as the universal translator for the facility.

G Morgan, EVP, sales, Globecast Americas: The challenge in multi-vendor environments is rarely that individual technologies do not work; it is that complexity builds up at the handoffs between systems, support models and operational responsibilities. Media companies are managing vendors across contribution, production, playout, cloud, CDN, OTT, FAST, monitoring and analytics, which makes workflow design and accountability more important than ever. 

What defines a “good” integration today — and where do projects still fall short?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: A good integration delivers measurable business outcomes while remaining easy to deploy, maintain, and scale. The biggest challenges often arise when data, monitoring, and performance visibility remain siloed across different platforms, making troubleshooting and optimization difficult. Successful integrations provide end-to-end visibility, enabling teams to understand not only system performance but also the actual viewer experience.

G Morgan, EVP, sales, Globecast Americas: A good integration is one that works reliably in real operations, not just in a proof of concept or project plan. It must be resilient, observable, scalable and supportable, with clear ownership of handoffs, monitoring, escalation and service performance. Projects still fall short when they focus too much on connecting systems and not enough on day-to-day operational readiness, including redundancy, metadata integrity, security, support and cost control.

How are vendor relationships changing as systems become more software-driven?

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: As systems become software-driven, the old transactional model of buying a box and moving on is giving way to something far more valuable: a genuine partnership built on trust, transparency, and a shared understanding of the production challenges our clients actually face. The teams we work with consistently tell us it doesn’t feel like dealing with a typical software vendor, but more like collaborating with a peer team that listens, adapts the platform to their workflows, and values their input at every stage. This is key, because software keeps evolving, and those vendors who win are the ones who co-develop alongside their customers for the long run rather than disappearing once the deal is signed.

Dave MacKinnon, VP, product management, Clear-Com: Vendor relationships are becoming less about isolated boxes and more about how well each company fits into a broader ecosystem. This has been a major part of my role at Clear-Com over the last two years, as we build strong partnerships with other vendors and deliver unified solutions. As systems become more software-driven, customers expect partners to deliver interoperability, API-level integration, security, and a credible long-term roadmap — not just a product spec — because the real value increasingly comes from workflow fit and ongoing capability expansion.

Where are open standards actually working, and where are they breaking down?

Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble: Open standards are delivering real value where adoption has reached critical mass, and within the NMOS ecosystem, IS-04 and IS-05, covering discovery, registration, and connection management, are now widely supported across vendors and have genuinely transformed how IP broadcast systems are built and integrated. However, the effectiveness of any open standard is entirely dependent on the breadth of its adoption, and that picture is uneven. NMOS BCP-003, which defines security for NMOS environments, remains poorly adopted across the industry and this is a real problem because, unlike interoperability standards where partial adoption still delivers some benefit, security is binary: every vendor in a system must support it for it to be effective, while implementing security layers also adds significant complexity to already intricate systems, making debugging considerably harder.

How are organizations balancing standardization across facilities with local operational needs?

Narinder Ball, director, technology, Gravity Media: Camera systems now need to work for more than just traditional TV broadcasts. Productions often need the same cameras and setup to create content for television, streaming services, corporate communications, social media and new viewing formats, which means cameras must be flexible in how they capture, frame and deliver content while remaining reliable enough for live production. That flexibility is particularly important as studios and content creators increasingly experiment with new formats and audience experiences before bringing concepts to market at scale.

What does a realistic lifecycle look like for core studio systems today?

Graham Sharp, VP, sales and marketing, BCNexxt: Most modern software companies have adopted continuous development, with new versions with bug fixes and features available every few weeks. Containerized microservices means software can be hardened faster, without extensive regression testing and typically deployment is done centrally, and all customers use the same software — there are no individual code branches. This means customers receive fixes and new features much faster and are often upgrading their core systems on a monthly basis without issue.

How has the cost of ownership equation changed vs only a few years ago?

Adam Leah, creative director, Nxtedition: The hardware story has changed dramatically. WIN Network in Australia replaced seventeen racks of legacy equipment across four studios with four racks running Nxtedition, with power consumption dropping sharply once all that legacy gear was switched off. Beyond the physical infrastructure savings, the training burden has collapsed because there’s one interface for every role in the building, and because updates are delivered as rolling service upgrades with no downtime there’s no longer a budget line for painful major version migrations that take facilities offline for days.

Graham Sharp, VP, sales and marketing, BCNexxt: TCO of playout and master control has dramatically improved over recent years partly due the consolidation of silos and the simplification of supply chains, but also the tight control of infrastructure usage and the increase in channel to operator ratios through increased automation, manage by exception and logical user interfaces.

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How are budget constraints reshaping system design decisions today?

Narinder Ball, director, technology, Gravity Media: Organizations are placing greater emphasis on flexibility, scalability, and long-term value rather than investing solely for peak demand. We are seeing growing demand for facilities and technology investments that can support a wide range of production requirements, allowing organizations to maximize use across broadcast, streaming and content creation projects. Today, investment decisions are increasingly being driven by operational efficiency as much as technical capability.

Where do legacy systems create the most friction in modern environments?

Graham Sharp, VP, sales and marketing, BCNexxt: The fixed one-channel to one-server paradigm and legacy silos keep operating expenses high, and flexibility low. Newer systems scale to the content played in an ‘only pay for what you play’ operating model and enable new channels to be spun up and shut down in minutes for the ultimate flexibility.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: Legacy systems hurt most at the points where people just want to get work done, like hunting through scattered storage to find one old file, or waiting on a manual archive process that turns a quick retrieval into a half-day chore. When it comes to production, the friction really shows up when teams are tied to the office because the old setup won’t let them work from anywhere, and when the IT crew spends its weekends bracing for the next surprise outage instead of building something useful. And the biggest one is scale, because the moment your output grows, those rigid boxes and one-size folder structures start cracking, and everyone feels it.

How are organizations deciding when to replace rather than extend existing infrastructure?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Many organizations are moving away from large-scale replacement projects and instead taking a phased modernization approach. Decisions are increasingly based on business outcomes, operational efficiency, and long-term flexibility, with existing infrastructure being extended where it continues to deliver value and newer technologies introduced where they provide clear advantages.

Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing, Telestream: Faced with strict budget constraints and the pressure to rapidly adapt to new distribution models, media organizations are moving away from costly, full “rip-and-replace” strategies in favor of a hybrid approach that extends the value of legacy investments. The decision to completely replace infrastructure is typically reserved for legacy components that create severe operational bottlenecks or lack the modern API connectivity required to participate in an automated supply chain. Instead of abandoning functional on-premises systems, organizations are extending them by wrapping existing hardware and archive storage in agile, cloud-native microservices and AI-driven automation pipelines.