Broadcast and the IT industry: an inevitable evolution?

At IBC2024, Grass Valley CTO Ian Fletcher told attendees at GV Forum that broadcast is now an IT industry. During our discussions at the show, TVBEurope heard varying degrees of agreement with that statement. Here, industry stakeholders share their thoughts on the subject

By TVBEurope Staff

Published: December 20, 2024 Updated: December 23, 2024

At IBC2024, Grass Valley CTO Ian Fletcher told attendees at GV Forum that broadcast is now an IT industry. During our discussions at the show, TVBEurope heard varying degrees of agreement with that statement. Here, industry stakeholders share their thoughts on the subject

target=_blank title=Share on LinkedIn class=share-linkedin>

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, b

LINK:	https://www.tvbeurope.com/ip-migration/broadcast-and-the-it-industry-a...
	See more stories from tvb

More from TVB Europe