Ian Fletcher, chief technology officer, Grass Valley
The shift from traditional broadcasting to an IT-driven operation hasn’t happened overnight, but it’s been in the making for years. The broadcasters who have successfully adapted to this shift are those who recognised early on that the worlds of broadcast engineering and IT were not separate entities but interdependent ones. Historically, these departments operated under very different rules and conditions, which sometimes led to conflicts — like the infamous Friday afternoon firewall changes by IT, leaving broadcasters scrambling over the weekend.
However, as we move towards software-based processing and cloud-based solutions, it’s become clear that these two fields need to work more closely together. Some broadcasters are essentially transforming their on-prem facilities into data centres, making them face a critical decision: should they continue owning these infrastructures or outsource them to the cloud? It’s a balancing act, with pros and cons to both.
But while the technological evolution towards Kubernetes and microservices is inevitable, it’s crucial to acknowledge that these systems require much more attention than the old hardware setups. I’ve seen broadcasters who haven’t touched their systems in a decade because they simply didn’t need to. With modern tech, though, it’s a different story — you need to “feed and water” your Kubernetes clusters, applying security patches and keeping everything up to date.
The reality is that not every broadcaster has the resources or technical expertise to manage these complex systems. That’s why it’s important to use the right technology at the right place in the chain. For enterprise broadcasters with in-house expertise, a deep dive into advanced IT systems makes sense. For others, a more simplified, broadcast-friendly solution is essential to ensure they’re not bogged down by complexity, allowing them to focus on what they do best: broadcasting.
Andy Bell, chief engineer, Channel 4
There are many reasons why we could label the broadcast Industry, as another part of the IT industry. If you look at the last decade and our industry’s transition away from traditional bespoke broadcast infrastructure to everything having an IP address and deployed in the cloud, you can see why the argument is made.
Having experienced the transition from analogue technology to digital in the 1990’s, where video and audio signals took a giant leap from a broad level of variation to ‘zeros and ones’, I accept that switching to a digital world was quite straightforward to understand. Of course, switching from broadcast to IP could also be argued in the same way, as that transition has been relatively fast. Only ten years ago, nobody would have dreamed of trying to deliver broadcast signals via anything other than broadcast-grade kit from a specific manufacturer. Fast forward to 2024 and the first decision is how you architect your platform in the cloud, not whether you should try and use the cloud.
With all of this said, and with nothing but respect for the IT industry, there remains quite a difference between running an IT operation and running a broadcast operation. In broadcasting you require specific craft skills to create, editorialise, prepare, convert, localise, add accessibility and market content. The differences between broadcast and IT are closing, but are still vast.
Robert Ambrose, managing director and co-founder, Caretta Research
The broadcast and media industry has adopted software and IT solutions at scale for 20+ years, and the rise of public cloud providers means more and more workflows are running efficiently and reliably on standard IT infrastructure – from live production to linear playout and streaming. That’s helping to drive down costs, and increasing innovation and agility.
What makes us different as an industry is scale – or rather the lack of it. We’ve seen some vendors adopting a standardised SaaS model, especially where there’s scale across other industries like with Adobe Creative Cloud. But for most products, a “one size fits all” approach is too much of a challenge in a very heterogeneous industry.
What a major public broadcaster needs is different from a telco pay-TV operator or a small content distributor. They can all use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to run their business, but they each have quite different needs and budgets when it comes to MAM, rights management or streaming platforms.
But, and it’s a big but, we need to get away from the “we’re different” mindset. There’s still far too much reinventing of the wheel by buyers when an off-the-shelf product will meet 80 per cent of the requirements much faster. When it comes to ROI, time-to-market wins every time.
At the same time, some technology vendors need to do much more to invest in keeping their products up to date. The IT industry delivers multiple releases a day. Some broadcast products are lucky to see a few updates a year, and frankly, too many vendors have underinvested in their products for too long, leaving them to wither on the vine, banking on a captive audience.
What’s still to play for is who, if anyone, will control the platforms on which our industry’s content supply chain runs – in the way that, say, Google has achieved in pay-TV with Android TV Operator Tier. Scale and economics suggest there’s value in a common industry operating system. But technology buyers consistently tell us that they don’t want their core operations in the hands of any one vendor.
Chris Bailey, head of innovation, Jigsaw24 Media
While the Sony hack in 2014 may have kickstarted the slow blending of IT and media engineering, it was probably during the pandemic that the dynamic changed most dramatically. Before Covid, media teams would provide the IT department with a pre-requisite sheet of what we needed from them to enable our systems. Now IT is the first port of call, and they provide the specifications that solutions need to be designed around. Security is paramount, and if a media system doesn’t fit into IT’s network architecture and security policy then it’s a non-starter.
As a result, media and IT engineering roles have become more blended, especially in small to medium-sized organisations. But it’s not necessarily a case of meeting in the middle. In addition to specialist knowledge around media systems, the new breed of broadcast engineer has a much better understanding of how networks are put together, but IT engineers (particularly in enterprise organisations) don’t always have as much in the way of media chops. They may know what they need to achieve from a networking, security and architecture standpoint to integrate media technologies, but they generally would not need to understand the workflows or intricacies of the media systems.
So, media engineers may understand networking and IT Infrastructure, but does that mean they’re the same as a corporate IT engineer? Absolutely not. That’s why we have two sides to this business – because while broadcasting and IT have become increasingly blended, they are still very different specialisms. And there’s probably not enough bandwidth in one person’s brain to do it all.
This article appears in full in the December issue of TVBEurope, available to download here.
