Our look at the year ahead
2024 has started with the closing of the deal between EMG and Gravity Media and with continued rumours that Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are eyeing up options it's clear that that mergers are still on the table. This suggests a continued consolidation in the global media sector, potentially leading to strategic shifts in content focus and investment. These mergers are expected to trigger an inward look at spending resulting in some broadcasters & media companies cutting some niche/lower-value content to strengthen their position in premium sports content.
The rise of live content in VOD platforms
Some media companies might reduce their variety of shows to build and reinforce their brand image, but we expect to see companies typically operating as ‘Video On Demand (VOD) services’ introducing live content offerings to drive differentiation and reduce churn. This includes major players such as Amazon Live and Apple TV continuing their moves into live sports, and Netflix expanding into live entertainment and sports in 2024. This shift is significant as it represents these streaming services encroaching on traditional broadcasters’ territory, particularly in the realm of live sports and large-scale entertainment shows.
As mergers make broadcasters larger and larger, this will put strain on their workflows, internal teams, and the software products themselves. We’ll see the ability to efficiently plan, implement, and maintain large infrastructure as an important differentiator between broadcasters and media companies. For software vendors, software flexibility and efficiency at each layer of the technology stack will become more crucial, offering a large commercial opportunity for those that correctly tailor products for top-tier broadcasters.
Optimisation in, and out, of the cloud
Broadcasters who have moved to cloud-based operations are now looking at ways to optimize their cloud computing costs and understand the limitations of public cloud infrastructure. This follows the trend over the past few years where speed to market was prioritised over efficiency. We believe that during 2024, this optimisation trend will drive increased investment in private cloud or on-premise infrastructure, especially for 24x7 services where the 3-year total cost of ownership is typically higher than on-premise. Furthermore, while cloud technology for live production is still maturing, we will see increasing experimentation and building of trust and understanding of the emerging technologies and platforms over the next year including increasing parallel public cloud/on-premise production for some key live sporting events.
The role of software in broadcast infrastructure
The theme behind all of these predictions is software. The flexibility to run the same software on the ground or in the cloud, to create end-to-end infrastructure in a fully automated fashion is attractive and many organisations are realising that the benefits of the move to the cloud were largely brought by the move to software that this brought with it.
In 2024, we predict that partnerships, which have emerged as an underlying foundation of many of the recent infrastructure innovations, will be increasingly preferred by broadcasters and media companies. A close partnership with a small collection of vendors has two major benefits: It removes the stop-start nature of project-based deliveries, and it also closely matches the iterative approach of modern software development where software – and hence the platform – can continuously improve. By carefully selecting partner organisations, broadcasters and media companies can benefit from a long-term, extended team of experts evolving and improving large-scale, software-based infrastructure over many years.
AI Integration in Broadcasting
AI will continue to make inroads into the broadcast and media industry during 2024. We already know that many companies are actively trialling – and in some cases using – AI in workflows. AI for IT security and network efficiency is likely to become more common, while using machine learning to create content metadata will become pervasive. However, its use in the control room may be the newest trend either helping incident response times or even helping route signals and configure equipment.
There is no doubt that 2024 will continue to provide many opportunities for broadcasters as the rapidly developing landscape of real-time software signal processing operating on COTS infrastructures continues to thrive and prosper. AI is further improving the potential to both deliver reliability of highly complex networks and infrastructures and enhance production efficiency. But what is becoming increasingly clear for broadcasters spanning the globe is that they must continue to develop a deep understanding of software engineering and architecture to guarantee successful implementations of these new technologies. Leveraging the knowledge and experience of established specialist software-centric partners is crucial to reducing the risks associated with navigating the complex world ahead and delivering success in 2024.