Don’t neglect infrastructure in the tech broadcast revolution

IBC is back in Amsterdam this week and it comes at a time of fevered change in the broadcast sector. The mass digitisation of the sector is moving apace and there are equally rapid changes in collaboration and content distribution as broadcasters seek to move content to partners in close to real-time.

At the bleeding edge of technology-enabled change, AI has the potential to revolutionise how content is created, optimised and shared, and VR and AR are making inroads in immersive experiences. IT will be under pressure to deliver competitive differentiation and unique platforms.

But, while broadcasters and associates need to capitalise on these new opportunities, they should also be thinking of the infrastructure that supports them.

The impacts of technology can often imbue dazzling effects but it’s important to look at the core systems that enable that innovation and underpin that unfettered creativity. And storage repositories that act as the home base for content are at the heart of change in the broadcast technology sector.

We can start to address the nexus of broadcast and storage by asking some simple questions:

What is special about the sector? Ultimately, broadcasters are organisations with vast, valuable, data-hungry content assets that are often stored in disparate geographical locations. These assets can possess multiple file formats and may be tagged using different terms.

They will often run atop various storage architectures such as files and objects. All of this means that broadcast content owners often struggle because these assets are held in silos, meaning they can‘t easily retrieve, view, manage and make best use of what they have.

What they want in a perfect world then is a single platform to manage all their data from any location. Like their peers in other sectors, broadcasters should be aiming to move off proprietary platforms to unleash creativity and move swiftly when opportunities arise. They should be seeking to harmonise and rationalise, reducing the number of technology platforms, suppliers and workflows they manage.

This in turn will help them make the best use of the emerging technologies that are reshaping broadcasting and every other sector. It’s impossible to make full use of AI unless you have data that is clean, accessible and discoverable. It’s also very tough to optimise workflows and relay assets to the people who need them quickly unless data is at hand and manageable.

Also, broadcasters are, again like their peers in other verticals, moving to cloud platforms to make use of affordable data storage, elastic compute power, low hardware costs and universal accessibility. Many are delving into the cloud-native, containers and microservices world where content becomes almost infinitely granular with all the scalability, high availability and development flexibility that entails. 

But they will often have decades of legacy and they can’t leap to moving everything overnight so they need support across on-premises and cloud platforms to be able to prioritise and move at their own chosen speed. Today we live in a multi-hybrid cloud world, and we need technology that can support this.

They also need a helping hand so they don’t overprovision in the cloud and end up paying more than they need to – they also need to understand the potential for egress charges if they need to withdraw content from cloud systems. 

And of course they will want to keep their data secure and protected from the risks of compromises including ransomware. 

Finally, they will want to ensure that everything is manageable so they don’t need to recruit specialist admins but can upskill current staff.

Broadcast and technology are colliding very rapidly today and the opportunities are incredible and likely to change the industry. Just ensure that you have the platforms and storage strategies in place to be in the best place to lead that change.

Nutanix is attending IBC2025 at booth 7.06 in Hall 7 of the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre, running 12-15 September

Stuart Heade is EMEA sales director, Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS).