The media industry is not short on technology. Yet something’s missing.
After visiting the DPP European Broadcaster Summit, March 11–12 in Paris, and DVB World, a week later in Amsterdam, Unified Streaming Solutions Manager Valentijn Siebrands put pen to paper. Well, to be honest, he typed.
Here are his thoughts.
All buzzwords, no bite
AI, cloud, standards, trust, monetization, control: the conferences were packed with all the right buzzwords. But they said little.
Too often, we rely on the same safe choices, building on the same stacks, and repeating the same workflows with a slight refresh of tech. New labels come up, but old habits stay.
What should we pay attention to? Instead of just the next tool or next trend, which big shifts roiling underneath it all should we be noticing and actually attending to?
Standards hold us back from competitive advantages? No, sameness does
Media has always moved forward through sharing foundations: standards, interoperability, and common building blocks. That’s how we develop the industry. That’s how we innovate.
But there’s a difference between standardization and sameness.
Applying standards helps us avoid vendor lock-in and mitigate risks.
Repeating the same workflows with newer tech leads to stagnation and loss of competitive advantages. Applying these approaches, we risk becoming boring burger chains, offering only different packaging and different sauces.
Our industry has always boasted a ridiculously strong bench of smart people. Engineers, product thinkers, operators, media technologists: the talents are here. We just need more space to experiment faster. That means starting with smaller requirements, shorter feedback loops, and smaller PoCs to prove an idea works.
Such flexibility saves money, boosts creativity, makes collaboration easier, and in the end, it helps us innovate. The industry needs more of that energy.
Too much control, or not enough? Clouds are reliable, but too independent
While everyone’s talking about greater control over assets and greater security, we still rely on big clouds.
Using cloud infrastructure is wise, especially when we need to scale quickly. It’s a convenient way to outsource risk and ensure your stream will work, especially during spikes.
But there’s a catch. Often when you outsource too much risk, you outsource too much control, too. This remains a common blocker.
Interest in repatriating some workloads and exploring sovereign cloud options is growing again.
That is not a sign of an industry becoming lazy or paranoid, but a sign of an industry attempting to move forward.
Stuck streaming, sans reusing and monetizing
The industry is investing in content, big time. Production and distribution costs continue to rise. The value of sports rights is increasing worldwide.
This situation requires us not only to extract more value from our content, but also to work a lot smarter.
We need to go beyond streaming and focus on reusing and monetizing the content we have effectively.
This is the new gold standard: getting one stream and repurposing it again and again.
Live content should be clipped, personalized, reformatted, and reused across many devices and use cases. Making highlights, sharing clips that might interest viewers, and following up with the best moments can be a new service that people love to watch.
Using advanced technologies can make ad-supported streaming seamless. And of course, AI can enhance the overall experience by creating in-flight content and targeting it more effectively.
Maximizing the value of both new releases and archives by making smarter decisions is a must.
Looking forward
The industry does not need more hype. It needs more flexibility and thoughtful thinking.
To stay resilient, to evolve, we need to bet on reuse and flexibility. Let’s favor less weight, faster changes, smarter tooling, quicker experiments, and bigger room to adapt. Let’s ditch rebuilding everything every time.
And that is where middleware, like Unified Streaming's, comes in.
Our tools don’t just get the job done: they also let teams create new stuff on top of what’s already there, and keep the confidence in how things work. This leads to faster launches and makes it easier to adjust to changes, explore new ideas, prove better and cheaper approaches, and make the work more creative and enjoyable for everyone.
Agree or disagree? Want to discuss things further? Just shoot us a message!