For Tech Vendors, A ‘Rollercoaster’ Year That’s Still Twisting

AMSTERDAM – Nothing about 2025 has been easy for broadcast technology vendors, but the leaders of three of its largest companies told attendees of Thursday’s Devoncroft Summit here that they’re undaunted and even seeing growth despite challenges including tariffs and industry consolidation.

“It’s been an interesting year – quite the rollercoaster,” said David Ross, CEO of Ross Video, who said the year’s first four months were marked by uncertainties and buyers delaying purchases over the prospect of seeing 25% tariffs hitting between placing orders and taking deliveries. The next four months saw a dramatic upswing in business, Ross said, before settling into the current phase of calmer activity.

“Uncertainty and unpredictability don’t help capital investment,” Ross said.

Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder of Bitmovin, said his company has exceeded expectations to date. “The media industry and the supplier industry is going through a compression phase at the moment,” Lederer said, “but this year has been much better in terms of growth than we initially expected.”

That growth has been 22% for the year, he said, prompting Bitmovin to get more aggressive. “We’re getting hungry and looking to see what we can do beyond that,” Lederer said.

Amagi CEO/Co-Founder Baskar Subramanian said his company has seen 30% growth as the company readies for an IPO at a yet-undetermined date. As the company pushes past industry conceptions that it’s primarily in the FAST game, Subramanian said 2025 has offered “no big surprises” in its trajectory so far as it leans into the “entire flywheel” of production, including the cloud business.

Lederer conceded that cloud adoption might be seeing “slight stalling” in line with Devoncroft Partners’ own findings, though he said he’s seeing many customers switching clouds or moving towards a multi-cloud strategy this year.

Lederer foresees the cloud becoming a commodity just like CDNs are now.

Ross said his company is still seeing cloud growth, though not as fast as the industry’s cloud conversation had been accelerating. “The cloud for us isn’t just cloud — it’s also on-prem, hybrid workflows, anything that connects to cloud,” he added.

Looming just beyond the cloud, the tech executives said AI was looking to be even more transformational, though media companies would do well to buckle up for its implications.

“There’s so many different areas where you can insert it into different workflows and create things,” Ross said.

But Subramaniam warned of inevitable knock-on effects for employees.

“Lots of jobs are at risk for everybody,” he said based on the capacities he’s already seen with agentic AI. “We should all embrace that because it’s not a choice.”