SVG Sit-Down: Kieran Kunhya of Open Broadcast Systems on the Power of De-Centralized Production

The company CEO sees AI as a tool in speeding and enhancing product development

Open Broadcast Systems continues to show the industry how a small, nimble company can transform workflows and improve operations not only for small-scale productions but also for the world's largest media companies and sports entities. At IBC, the company continued to improve its encoding, decoding, and other features on a number of fronts, and OBS CEO and co-founder Kieran Kunhya sat down with SVG to discuss the latest offerings and trends.

So, what's your big news here at the show?

We're showing new video transport with low-latency encoding and decoding as well as new monitoring features like subtitles, which have grown in popularity in the past year. Also, we are focusing more on distributed production and people working from home, which has become business as usual for a lot of productions. So we have new products that are smaller devices and can go into people's homes that give the same experience as being in a studio. That's the strength of our products: the same software running on a massive system in a huge facility as on a small NUC Mini PC under someone's TV.

When you say working that way is business as usual, what do you mean?

We're seeing organizations treat distributed production with home operators as first-class citizens, not emergency tools. They're doing 10-bit 4:2:2 to the home, for example - the same monitoring and production workflows to the home as what the big truck companies have done using local production facilities. And that's all driven by connectivity improvements in the U.S. We see people in extremely remote places on Gigabit fiber and even Starlink in extreme cases - just for distributed production. Getting sub-200-millisecond feeds anywhere in the U.S. to someone's home is a big push this year.

OBS's Kieran Kunhya: We're seeing organizations treat distributed production with home operators as first-class citizens, not emergency tools. Other companies are seeing an opportunity in distributed, decentralized workflows. What's your market advantage?

The expertise we have is doing this at scale in the U.S., like what we do with our Mobile TV Group colleagues and some of the big streamers. The streamers are pushing hard into this as they don't have the legacy of large facilities, and they have been remote-first from the beginning. There's still some need for centralization, but most of the staff are remote.

Do you think new facilities will be leaner and embrace more of your technology because, from the start, they're not trying to rationalize a footprint built for in-person work?

Possibly. I don't know the exact business model for how the streamers do live, but I know they're relatively facility-light compared to traditional broadcasters, and distributed production is a way of achieving that. They're certainly pushing it hard.

Streamers also have a unique distribution model.

Yes, and the other things we've announced at NAB and IBC is more audio languages. The streamers are pushing hard to support more audio tracks as they deliver to a lot more places than a single domestic broadcast would. Normally, it's English and Spanish, but streamers are distributing to much wider audiences: 32 languages, soon 64, and all over ST 2110. That's another unique thing we've developed for one of the streamers: they want to move fast, and a software product lets them do that.

AI is a big trend at IBC. How are you taking advantage of AI?

We embraced AI internally in product development, and we recently showed Japanese subtitling that was all developed with AI. no one in the company has read the Japanese-subtitling specification, and the AI implemented it correctly the first time.

And, for the last six months, we've been doing AI development on non-mission-critical features, and then, in the next few months, after extensive testing, we will start having mission-critical features written by AI, and that will be a massive step change. It will accelerate the product-development cycle drastically as things like getting Japanese subtitles working would historically have been a multi-week or multi-month job. But we were able to do it in a half hour, and it worked the first time.

Do you think the real impact of AI might not be the consumer-facing side, but the behind-the-scenes work helping you create products?

Yes. For example, the feedback loop from client request to shipping used to take weeks or months, and that might change to days. AI can read a customer's support ticket, implement the fix, and test it itself. We're already at that stage. And things like AI now can test an SDI board so we should see a rapid acceleration in new capabilities and product development. The challenge for manufacturers is making sure it still works reliably 24/7.

How have your customer demands in terms of features and capabilities evolved? What are customers looking for in terms of new offerings?

Latency and density top the list but also, surprisingly, more-flexible monitoring, whether in-home or otherwise. They want quality monitoring for remote editing, a low-latency link to a home or a lightweight facility. So instead of needing a big, fully kitted-out ST 2110 or SDI setup, they could use a generic office space and just run SRT to it for monitoring and whatever else they need. There's a big push for that among our customers, in both Europe and the U.S.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/10/01/svg-sit-down-kieran-kunhya-of-o...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines