Vendor Integration Gives Cloud A Boost, But Broadcast Adoption Still Measured

Over the past few months, a series of high-profile sporting events on OTT platforms, including a Christmas Day NFL game on Netflix, an NFL wild-card playoff game on Amazon Prime Video and both the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics on Peacock, have demonstrated the power of the public cloud to deliver live television programming at scale. But for day-to-day operations across broadcast networks and local stations, the adoption of cloud technology has been somewhat less dynamic.

While major sports rights holders like NBC, Fox, CBS and ESPN all have robust streaming offerings, the production of Tier One sporting events still relies mostly on traditional on-premise hardware (with the notable exception of Olympic Broadcasting Services, which is making heavy use of Alibaba’s private cloud for this month’s Milan Cortina Games). Local stations have hopped on the cloud to launch FAST channels in search of new digital revenues, but they have been much slower to adopt the cloud for traditional workflows like day-to-day news production.

Vendors say that most broadcasters are looking at cloud today as just one component of a broader overhaul of their technical operations from legacy hardware to agile, software-defined systems, as embodied by the European Broadcasting Union’s new Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) initiative. Some note that as long as new broadcast applications are designed in a cloud-native way, it doesn’t matter whether the actual compute that runs them is located in the public cloud, a private cloud or on-prem compute.

What is more important, they add, is better integration between different vendors’ software products, something that attendees can expect to see demonstrated at the NAB Show in Las Vegas this April.

Imagine: Looking Past The Hype

While the early days of cloud technology in the broadcast marketplace came with a large dose of hype, those unrealistic expectations have been tempered as stations assessed the true cost of operating workflows in the cloud, says John Mailhot, systems architect for IP convergence at Imagine Communications.

“People don’t stop doing math,” Mailhot notes.

Cloud has found success where it has enabled a lower operating cost or new capabilities compared to legacy systems. One of the big wins is station groups using cloud-based editing and ingest systems as a shared resource that has a fairly low overhead cost when they aren’t using it. But the numbers haven’t worked out for the 24/7 playout of the main channel of a station, where Mailhot says “the cloud is just never going to be the low-cost option for that.” That doesn’t mean the cloud doesn’t have value for disaster recovery or business continuity applications, which several Imagine customers have deployed.

“That’s really where I think we’ve seen the maturation of cloud technology,” Mailhot says. “Especially for smaller broadcasters, it’s not a mystical solution that’s somehow just magically less expensive. It’s a part of an overall strategy where cloud can enable you to have a lower cost on something; maybe it’s something you don’t do every day.”

That said, Imagine does have a number of customers who are using public cloud for playout or network origination in Canada, the U.S. and other parts of the world. Those usually aren’t highly interactive channels with a lot of live content like sports networks, but instead tend to be channels that are clips-only or mostly clips with only an occasional live insert.

“But definitely there are clients that use it, and normally, if it’s a 24/7 channel, then their decision to use cloud is driven by some kind of impracticality of hosting it on site,” Mailhot says. “We had one client where they just didn’t have enough electricity coming from the street into their building to stand up another couple racks of playout system. So, they were willing to take the cost of doing it in cloud, because the overall construction project to do it on-prem was going to be significant. But if they improve their plant in the next year or two, I would not at all be surprised if they decided to move those things back into the building.”

Many broadcasters are grappling with constrained finances and are looking to potentially consolidate technical operations or downsize staff, potentially by reducing their real estate footprint. But in general, Mailhot hasn’t seen reduced real estate costs being a big driver of cloud adoption.

“Real estate moves usually are because you’re going to get something for what you’re moving out of, or you’re going to make a trade on the space that’s really, really big,” he says. “It’s unlikely that reducing your machine room space by 20% is going to make a real estate difference. Now it might make an HVAC difference, and that’s measurable quite linearly. But the big moves around real estate usually are driven by a wholesale decision to have a space that’s half the size or a third of the size, and the technology refresh is definitely part of that.”

Riedel Eyes MXL Potential

The cloud has gained significant traction in broadcast playout and media asset management (MAM) applications, notes Drew Martin, head of video product management for Riedel. But when it comes to live production, he says relying solely on the cloud is still rare for coverage of Tier One sporting events on major networks and stations.

“I see a lower-end production that needs the cloud because they don’t have the compute available for them on prem, or because they want the flexibility of the cloud,” Martin says. “But when they do that, they’re doing events that are lower-tier.”

Riedel has made some inroads with its SimplyLive cloud production suite for sports like soccer in the US, which doesn’t have the same large broadcast footprint as it enjoys in Europe; it has also been used by ESPN to handle slo-mo replays for some of its college football coverage. Many SimplyLive customers are using Riedel hardware to take an SDI input and convert it to SRT so it can be sent via the internet to the SimplyLive application for switching or replay functions.

But Martin says there are still “two big limiting factors” to cloud production becoming more prevalent among high-profile events. The biggest one is that broadcasters are still worried about losing connectivity to the cloud, unless they invest in redundant dual ISP connections.

“There’s some work that needs to be done there,” Martin says. “I think a lot of ISPs need to have relationships when it comes down to the actual large production facilities, so that they have at least some sort of confidence that their streams will get from [Point] A to B.”

Another limiting factor is that producing in the cloud today often means using “jack of all trades, master of none” solutions compared to the established on-prem production tools, Martin says, and sharing between different vendors’ software can mean latency and unnecessary processing.

However, Martin says the nascent Media eXchange Layer (MXL), an open-standard technology designed to support uncompressed workflows on shared memory, may soon solve those interoperability problems for cloud production.

Uncompressed production workflows in the cloud were introduced by AWS over five years ago with its Cloud Digital Interface (CDI), which allows low-latency network transport between different Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances (i.e., machines running applications). But the CDI technology didn’t gain much traction, which Martin says is mainly because it took too much compute resources to receive or send out CDI streams between the different instances.

Another issue was that CDI is AWS-specific, and not compatible with other cloud platforms.

Because MXL uses Remote Dynamic Memory Access (RDMA) to allow two different applications to work on the same piece of video in shared memory, instead of having to send a synchronous flow between machines, it dramatically cuts down the compute required. And as an open-source technology, MXL is also designed to support interoperability between different software applications and not be platform-specific.

“With MXL using RDMA, it requires a vastly less amount of compute, because there’s not a lot for that processing to do,” Martin says. “Everybody’s sending it out in that same memory representation. And that’s what allows other vendors to hook into it. And then you absolutely are dealing with uncompressed media in the cloud, but you’re dealing with it in an efficient way.”

Amagi Moves Into Managed Services, AI

Perhaps no cloud technology vendor has benefited more from the rise of FAST channels among broadcasters than Indian firm Amagi, which provides its cloud playout and ad insertion software to several large station groups, most notably Sinclair, and also serves as the technical backbone for NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform. The company recently was publicly listed in India, one of the first media-focused SaaS companies to do so.

Amagi co-founder Srini KA says the advantages of the cloud for broadcasters aren’t limited to mining new revenues with FAST channels. In a market where a lot of broadcasters are “facing some financial headwinds,” adopting the cloud gives them the “flexibility and agility” to be able to more easily engage in M&A activity, whether that means selling off stations or buying new ones and quickly integrating them into a group’s technology stack.

While FAST revenues are still dwarfed by stations’ traditional linear businesses, they have grown enough to be material, KA notes. And that has some groups eyeing the cloud as a platform that could potentially handle both businesses.

“It’s becoming a decent number right now,” KA says. “Many of them have been running FAST and broadcast as completely two different entities, running parallel workflows, parallel ingest and so on and so forth. We are starting to see more and more interest in having one unified solution for both broadcast and FAST. Thinking of it as linear, it doesn’t matter whether it’s streamed or whether it’s broadcast, as one linear back end.”

One customer has gone so far as to feed its FAST channel into its linear broadcast, using it to fill its 2 p.m. newscast slot.

“These are becoming much more commingled, FAST and broadcast in general, and being able to leverage that,” KA says.

While KA sees this shift happening in the technical architecture, he also sees some of this change from an organizational structure perspective, with groups unifying their linear and digital personnel.

“Ultimately, it’s about cost saving, it’s about efficiency,” he says.

In the vein, last year Amagi started selling its cloud technology as a fully managed service, supported by a new network operations center (NOC) in Princeton, N.J., with about a dozen operators. That reduces the friction for customers who may not be comfortable with running their own playout functions in the cloud, and KA says the NOC has served as a bit of showroom for potential new customers.

“They can actually see how that’s being run on the cloud,” KA says. “We have zero hardware in that facility; it’s just monitors and laptops. That’s essentially the master control facility.”

Amagi also has recently started offering “offshore” managed services to a few larger broadcasters using a much larger workforce in India, which KA says can bring down the cost significantly, “especially for the lower end channels.”

At the same time, Amagi is working to improve its traditional broadcast features for core linear workflows, and KA says it’s currently in a pilot with a large station group for “more enterprise grade” news production. The company is also exploring the use of AI for automated news bulletin production and for automated social media clipping and posting.

KA says a major request of several broadcasters is to expand their stations’ social media offerings beyond Facebook and Instagram to platforms that appeal more to younger viewers like Snapchat and TikTok, and Amagi is trying to automate that process. Amagi has even branched into agentic AI technology with what it calls AMMO (Agentic Managed Media Operations).

“Essentially, we’re trying to automate using agentic AI many of the traditional operations as well, so you can actually do significantly lower costs using our own managed services, first and foremost,” KA says. “It becomes a way for us to eat our own dog food. Run it through our managed services, validate the agentic AI and actually refine it for our customers, and hopefully driving down costs further.”

A Balanced Approach For Grass Valley

Grass Valley sees a “balanced approach” to cloud adoption among its customers with pretty much a 50/50 split between cloud and on-prem hardware when it comes to new technology investments, says Adam Marshall, Grass Valley chief product officer.

“Some clients are seeing value in relocating their businesses or downsizing facilities or making significant infrastructure-based changes to their operations, where moving to the cloud is sensible, because it’s just a reallocation of cost,” Marshall says. “Others are at capacity in their current facility. They can’t move, they can’t change, but they need to grow. And they’re using the cloud for those kinds of capabilities as well. Those who have the capacity to do so, to host on prem, or have access to other private data center kind of solutions, and they’re running more 24/7 operations, then they go down to on-prem.”

If customers are already successfully running operations on-prem with 2110 or SDI infrastructure today, there isn’t a big driver to take signals to the cloud and back, Marshall notes. But for doing productions that are “bursty in nature” or coping with real estate moves or restructuring, the cloud can make sense. He says customers are often challenged internally with how to model the costs.

“If you compare a COTS appliance to a cloud instance, the cloud instance is always more expensive,” Marshall says. “If you compare the COTS instance and the AC and the power and the operations and everything else, and then the recycle time in terms of when you need to reinvest, to that instance, then the cloud instance normally works out better.

“It really depends on how your business wants to shape itself financially and what your long-term strategy is, to decide which way to go,” he adds. “Honestly, it’s a big split, 50/50. And even the ones that go to the cloud are often still on a project-by-project basis, balancing between the two.”

Grass Valley was one of the first vendors with a cloud-native production platform in its AMPP product, which is being regularly used in the cloud by sports broadcasters like NPV in Spain and DMC in the Netherlands. But he says that the current applications for AMPP are split almost 50/50 between live production and playout.

“There’s this playout refresh that is happening internationally,” Marshall says. “They’re looking for solutions beyond the traditional kind of player offering, where here’s a box, it does this one thing, and that’s where we now see a significant growth in that space.

“Content management and playout is accelerating considerably,” he says. “We’ve got around 700 to 800 channels going at the moment on Playout X, many of them kind of launching over the last 12 to 18 months, and we’ve got big funnel inflow for the remainder of this year of services that go live to scale that out.”

LTN Bets On Private Cloud

IP transport vendor LTN has also gotten into the cloud game, leveraging its robust network and edge presence in numerous top-tier data centers by investing in additional compute to create its own private cloud platform which it launched last year.

The company, which has a Technical Operations Center in Columbia, Md., a sports production hub in Liberty, Mo., and another technical center in Cologne, Germany, is using its private cloud platform to offer a range of master control capabilities in addition to its core IP-based program distribution and contribution services.

The private cloud platform doesn’t aim to compete with public cloud platforms in delivering VOD content, but is instead aimed primarily at live channel workflow like sports. LTN also continues to deliver a wealth of content in and out of public cloud platforms, particularly for its steadily growing business in support of OTT sports platforms.

“We have a global network, we manage data centers around the world, and that’s what we’ve been doing for 15 years,” says LTN SVP of Product Rick Young. “And so, it makes a lot of logical sense, both from a business and affordability perspective, and just better workflows, in many cases, to add additional capabilities, additional processing, additional features, beyond just moving content from point A to point B into those data centers.”

LTN, which has its receive equipment located at numerous cable headends and broadcast stations, is also promoting itself as a terrestrial alternative for satellite for program distribution as the C-band spectrum that many networks have long relied on will be significantly reduced by a scheduled FCC auction in 2027. The private cloud capabilities are a natural tie-in to its satellite replacement offering, Young says.

One of LTN’s new customers for its private cloud service is Public Media Management (PMM), which currently provides a hardware-based master control solution that handles playout for some 22 public broadcasters across the country under the supervision of a NOC located at WGBH Boston. With public broadcasting (most notably the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) coming under severe financial pressure due to recent cuts in government funding, PMM started looking for a cost-effective cloud-based solution that would be able to support additional stations.

“The real impetus for looking at this new model was primarily driven by anticipating that the funding from CPB was going to get cut and that all stations were really going to be looking at their cost structures,” says PMM CEO Marc Hand. “And the cost structure with a full equipment package is more expensive because the equipment is acquired by PMM, and then it’s built into the monthly cost spread out over a five-year contract. So, we really wanted to look at a model that could bring the cost down dramatically, particularly for what we’re calling the ‘at-risk’ stations. So those are the stations in the system that have lost 30% to 50% of their funding from CPB.”

Hand and technology consultant Jim DeChant evaluated different vendors’ offerings at NAB 2025, and then wound up doing a POC of integrated cloud playout solutions from Harmonic, Amagi and LTN before selecting the LTN system. It is now offering the new capability to existing and prospective customers as “PMM Cloud,” with PMM providing the managed service and LTN supplying and maintaining the technical infrastructure.

“LTN, because of their managed solution and their private network, they’re much more controlled and less expensive, probably 30% less expensive if you look at the whole package,” DeChant says. “And it’s managed so you don’t have two different vendors trying to work together. All of that is under their own IP, so they wrote their own software. They wrote their own transport.”

Hand says the network transport capabilities and reach of the LTN network were a major selling point, particularly the ability for client stations to contribute content such as coverage of local or state government meetings, across the PMM group or even more broadly.

“We expect there to be more of a shift to local and regional content on the part of stations,” Hand says. “The ability to easily share those things has evolved, and this kind of system really helps facilitate that.”

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