Report: North American Broadcast Journalists Spend Up to 75% of Time on Technical Workflows

A new report from Quickplay and Caretta Research, The Broadcaster Revolution Will Not Be Televised, finds that broadcast journalism and production staff in North America are spending approximately 75% of their time on technical workflows, leaving limited time for content creation. The report examines how local broadcasters can use their archives, local knowledge, and brand equity to compete as audiences shift to streaming platforms.

The report identifies fragmented content archives as a major operational challenge, with broadcasters holding vast amounts of historical and local content spread across multiple media asset management systems and file types. Without unified infrastructure, staff often rely on institutional knowledge to locate specific video files. The report also notes that workflows designed for linear broadcasting are too slow for the publishing cadence required by social and third-party streaming platforms.

The report recommends adoption of unified software or orchestration layers that provide visibility and control of content, production, and distribution workflows from a single interface, reducing the need to switch between tools or manually move files.

When local broadcast journalists lose 75% of their days to technical workflows, they're not just facing a productivity problem, they're staring at an existential one, says Paul Pastor, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer, Quickplay. While the demand for trusted and relevant local content remains high, new rules are in play for local broadcasters to survive. Gone are the days where broadcast is always the first format and then recut for other platforms. Our digital-first world demands the flexibility to start with vertical before broadcast when appropriate. An orchestrated, content-to-value platform then turns one story into formats built for each of these platforms simultaneously, so broadcasters can compete at the same velocity and reach as anyone else without giving up their real superpower: local relevance.

Our research confirms a critical bottleneck in North American broadcasting: production teams and journalists spend up to 75% of their time on technical busywork that could be automated, accelerated and improved. The shift to unified, software-orchestrated operations is no longer optional, it is the urgent step required to empower and accelerate key staff, enabling broadcasters to compete more effectively in the streaming age. The technologies enabling such a transition used to be expensive and required a lot of customisation. However vendors have worked hard to ensure adopting such capabilities is accessible to even the smallest broadcaster, says Ed Barton, Research Director, Caretta Research.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/07/09/report-north-american-broadcast...
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