Why Decentralized Production is Key for Media’s Future – Spiceworks

Jared Timmins and Tom Carlisle of Diversified explain why embracing decentralized infrastructure and operator-centric orchestration is essential for media companies to stay competitive.

The five most-watched interviews in broadcasting history all happened in the last two years—and they all took place on social media. Viewership for each eclipsed the 62 million who tuned into Oprah’s interview with Michael Jackson, the most-watched TV interview of all time.  

MrBeast has built a YouTube following of 240 million, expanded his business empire to include a restaurant brand and a chocolate company, and brings in about $700 million a year in revenue. He did it all by the age of 25 – and without the heavy overhead of traditional TV broadcasters. If you’re a traditional media business, you may be thinking: What does that have to do with me? 

Kodak, once one of the most powerful companies in the world, may have had similar thoughts about its position. The company created digital imaging and was the dominant market player, yet it failed to see the market was changing due to cell phone cameras and newer competitors. 

Why Traditional Media Needs a Digital Transformation

Here’s the point: Sticking with the status quo is not safe. If traditional media companies don’t adopt a digital operating model, they will lose their leadership positions to innovative upstarts that reach customers faster and more efficiently. Legacy media companies must change how they think and work and figure out what new models work best today and tomorrow. 

Moving to a decentralized infrastructure was a good first step. Now, media companies need to operate like DevOps teams, define and adopt data-driven workflows, and implement software-defined production environments and operator-centric orchestration to move their production environments—and their businesses—forward and survive and thrive in the new world. 

The Role of Decentralized Infrastructure in Media

The media industry has embraced decentralized infrastructure. 

When COVID hit, media companies didn’t have the infrastructure to enable remote teams to create content the way they used to. The industry rapidly adopted Zoom, Teams and other enterprise-level communications tools; many production environments still ingest content from these platforms. But enterprise-level broadcast production infrastructure couldn’t support the volume of remote connections these facilities needed, and people couldn’t remotely control gear like vision mixers and audio mixers the way they needed to. This led many vendors to introduce products allowing users to remote in using virtual desktop interface solutions. 

Once the media industry discovered that it could build entire production control rooms that don’t require much on-premises infrastructure to support them, there was a big push to decentralize infrastructure. Most companies still use centralized media production infrastructure. But, in the future, they will not invest in on-premises or centralized production infrastructure or dedicated spaces in their offices, opting instead for a decentralized approach to their workflows and staffing. 

Benefits of Decentralized Production Environments

Decentralized production environments offer 3 advantages for modern media companies:

1. Faster Production Environment Setup: Creating decentralized environments using cloud resources and data centers accelerates the time-intensive process of building production environments.
2. Increased Flexibility and Cost Efficiency: Decentralized infrastructure also provides companies with more options in who they work with. Now, you can move from working with the best operator in town to the best operator in the country or the world. You may also decide to use the best commentators for three games over the weekend rather than one night. Virtual facilities also enable greater scalability because they can serve different time zones. Plus, they are more cost-effective because now you don’t have to build different facilities in various cities, countries, or regions. 
3. Enhanced Scalability and Adaptability: You can scale and adapt by defining your production environment end-to-end with software, including containers and microservices. You’ll no longer need to build facilities for the most demanding events like the Super Bowl. You’ll build facilities that can constantly evolve to meet your needs. 

Challenges and Opportunities in the Streaming Wars

Amid streaming wars, traditional media companies need greater flexibility and agility 

The pandemic also prompted media companies to transition to streaming models. This was a necessary move, but it hasn’t been easy, adding to the media industry’s turmoil.  

Things are looking up a bit, but we’re not out of the woods yet. After a loss of nearly $2.1 billion in 2022, Discovery recently became the first Hollywood conglomerate to turn a full-year streaming profit. Meanwhile, Paramount lost $490 million from streaming in the fourth quarter of 2023 despite adding 4.1 million Paramount+ subscribers. 

The streaming wars call for media companies to create more content and compete at a larger scale across multiple syndication points with different cost bases. Yet, no one has had the business model experimentation engine to figure out how to win in this new market.

As media solutions vendors continue to develop their solutions for decentralized infrastructure, the need for operator-centric orchestration becomes vital.

The Importance of Operator-centric Orchestration

In any given production environment, solutions architects can be required to stand up a dozen or more services, many requiring differing approaches to their configuration and licensing. This can create a large time gap between deploying these services and creating monetizable content. If you can orchestrate this workflow, you can take back the time lost building these environments. The same holds true for experimentation and parallel testing of workflows. If each time you need to spin up a new production environment, channel, or edit workflow, you end up tying up your valuable engineering resources for a long time. Conversely, if you have operator-centric orchestration, as opposed to engineering-centric orchestration, your cost base drops, experimentation becomes a part of how you do business, and you are far better positioned to find the north star that will make you successful in the next decade of media.

With modern infrastructure – based on software-defined production environments, containerization and microservices, and operator-centric orchestration – you’ll gain better control and observability over your production environments. Your staff will be freed from nuts-and-bolts work so teams can think about and innovate around the things that will grow your business. You will be able to spin up new, more personalized content and package your existing content in new ways with minimal risk and expense. And because you can do all of that quickly, efficiently, and at scale, you’ll be in a better position to profit from your content, increase your ratings and competitive edge, and adapt to future shifting demands and viewer preferences. 

MORE ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION