Broadcast IP Transformation Report: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Broadcast Industry
From the dramatic rise in online content consumption to the huge blow of major sporting events being cancelled around the world, COVID-19 has had a massive impact on the media and entertainment industry. The pandemic has forced many broadcasters to rethink the way they operate. Late last year, Haivision polled television broadcast and video streaming professionals around the world to understand the biggest challenges that they face, the technologies they are deploying, and the impact that COVID-19 is having on their organizations. You can read more about the findings in the Haivision Broadcast IP Transformation Report 2021.
Here’s what we discovered about the impact of COVID-19 on broadcasters.
COVID-19 is Accelerating the Transition to IP
71% of respondents said that the pandemic has accelerated their organization’s transition to IP. While many broadcasters had already embarked on transforming at least part of their video production workflow to IP-based technology, COVID-19 has certainly sped up deployment plans and widened their scope to include other parts of the workflow, including remote workforces.
“We’re seeing that both our enterprise and broadcast customers are far more willing to experiment with remote IP-based workflows as they simply don’t have a choice anymore. The broadcast industry was certainly already headed this route, but the pandemic has accelerated the transition to IP-based workflows.”
Ken Stiver, Senior Director, Engineering and Field Operations, The Switch
It’s the Age of Remote
There’s no question that because of the pandemic, 2020 was the year of working from home. At the time we conducted our survey in late 2020, some of the largest names in the broadcast industry had as many as 75% or more of their employees successfully working together from their homes to produce quality live content. In an industry synonymous with studios and master control rooms, the pandemic has radically changed the way both production staff and talent work.
For broadcasters, the pandemic has served to accelerate the adoption of distributed workflows for greater operational agility. Whether it’s for remote production, remote collaboration, or remote operation, broadcast professionals are leveraging IP streaming technology to closely collaborate with their peers in real-time. If we’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that with the right tools in place, broadcasters have been able to survive and even thrive in a remote working environment, delivering high-quality live content, from anywhere.
“Haivision has allowed us to not only provide robust, high quality video signals for our operations team but also reliable, extremely low latency, low bandwidth video signals so we can efficiently operate and manage our video remotely.”
Brad Cheney, VP Field Operations and Engineering at Fox Sports
From the NFL’s first ever virtual draft, to getting live sports like NASCAR and MLB back on air with Fox Sports, more and more broadcasters depend on Haivision’s ultra low latency, high quality video streaming technology to power their remote workflows.
The Pandemic Will Change the Way We Work Forever
More than a year after the pandemic started forcing many of us to work remotely from home, is there any going back to business as usual? Nearly three-quarters of those we polled believe that the broadcast workflows changes spurred on by the pandemic are here to stay.
The transition to IP and cloud-based workflows has delivered quality live coverage of events in the face of social distancing measures, health and safety regulations, and travel restrictions. By putting low latency streaming technologies such as the SRT protocol to use, broadcast professionals have been able to collaborate with each other over long distances in real-time and even remotely operate broadcast equipment.
“We don’t believe that OB work will ever go back to the way it was pre-COVID. Remote work is set to continue, and we see this as the beginning of a remote journey.”
Michael Beaumont, Technical Director, Cloudbass
The success of these new and more agile approaches has resulted in permanent changes to the way broadcasters produce content. With its pioneering technology, Haivision has been helping broadcasters around the globe address the changes needed in this new environment. Many of the trends that have been accelerated by the pandemic such as the transition to IP and the cloud will persist and the broadcasters who are at the forefront of the IP transformation will emerge the strongest.
