At NAB Show 2025, Amagi’s Chief Product Officer, Richard Perkett, spoke about increasing broadcast ROI and why cloud play out is the future. Read on to discover the key themes from his talk on reducing infrastructure costs, boosting agility and operational efficiency, and more.
On linear TV economics
I think we can talk about a couple of themes that are probably pretty familiar around TV networks struggling with linear TV economics. Traditional TV revenues are dropping. We've seen this, across the board. And costs are not fully optimized. So we drill into this a little more across these areas. We look at content programming, customer experience, human resources, technology and operations, trying to find where we can identify optimizations. There's only so many opportunities. Our perspective is that the technology and operations area are where there's great opportunity.
Transitioning from traditional hardware operations to SaaS operations is a ripe area for exploration. So let's dive into some of these pieces, specifically for TV networks, for broadcasters.
READ: Linear TV in the age of streaming
On infrastructure cost savings
The increased operational efficiency of transitioning from traditional hardware to SaaS based solutions, from resourcing and remote operations perspectives, is aimed at helping people identify some of those cost savings. And then on the business agility side, in that shifting media landscape, with those uncertain revenue streams, changing consumer preference, evolving content formats, agile and flexible solutions are absolutely essential. We see this with the speed to market — the ability to roll out new capabilities, new channels — our solutions are aimed at equipping our customers spin up new channels in a shorter amount of time.
And we think about scalability and flexibility … this is where you have so much more choice. You scale as you need it. You don't have to pre-purchase hardware or all the pieces and components that you need without really knowing where your business is going to go. So you can really scale things as you need them. Spin things up, spin things down. Infrastructure can be spun up, for a single live event, for example, and spun back down, without having to make a longer term purchase or a longer term commitments. That ability to speed up infrastructure creation can be a real advantage once you're leveraging cloud playout.
And not one size fits, not all channels are created equal. Some channels require higher levels of resiliency, scalability, and redundancy. You have that choice to do that on your tier one channels, but for your lower tier channels, you can go with a smaller infrastructure, without all of those redundancy needs. That flexibility is built into cloud playout solutions.
WATCH: Media in the cloud era — Balancing ROI & Innovation
On being future-ready
And here again when we talk about being future-ready — leveraging those evolving talent trends — it opens you up to a greater resource pool of not just broadcast engineers, but IT engineers, DevOps engineers. And again, that ability not to have people physically located, to run the operations can be a real advantage.
Leveraging cloud innovations and the speed and pace of what gets rolled out in cloud infrastructure is aimed to gives you that ability to move quicker instead of having to wait for hardware refreshes and go through that whole procurement process. As new, faster, smarter instances are available, you can quickly both experiment and migrate over to them.
And then leveraging newer hardware technologies is also a big piece of this..
And then lastly, just around sustainability, aligning with your own kind of corporate governance and corporate goals.
And then on-demand versus 24/7: that ability to not make these long-term, high-priced capital expenditure commitments is aimed to gives you that flexibility to spin things up and down and manage costs.
Want to learn more?
- Watch the full video here
- Read our broadcast report here
- View our full webinar series here
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