For broadcasters and streamers, a migration to the cloud is no longer a simple technical upgrade. The era of merely replicating on-premise infrastructure in a virtual environment — the so-called lift and shift — is over.
The most successful organizations are embracing the journey as a fundamental operational and creative transformation, requiring a phased approach that addresses architectural resilience, cultural change and the accelerated adoption of new technologies like AI.
The initial hurdle for many is realizing that the journey to the cloud is less about IT infrastructure and more about people.
“Cloud migration isn’t just a technical decision. It’s a creative and operational one,” Sami Aziz, executive producer and founder of Pale Blue Originals and former head of live broadcasts at NASA, said.
“The organizations that navigate the move to cloud best treat it like a production: a phased approach, very clear communication, investment in training and intentional standardization across tools.”
Any move to the cloud comes with challenges, including managing real-time media workflows that demand low latency and high reliability.
“To tackle this, it’s important to ensure workflows are consistent to reduce training time and use real-time monitoring tools to keep an eye on network and media performance,” said Bryan Bedford, director of consumer industries and business solutions at Cisco Systems.
“Automation and orchestration can simplify operations and help scale efficiently. Plus, collaborating with vendors and adopting open standards ensures everything works well together.”
Reliability Concerns
Reliability, especially for real-time media workflows that demand low latency, remains a constant challenge. Organizations must design their systems to survive multiple problems, from public internet performance issues to data center and region outages.
Mike Pilone, enterprise architect at National Public Radio, suggested that any system deployed in the cloud has to “utilize multiple regions to ensure they can survive an interruption. Using multiple cloud providers can give you an additional layer of availability as well as flexibility if a provider is no longer attractive due to service or pricing changes.”
- Start by making sure your creative and technology teams are working together and not independently. The people making the content have the clearest view of what’s broken and needs work.
- Embrace flexibility and agility, don’t just “lift and shift.”
- Adopt software-centric workflows that let you scale and innovate quickly.
- Explore hybrid models or edge computing, which can help reduce latency and improve streaming quality.
- Understand the problem you’re trying to solve and the specific requirements of your solution.
- Map your production process and identify where physical infrastructure is slowing you down.
- Consider building your own solutions on top of core features to stop vendor lock-in.
Content protection and ownership in a cloud-first world are also new challenges facing content owners, especially with the need to protect their assets and set clear parameters in case a platform goes down.
“Most broadcasters don’t ask these questions until something goes wrong,” Aziz said. “Redundancy and contracts with clear data ownership language are two critical starting points. Security should also be treated as an ongoing operational priority, not just a one-time setup. The same care you would apply to protecting a finished master should apply to every stage of your cloud pipeline.”
The growth of AI is also linked to the move beyond a basic cloud deployment. Most AI tools, such as automated captioning, content tagging and quality control, are cloud-based. AI models are resource-intensive operations that may only be practical in a shared computing environment such as the cloud.
“As we see more AI adoption in various use cases, we can expect to see greater use of the cloud to provide the core models and compute,” said Jon Cyphers, senior manager of product and support, distribution at NPR.
AI is transforming how broadcasters operate in the cloud, Bedford agreed, helping to automate and optimize media production and delivery, making workflows more efficient and reducing manual errors.
“Combining AI with cloud and edge computing opens up exciting possibilities like personalized content delivery and intelligent network orchestration,” he said.
“This integration helps broadcasters stay competitive by enhancing efficiency and creating new ways to engage audiences.”
According to Aziz, organizations that have already started migrating to the cloud will be able to adopt and adapt to AI incrementally, with human judgment still a large part of the workflow.
“Organizations still anchored to legacy systems will have a harder time making the leap all at once,” he said. “We’re all watching how quickly AI is evolving. The honest truth is, it’s moving faster than any of us can set editorial and ethical standards, and that’s a conversation our entire industry needs to be having.”
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