Industry Insights: How sports workflows are changing under pressure

Sports production is being reshaped by a combination of rising rights costs, higher audience expectations and the need to deliver more content without proportionally increasing production resources.

In part one of this four-part Industry Insights roundtable, broadcast technology leaders examine what recent marquee sporting events reveal about the industry’s direction.

The discussion explores the growing importance of resilient streaming infrastructure, flexible IP-based workflows and production models that can be reused across venues and events.

The conversation also looks at how rights holders can extract more value from each production through personalization, alternate feeds and expanded digital distribution, while remote and centralized workflows continue to redefine which people, equipment and functions actually need to be at the venue.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Flexibility is essential: Sports workflows increasingly need to adapt across venues, platforms and production models without requiring entirely new infrastructure for each event.
• Streaming raises expectations: Large sporting events are putting greater pressure on latency, reliability, scalability and playback as audiences expect broadcast-quality experiences on every device.
• Production is distributing: Organizations are becoming more deliberate about which roles remain at the venue and which can move to centralized facilities or the cloud.
• One production, more outputs: Rights holders are looking to create alternate feeds, localized versions, digital content and other experiences from a common production rather than duplicating workflows.
• Economics drive change: Rising rights and production costs are accelerating adoption of software-defined infrastructure, automation and shared resources that can support more coverage without matching increases in staffing and equipment.

What are the big lessons from this year’s marquee sporting events?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Major sporting events continue to demonstrate that delivering a great viewing experience is just as important as producing great content. Audiences now expect low latency, high reliability, and seamless playback across every device, regardless of where they are watching. The biggest lesson is that success depends on end-to-end workflow optimization — from production and distribution to the final playback experience.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: The scale of streaming is increasing at a fast rate. Yospace is stitching over 10 billion ads per month now, whereas last year it was between 6-8 billion. Plus, there’s a clear appetite to maximize the advertising potential using non-linear ad formats that are considered less disruptive than the usual linear ads.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: Broadcasters are successfully managing productions across multiple venues and countries while keeping quality high and making better use of people and equipment. The Winter Olympics also showed why flexibility matters: Every venue had different technical demands, so production teams needed workflows that could adapt without adding complexity. Both events proved that broadcasters are investing in production models they can reuse across future events rather than building systems for a single tournament. 

Xavier Leclercq, VP, business development, Broadpeak: This year’s World Cup is the biggest in history — more teams, a broader global footprint and much larger demands on operators and streaming platforms in all corners of the world. Big-game kickoffs, extra time rushes and penalty shootouts drive sudden spikes in traffic as viewers tune in across mobile devices and connected TVs. Beyond simply adding more CDN capacity to handle this, the focus is shifting toward finding more cost and energy-efficient ways to deliver at scale.

Advertisement

Alex Zambelli, director of product, Bitmovin: The FIFA World Cup 2026 is the largest live streaming test the industry has ever faced, with tens of millions of viewers accessing the action concurrently across regions, and on different devices. This kind of scale puts enormous demands on streaming infrastructure, highlighting just how important reliability and resilience are. The infrastructure underpinning events of this scale, from playback and live encoding to real-time quality monitoring, must work perfectly to deliver viewers the quality of experience they expect.

Andrew Lahey, senior manager, solutions services and project management, Ross Video: The biggest lesson from this year’s marquee sporting events is that audience expectations continue to rise even as budgets and production teams are under increasing pressure. Broadcasters are finding ways to deliver richer experiences through more camera angles, deeper data integration and enhanced storytelling while still serving both lifelong fans and new audiences. Success is no longer measured by doing more with less, but by using technology and smarter workflows to make every production element more impactful.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The biggest lesson is that flexibility now beats brute force. Productions that treated distributed teams and IP infrastructure as the default, rather than a fallback, moved faster and adapted to last-minute changes with far less friction. The events that stood out were the ones where the technology stayed invisible and the storytelling stayed front and center.

Rob Willox, director, product marketing, live production, Sony Electronics: Large scale events, like the recent worldwide soccer tournament, are featuring the centralization of camera control. This allows multiple venues’ video to be controlled in one central location. It also provides a consistent look and a reduction of crews on site — which can contribute to a significant cost saving.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services: Viewers now expect streaming to match broadcast-level quality across every device, period. The Super Bowl, NBA Finals, and FIFA World Cup proved that bar has been met, and we’re seeing enhanced personalization and new monetization opportunities open up for content producers as a result. The other lesson: attention spans have shifted, and audiences expect sports content to be social-first and mobile-native, not just a linear feed repackaged for a smaller screen.

Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, UK & EMEA, TMT Insights: The biggest lesson from this year’s marquee sporting events is that scale alone is no longer enough. The organizations seeing the greatest success are combining global distribution with localized experiences, using flexible production to create additional digital content before and after the sporting events and expanded distribution models to maximize audience engagement and unlock new revenue opportunities.

Suzana Brady, VP, worldwide sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital: Viewing habits continue to evolve and today live sports events must reach audiences across a growing mix of devices and platforms split across traditional TV, streaming, social clips and even public watch parties. Productions need to serve all those platforms simultaneously. The biggest lesson learned from this year’s marquee sporting events is that broadcasters need to design resilient, flexible workflows that can support multiple formats and distribution paths efficiently and adapt quickly to changing production requirements while maintaining uncompromised signal quality.

Dave MacKinnon, VP, product management, Clear-Com: The biggest lesson is that production no longer has to be anchored entirely at the event site. Teams can contribute from anywhere, or from multiple locations at once, which opens up new ways to use people, equipment and infrastructure more efficiently. That is exactly the workflow shift behind Clear-Com’s FreeSpeak Cell and cloud solutions: lower-friction communications for more distributed productions.

As rights costs, audience expectations and production complexity continue to increase, what does the future of sports media look like?

Tim Jackson, senior director of sales and business development, North America, Techex: The economics of sports rights increasingly depend on broadcasters finding more value in the content they already own, and that means giving audiences a richer experience rather than simply offering more of the same. Multiview is an important part of that because fans increasingly follow several matches, teams and storylines at once, and bringing those experiences together can help keep them on the broadcaster’s own platform. What has changed is the economics: software-based production, whether on-premises or in the cloud, makes it possible to offer that choice at scale without costs rising at the same rate.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: The future of sports media will be increasingly personalized, data-driven, and platform-agnostic. Fans want the flexibility to watch on any screen, access alternate feeds, engage with statistics in real time, and interact with content beyond the live event itself. This places greater emphasis on scalable workflows and technologies that can support both premium viewing experiences and sustainable business models.

Colin Moran, VP, production products, LTN: We’re seeing a shift toward producing an event once and creating multiple versions from the same source. This means one single production that can support alternate commentary, localized graphics, regional advertising, and platform-specific experiences without requiring separate workflows for each partner. That changes the economics of sports media. Instead of building multiple productions around the same event, rights owners can extend the value of one production across broadcast, streaming, FAST channels, and social platforms.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: Standards and protocols such as SMPTE ST 2110 and SRT are making it easier to move live video across IP, while newer frameworks including DMF and MXL aim to improve how software applications work together across distributed production environments. The focus is now on making these different technologies work as one single fabric rather than a number of connected systems. Platforms such as Appear’s X Platform support these different environments by providing media processing and transport that fits into wider IP production workflows.

Advertisement

Alex Zambelli, director of product, Bitmovin: Streaming live sports content at scale demands uncompromising performance across three fronts: latency, scalability, and viewer experience. These combined pressures are being further magnified as the cost of sports rights increases, driving broadcasters to seek out ways to deliver high quality viewing experiences while at the same time reducing complexity and cost. To succeed in this environment, broadcasters will need to invest in a highly optimized streaming stack that leverages the most advanced encoding and playback technologies, enabling every component to perform efficiently, reliably and cost effectively, even at scale.

Sarah Hackforth, director, international sales, Big Blue Marble: The rights package that gets the most out of that asset is one built around a broader direct-to-consumer experience, where fans follow the game through live statistics, player data, tactical analysis, highlights, interviews, archive content, and app-based features throughout the week. None of that reduces the need for broadcast-grade delivery. Fans accessing sport through direct-to-consumer platforms expect the same reliability and picture quality they get from a traditional broadcast, and any disruption during a live event at a critical moment is enough to lose them.

Jimbo Haneklau, VP, sales, sports and live events, Imagine Communications: Broadcasters will need more flexible and efficient production workflows to keep pace with rising rights costs, growing audience expectations, and increasingly demanding live productions without proportionally increasing operational overhead. That means greater adoption of software-defined, IP-based infrastructures, automation, orchestration, and unified monitoring that give production and engineering teams the visibility and control they need to manage more demanding workflows with smaller crews and distributed operations. That evolution will give broadcasters greater flexibility to expand live sports coverage without proportionally increasing production resources.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services: Every customer I’m working with is utilizing AI for operational efficiency, whether that’s automating production workflows, repurposing content across platforms, or reducing the manual lift on their teams. Clients like Fox Sports and F1 are already using AI services on AWS to engage fans across mobile and social in ways that weren’t possible two years ago. The result is broadcasters doing more with smaller teams and tighter budgets, while actually expanding their reach.

How does the collapse of regional sports networks change sports media? Hurt it or help it?

Andrew Ward, business development manager, Cinegy: The key words here are “sports media” as RSNs were (and are) tied to broadcast, but the definition of broadcast is moving away from satellite, terrestrial and cable. We are no longer in a world where the default distribution is television, the cell phone is becoming just as important. We believe that new styles of sport coverage are likely to emerge as a result of the move away from hardware-based legacy production hardware towards software-based production which these days can produce first-class results from lower-cost installations that use standard computer hardware in place of expensive, cumbersome, aging legacy hardware plant.

How are sports production workflows changing as organizations balance on-site personnel with remote and centralized production models?

Tim Jackson, senior director of sales and business development, North America, Techex: The more interesting shift is not simply moving people away from the venue; it is changing what the equipment at the venue is capable of doing. As broadcasters put more software into trucks and production hubs, those environments become reconfigurable and reusable across different events instead of remaining fixed collections of single-purpose hardware. That gives production teams much more freedom to decide, event by event, which people and functions belong on-site, in a centralized facility or in the cloud.

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: We’re seeing sports productions keep their core teams and heavy infrastructure at a central hub, sending only a minimal setup to the actual venue. This relies on high-capacity, bidirectionally resilient internet links that can handle both multi-camera feeds and return feeds at the same time. When the network transport is solid, you can cut travel and on-site deployments without compromising broadcast quality.

Erik Otto, CEO, Mediaproxy: Workflows are expanding to accommodate operators working remotely but need to be fully connected and integrated with the master control room. This relies on rock solid IP and/or fiber connectivity plus software tools that facilitate remote operations. On a commercial level, the cost of sports production can be reduced significantly through people using these systems and not being on-site.

Alistair Horne, managing director, Hornets Tech: I think productions are finally getting more honest with themselves about who actually needs to be at the venue, rather than just doing it the way it’s always been done. What I’d push back on is the idea that this means stripping people out of the event altogether. It doesn’t. It means being much more deliberate about it, keeping the people who need to react in the moment close to the action, and letting everything else run from somewhere it can be done more efficiently.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear: Production teams are becoming much more flexible in how they cover live sport. Instead of sending full crews to every venue, broadcasters and rights holders are deciding which roles need to be on site and which can be managed from a central production hub. This helps them cover more events without increasing staffing or travel. Camera crews, talent and venue operations still need a local presence, while replay, graphics, commentary and production control can often be handled remotely. World Archery is a good example of this approach. By bringing production into its central facility and using an IP based workflow, it has improved consistency and gained more control over how its content is produced and distributed.

Advertisement

Srividhya Srinivasan, CTO, Amagi: Sports production is becoming much more flexible, with cloud and remote production allowing broadcasters to centralize technical operations while keeping only roles that genuinely benefit from being on-site. This reduces operation complexity and makes it easier not only to scale coverage across multiple events but also to package and distribute across multiple endpoints without proportionally increasing crew sizes. The result is that production teams can focus more on storytelling and editorial quality rather than managing infrastructure.

Andrew Ward, business development manager, Cinegy: Over the last few years we have seen ingenious solutions to logistical problems in remote broadcasting; cell phone bandwidth aggregation is a good example. However, with 5G cellular telephony in combination with modern protocols like SRT it will be possible to move away from that kind of solution, which invites problems from its complexity and from its adaptation of a technology which was not intended to be used that way. A gigabit per second is all a reasonable software solution needs and 5G can provide that, and all that is then needed is a willingness to leave the past behind, yet such willingness does not appear to be abundant in the world of television.

Andrew Lahey, senior manager, solutions services and project management, Ross Video: The conversation has shifted from whether remote production is possible to how organizations can build workflows that are flexible enough to support any production model. Advances in software-defined systems, cloud technologies and IP infrastructure allow teams to adapt resources based on the scale and needs of each event instead of being locked into a single approach. The result is a more agile production ecosystem where technology enables operational choice rather than dictating it.

Bea Alonso, marketing lead, Projective: The conversation has matured beyond “remote versus on-site” into a question of where each task belongs. Latency-sensitive work like camera operation and switching often stays close to the venue, while editorial, graphics and replay increasingly run from centralized hubs that serve multiple events at once. This hybrid model lets teams concentrate specialist talent in fewer locations, which improves both quality and cost predictability.

Doug Price, global head, commercial & operations, broadcast solutions, Hawk-Eye Innovations: Organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid remote integration model (REMI) workflows, keeping essential technical hardware and minimal camera crews on-site while routing feeds to centralized production hubs. This shift relies heavily on IP-based infrastructures like SMPTE ST 2110 and cloud-based switching to reduce travel costs and maximize equipment utilization across multiple events. However, the model has intensified an industry-wide engineering talent crunch, requiring on-site teams to rapidly pivot from traditional SDI engineering to advanced network management.

Costa Nikols, executive-team strategy advisor, media and entertainment, Telos Alliance: Sports production is becoming more flexible, with broadcasters using remote and centralized teams to cover more events while making better use of people and resources. At the same time and from an audio perspective, workflows must support multiple languages, commentary options, and accessibility features from a single production.

Abe Abt, senior product consultant, AJA Video Systems: Sports production is becoming more distributed, with smaller teams at the venue and more staff working from centralized facilities. This helps organizations reduce travel costs, share resources across multiple events, and make better use of specialized talent, regardless of where they’re based. The goal is not to move everyone off-site, but to place people and equipment where they are most effective.

Jan Schaffner, VP, managed technology, Americas, Riedel Communications: Workflows are increasingly being organized by function rather than physical location. Camera operations, venue engineering, field audio and access-driven editorial roles generally remain on-site, while replay, graphics, commentary, quality control and parts of the production team remain centralized — when connectivity and latency permit. This hybrid model allows organizations to reuse specialist personnel across events and reduce travel, allowing them to create more content without proportionally increasing production footprints.

Ole-Andreas Løvland, CEO and co-founder, Bitfocus: As sports production balances on-site crews with remote and centralized models, the real shift is that software control and networked connectivity have broken the link between where the hardware sits and where the people controlling it need to be. True efficiencies come when workflows can be designed around the result you want, knowing the underlying technology is handled through a powerful and intelligent control layer that brings the relevant functions to the relevant people wherever they are working. Our Buttons, for instance, controls almost any combination of devices regardless of location.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, media and entertainment, Amazon Web Services: Organizations are centralizing everything they can into cloud-based production hubs and reserving on-site roles for the positions that genuinely require proximity to the action (camera operators, field producers, talent). This dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of deploying full crews to every venue. The shift also opens up talent pools, because your best director or graphics operator doesn’t need to be on a plane every weekend to contribute to a live broadcast.

Nav Khangura, VP, sales and business development, UK & EMEA, TMT Insights: Sports production workflows are becoming increasingly modular, with centralized operations handling core production while regional teams customize content for local audiences. Cloud-based infrastructure and standardized workflows make it possible to scale efficiently without sacrificing production flexibility. This blend of remote and centralized production ensures audiences continue to receive high-quality programming whilst organizations keep costs under control and provide production staff with a flexible operation.

Suzana Brady, VP, worldwide sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital: Hybrid production workflows have become the norm rather than the exception with scaled down on-site crews and centralized production teams. This is largely a budget decision as travel expenses for a full crew are increasingly difficult to justify, and centralized teams can cover more events without adding personnel to the roster. Moreover, there is less equipment downtime as whatever is in the central location does not need to be dragged from place to place.

Dave MacKinnon, VP, product management, Clear-Com: We have seen the industry move from mostly on-site production teams to a much more distributed model, with people contributing from across the country or around the world. For Clear-Com, that makes low-latency, high-reliability communication over distance critical to customer success. That thinking drove FreeSpeak Cell, which supports high-capacity productions where teams are no longer all in the same physical location.