Industry Insights: The changing architecture of live production

Live production is becoming less about a fixed control room and more about building flexible systems that can operate across locations, platforms and production models.

In the first of this two-part Industry Insights roundtable, broadcast vendors examine how IP, cloud services, software-defined infrastructure and distributed production are reshaping live workflows.

The discussion explores how broadcasters are balancing centralized resources with local control, rethinking infrastructure investment and integrating switching, graphics and replay into more unified environments. It also considers the growing importance of interoperability as production systems span hardware, software, cloud services and multiple vendors. Together, the responses point toward a live production model that is increasingly adaptable, scalable and interconnected, while placing new demands on orchestration, reliability and operational simplicity.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Distributed workflows grow: Live production increasingly spans on-site teams, remote facilities, cloud services and multiple delivery platforms rather than operating through a single fixed production chain.
• Hybrid models persist: Broadcasters are centralizing shared processing and specialist resources while keeping acquisition and other latency-sensitive functions closer to the venue.
• Investment models shift: Infrastructure decisions increasingly favor flexible software, subscriptions, rental and scalable compute instead of purchasing hardware solely for occasional peak demand.
• Production tools converge: Switching, graphics and replay are becoming more tightly integrated, helping smaller teams manage increasingly complex productions.
• Interoperability remains critical: Open standards have improved connectivity, but coordinating control, orchestration, monitoring, metadata and failover across multi-vendor systems remains a major challenge.

How has the definition of a live production workflow changed over the past five years?

Ivy Li, marketing director, Telycam: Live production has evolved from being built around a single control room to increasingly distributed, IP-enabled workflows. Broadcasters now combine on-site production with remote contribution, cloud-based processing and shared production resources across multiple locations. At the same time, a single production is often expected to deliver content simultaneously for linear television, streaming platforms and digital channels, making flexibility and interoperability more important than ever.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Probably all major sporting events, be they Asian games, the Summer or Winter games, Soccer World Cups, or tennis tournaments, and so on, are now produced using IP infrastructure. Gateways are used to connect the venues to the production hub (IBC) and to share the various production flavors — whose number keeps growing — with rights-holders. While the cloud is used for certain deliverables and as a repository for on-demand streaming or downloads using SRT, most broadcasters and service providers prefer IT servers stationed on premises and a dwindling number of processing hardware devices for the production proper.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: A live production workflow is no longer defined by a single control room or fixed chain of equipment, but increasingly spans on-site and remote teams, distributed infrastructure, cloud services and multiple delivery platforms with content expected to move seamlessly between. This has made flexibility, interoperability and the ability to scale resources up or down just as important as traditional production capabilities. The workflow is now best viewed as an ecosystem rather than a liner path from acquisition to delivery.

What operational challenges are production teams facing as live events become increasingly complex and distributed?

Ulrich Voigt, director, live production solutions, Riedel Communications: One of the biggest operational challenges is staffing live events: the number of incoming professionals in today’s workforce willing to work irregular hours and travel extensively for live productions is limited, even as productions grow and become more distributed and complex. That makes intuitive, easy-to-learn applications, such as touch screen interfaces, increasingly important for new operators, while still accommodating the muscle memory and tactile control that experienced broadcast professionals rely on. The most effective systems support both entry-level accessibility and the precision of established broadcast workflows.

Martin Lindsay, head of networked solutions, Sony Electronics: As live production becomes more distributed, broadcasters are managing greater operational complexity across venues, time zones, networks and production teams. Key challenges include maintaining ultra-low-latency connectivity, ensuring workflow interoperability across multiple vendors, coordinating resources in real time and preserving reliability when operations span on-premises and cloud environments. At the same time, teams are under pressure to deliver more content with fewer personnel, making automation, orchestration and centralized monitoring increasingly critical to success.

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Sarah Hackforth, international sales director, Big Blue Marble: The main operational challenge is maintaining control of a workflow spread across venues, remote production hubs, cloud regions and multiple delivery networks. Teams must manage variable network conditions, latency, signal synchronization and sudden capacity peaks while quickly identifying whether a fault originates in contribution, processing or delivery. Resilience depends on independently recoverable layers, clearly defined failover triggers, shared end-to-end telemetry and clear operational ownership across vendors. These mechanisms must be rehearsed together under realistic load, as backup paths and escalation procedures that work in isolation may still fail during a live event.

How are broadcasters balancing centralized production resources with the need for local control and flexibility?

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: OB trucks may be used to ingest and produce matches and then stream the result to the IBC, while camera shading and stadium entertainment increasingly happen at a central location. Reporters, hosts and commentators, for their part, may still be at the venue and use a compact rack for their contribution to the international feed. For cost reasons, however, off-tube commentary using either just a HOME App or a compact IP-native stagebox and a couple of screens is gaining traction. A network-wide broadcast control system allows all involved to control the aspects that are relevant for their activity.

Sarah Hackforth, international sales director, Big Blue Marble: Broadcasters are centralizing orchestration, monitoring, shared processing and specialist resources while retaining local acquisition and other latency-sensitive capabilities at the venue. Predictable, continuously used functions or critical recovery paths may remain on-premises, while cloud capacity supports temporary peaks and geographically distributed events. This hybrid model allows processing capacity, production tools and specialist teams to be shared across events, without making the entire production dependent on a single facility, network or cloud environment.

What factors are driving investment decisions in live production infrastructure today?

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Where possible, investment decisions are decoupled from the perceived need to purchase enough hardware to cover sporadic events alongside the regular programs, as hardware for peak moments tends to sit idle for long stretches. Processing software running on generic IT servers or in the cloud provides a lot more flexibility, especially if additional software instances can be subscribed to just for the duration of the event and deployed anywhere. In the case of HOME Apps, subscriptions entitle operator to use all available and future processing app simply by allocating credits to them as and when needed.

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: Teams are expected to produce more and more content across multiple platforms with fewer resources. Investments that can support multiple production models and adapt to changing technology standards provide greater long-term value. There is also a growing emphasis on simplifying operations so teams can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time producing content.

Nick Ma, CEO and CTO, Magewell: Modern live production infrastructure needs to support both hybrid workflows and full IP-based workflows to cover as many production environments and projects as possible while also future-proofing the investment. Reducing complexity and maintenance cost also continue to be deciding factors.

Ulrich Voigt, director, live production solutions, Riedel Communications: As the broadcast industry and viewer habits change, investments are shifting away from traditional long-term capital purchases toward a mix of CapEx, OpEx, rental and subscription models. Infrastructure needs to be flexible, configurable and versatile enough to support a multitude of productions and business models, including requirements that don’t exist yet. The goal is to invest in technologies that can adapt and be reused across many different production scenarios and architectures.

Sarah Hackforth, international sales director, Big Blue Marble: Investment is increasingly assessed against measurable outcomes such as availability, deployment speed and the ability to absorb peak demand. Buyers are examining full lifecycle costs, including compute, storage, connectivity, CDN usage and data egress, because technically scalable infrastructure is not necessarily financially sustainable. For premium live content, integrated multi-DRM, access controls and forensic watermarking are also becoming essential to protect rights and revenue without disrupting the viewing experience.

How are switching, graphics and replay workflows evolving to support increasingly demanding live productions?

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: These workflows are becoming more tightly integrated, allowing operators to manage more advanced productions without increasing the size of a crew or the complexity of the operation. Automation, reusable templates and integration between production functions are helping teams move quickly while maintaining consistency. At the same time, systems need to support more sources, formats and destinations without creating additional bottlenecks. The goal is not just to add capabilities but to make increasingly complex productions easier to execute.

Nick Ma, CEO and CTO, Magewell: These important production functions don’t always need to be individual separate islands anymore, with distinct staff to operate and manage. Workflow integration between these functions is critical and improving, and as production technology has evolved, there are now solutions that pack all of these functions into one device for use by a small crew or a solo operator without compromising quality.

Ulrich Voigt, director, live production solutions, Riedel Communications: Cinematic production is emerging as a new direction in live production, with the visual “look” becoming an additional creative element that helps define the brand and emotional character of an event. This creates new requirements across the production chain, including graphics and replay, where teams need the ability to define, apply and switch “looks” across different replays and highlight reels. Software-defined systems make it possible to adapt the presentation for these different moments without rebuilding the production workflow.

How are organizations evaluating the tradeoffs between dedicated hardware and virtualized production systems in live production?

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: From a technical point of view, there is no real trade-off: most processing hardware has been software-defined for years, allowing users to upload new or completely different features to their existing hardware, and control has been vendor-agnostic for well over a decade. One-box solutions are increasingly viewed as a limitation, because the processing capacity and the input and output formats usually cannot be adapted to new requirements, while the development of more potent hardware is expensive and usually several steps behind rapidly evolving IT servers. With the Dynamic Media Facility principle and all required control tools in place, all eyes are now on the open-source MXL project, which will allow processing software from different vendors to exchange media directly, whether on-prem, in the cloud, in OB trucks, and so on.

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What advances in replay and highlight creation are having the greatest impact on live event coverage?

Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas, Blackmagic Design: More intelligent search, streamlined clip creation and closer integration between live production and post are shortening the path from an event moment to a finished highlight, so the biggest impact is coming from the ability to identify, access and repurpose important moments much faster than traditional workflows allowed. This is particularly important as audiences expect content to appear almost immediately across multiple platforms. The result is a shift from replay being primarily a live event function to becoming part of a broader real-time content strategy.

Ulrich Voigt, director, live production solutions, Riedel Communications: Replay is becoming more accessible through simple, affordable software-based systems that deliver high-quality creative output without requiring extensive, purpose-built on-premises equipment. We’re seeing this in practice. For example, a major U.S. broadcaster is using Riedel’s SimplyLive in the public cloud for super slow-motion (SSM) replays, with a venue gateway on the OB trucks sending the SSM phases into the cloud. This allows one SSM backend and one operator to cover multiple games across the country in a single day, while keeping the technical footprint in the OB truck to a minimum.

What challenges remain in integrating live production tools from multiple vendors into a unified workflow?

Ivy Li, marketing director, Telycam: Interoperability remains the central challenge, as most environments still run traditional digital signals like HDMI and SDI alongside IP protocols such as NDI, Dante, and SMPTE 2110. Bridging these formats typically depends on an encoder/decoder somewhere in the signal chain, adding complexity and cost to the integration. Some product categories have addressed this at the source instead — PTZ cameras that natively output HDMI, SDI, and NDI simultaneously have become increasingly common, reducing the need for conversion altogether.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Assuming that the move to IP is now unstoppable, interoperability, i.e. the ability to exchange media among solutions from different vendors, used to pose challenges when the SMPTE ST 2110 standard was implemented too freely, but such issues are rare nowadays. NMOS has been another important addition to the toolkit to ensure that devices see each other are able to communicate. Being HOME-native adds another layer of detailed control, discoverability and security, and the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) promises to solve the last remaining challenge by providing interoperability on a software level.

Nick Ma, CEO and CTO, Magewell: Interoperability still remains the top of all critical challenges, especially in production environments where different source types in different protocols and formats are used in an IP-based media workflow. Open standards are a starting point, but it’s important that manufacturers partner closely with other key vendors — and continually update and refine their partner integrations — to ensure seamless interoperability experiences for their customers.

Ulrich Voigt, director, live production solutions, Riedel Communications: In cloud environments, moving signals between different vendors is no longer the biggest challenge, with protocols such as SRT, NDI and JPEG XS having made interoperability relatively straightforward. The harder problem is coordinating the lifecycle of the multi-vendor infrastructure itself: provisioning and deprovisioning services, assigning resources, applying configurations and monitoring dependencies across vendors. Containerization helps, but not every broadcast application is efficiently containerized, so the industry still needs pragmatic orchestration approaches for managing mixed hardware, software and cloud resources.

Martin Lindsay, head of networked solutions, Sony Electronics: One of the biggest challenges is achieving seamless interoperability across a growing mix of hardware, software, cloud services and control systems from different vendors. While industry standards have improved connectivity, broadcasters still face integration complexity around orchestration, monitoring, security, metadata consistency and synchronized control of workflows across multiple locations. As productions become more software-defined, success increasingly depends on open standards and platforms that can unify disparate systems into a cohesive operational environment without adding complexity for operators.

Sarah Hackforth, international sales director, Big Blue Marble: Modular systems, APIs and containerized deployment make it easier to combine and update individual production functions, but they do not automatically unify control, timing, metadata, security, monitoring or failover. The greatest risk remains at the points where systems connect, where a failure or unexpected change can propagate into downstream services. The different systems must therefore work from shared telemetry, follow coordinated recovery paths and be tested during failures as well as normal operation.

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