July 19 marked one year since what has been described as “the largest IT outage in history” when cybersecurity company CrowdStrike updated its software that led to roughly 8.5 million systems crashing and refusing to properly restart.

A number of broadcasters were significantly impacted by the outage, including the U.K.’s Sky News and Sky Sports News. Sky News went off-air for parts of the morning on July 19, 2024, before returning with a much-changed backdrop, no graphics, autocue or packages.

In the United States, station group E.W. Scripps Co. told TV Tech that a strategy put in place over the past 10 years was able to quickly muster technical resources and identify and correct issues when they arose.

To mark one year since the outage, TV Tech and sister brand TVBEurope asked key media figures if they believe the industry has taken sufficient steps since then to prevent similar disruptions in the future.

Tim Claman, chief technology officer, Avid
One of the big learnings from that outage was that security strategies need to be more proactive and adaptive, rather than just responding to incidents after the fact. Since the outage, we have seen wider adoption of strategies that combine prevention and resilience methods.

Customers are bolstering traditional detection methods (like antivirus, EDR) with technologies that more dynamically identify potential threats, including AI-based monitoring, zero-trust models, dynamic policy management and more rigorous update testing, to help prevent and minimize impact from security incidents like we saw last year. While a lot of the technologies and approaches (CNAPP, IAM, EDR, Endpoint Isolation, Zero Trust, etc.) are not new, they are now being used more intelligently in combination with operational best practices to reduce risk.

Beyond the technological improvements and the evolution of best practices, we have seen a shift in mindset. The outage was a wake-up call for our customers, as well as for the vendor community. Media enterprises realize that they need to own their own destiny on security, rather than trusting security vendors, so they are more proactively managing their security strategies and practices. As a technology vendor, Avid is receiving more detailed and thorough security questions and requirements in RFPs, a reflection of our customers’ more intensive approach to security strategy.

Rowan de Pomerai, CEO, DPP
I think it’s probably fair to say that no, not enough focus has been given. There’s been a huge amount of business transformation and disruption, and AI has taken so much of the technical limelight, so it’s been easy to lose focus on concerns like security.

But perhaps AI could be the solution as much as the problem: contributors to the “DPP 2025 Predictions” said that “security concerns will go beyond human scale” as the capability to keep up with ever-changing threat vectors will become so complex that AI and other automation tools become essential.

Our “State of Media Technology Security” report also exposed a gulf between customers and vendors when it came to their assessment of the security of modern media technology tools. Clearly, there is more collaboration needed as we move forward.

Neil Maycock, TVBEurope contributor and business adviser
I think the CrowdStrike incident really highlighted that trying to protect against the ever evolving threats in cyber security carries its own risks, and the fact that major operations were so severely impacted is a testament to that. These were companies who take security very seriously and will have had extensive protocols in place to keep systems safely up to date, and yet an unforeseen scenario had devastating consequences. Therefore, to answer the question have sufficient steps been taken to prevent a repeat, I think the answer is of course industry will have protected itself from another CrowdStrike, but the real question is it ever possible to anticipate all possible scenarios?

Cybersecurity is a classic risk management exercise, where risk must be balanced against cost, both financial and operational impact. If we lock our systems down to the extent it compromises the ability of our organisation to operate, then the cost may outweigh the potential risks. Quantifying the risk and cost impact is a massive challenge, and one that is getting harder all the time. We frequently talk about the impact of AI in the media industry, but across all sectors AI is now being leveraged to implement ever more sophisticated cyber-attacks. For example, AI’s ability to impersonate key personnel, or create very specific personalised phishing attacks is creating new challenges.

Ensuring companies are adequately protected is an unenviable challenge.

Karl Paulsen, TV Tech contributor and retired CTO
I suspect this won’t be the last time we see something like this happen when there are so many moving parts in a single system. With Windows 10 support evaporating, much of the base software for users will be shifted and everybody and their dog will be wondering how to address a significant change in their hardware and software (including third-party support).

Impacts on multi-cloud will need to be managed, and it is still unclear what “AI” is going to do to everyone’s architectures. Errors are still likely to occur and an overload of systems management is a potential liability.

Dan Pisarski, chief technology officer, LiveU
The notorious CrowdStrike outage in 2024 taught an important lesson about shared vulnerabilities: you could have an entire, physically diverse set of servers and workstations—even in a building designed to withstand disasters (what if a meteor falls on the building, after all?)—but if every one of those servers runs CrowdStrike, you’re still at risk. This event has put real pressure on media organisations to rethink what disaster recovery looks like, especially when it comes to intentionally building diversity into Disaster Recovery (DR) plans.

Is your primary production on-prem? Then your DR should be in the cloud. Is your playout path based on a local fibre run? Then your DR plan should use wireless. The goal is simple: if something happens that wipes out an entire class of options (as the CrowdStrike incident did to Windows PCs and servers), you need a diverse DR plan that can avoid the fate that takes down not just one component, but an entire class of your mission-critical systems.

Cloud-based production platforms provide a diverse form of backup to hardware-based production solutions running Windows. If there is another day when “all Windows PCs don’t work in the world”, then you have a backup plan. The cloud solution does not require integration with Windows, and while it is not an exact match 1:1 of features of a hardware-based solution, that matters less when it is becomes the primary solution in a disaster recovery scenario.

This kind of built-in diversity applies at both small and large scales. At the small scale, for example, your bonded-cellular active/active wireless transmissions should use multiple carriers—not just for performance, but also “just in case” one carrier experiences a localized or nationwide outage (it’s happened!). On a much larger scale, diversity might mean having an elastically scalable cloud production service ready to go, even if you “usually” rely on on-prem production.

Neil Mayock has joined playout specialists Pebble as the company’s new chief commercial officer, with Alison Pavitt moving to the role of chief revenue officer. Maycock joins Pebble from Grass Valley, where he was CMO and EVP of delivery and support.

In his new role at Pebble, he will be looking after marketing with a strategic focus in terms of the development of the business. “Part of the rationale behind chief commercial officer was that it’s a more appropriate vehicle for being able to talk to customers, and it does encompass the broader role,” he said. 

Read Jenny Priestley's interview with Neil at TVBEurope. 

In a story first broken by TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope, Andrew Cross, who joined Grass Valley earlier this year as CEO, has stepped down from the role, but will remain working with the company as an advisor. 

Cross took the decision to step down following a restructure of the company due to market conditions, CMO Neil Maycock tells TVBEurope.

“When we worked on strategy with Andrew as a management team, and when we looked at the requirements for the immediate term, Andrew didn’t really feel he was the right person to lead the company through that phase of transformation,” says Maycock. “If you know Andrew, he’s very much a technologist and visionary. He felt he was the right guy to set a forward agenda around technology exploitation, but right now we’ve got some pressing operational issues that we need to look at, and Andrew felt that wasn’t him.”

Louis Hernandez Jr, CEO of parent company Black Dragon Capital, has taken over as interim CEO, leading the company for the second time in 12 months following Tim Shoulders’ departure last November. 

The search for a new CEO is likely to begin in early 2023, says Maycock. “Louis has done a transformation like this with Avid, and they came through that with a very healthy business,” he states. “So he’s got some experience of doing what we’re doing right now. Once we get through this phase, then he will be looking to fulfil that CEO position.”

Grass Valley has been “hit particularly hard” by issues around the supply chain, explains Maycock. “We’ve done exceptionally well this year with orders, we’re hitting our orders aspirations for the first time in a long time,” he adds.

“The frustrating thing is that the supply chain is hitting us really hard and we are behind on revenue because we can’t source the components we need to make products and ship the orders that we’ve got, which is a really bizarre situation to be in. That puts an undue strain on the business. Obviously, if you’ve got less revenue than you expected, it impacts cash. In the past where we would give a supplier a forecast of what we needed over the next 12 months, now if components are available, you have to buy 12 months upfront. There are other components you can’t even get for 12 months. So it’s a completely changed landscape.

“Our inventory has gone up, and yet we still don’t have all the parts that we need to supply the demand we have for orders in a timely manner. We will fulfil those orders, but it’s taking time,” he adds.

Maycock continues that these issues have put pressure on the business which has led to an acceleration in its strategy around its media processing platform, AMPP. “That strategy involves a level of restructuring of our cost base, which will help with the supply chain issues, and that’s what we’re executing against,” he explains.

Prior to Cross’s decision to step down, CTO Sydney Lovely also left the company. He has been replaced by Marek Kielczewski, who comes from a “very strong software background”. “As we do more with AMPP we wanted to improve our software disciplines and productivity and quality. So Marek came in with that agenda”, states Maycock.

That wind of change is blowing through the media industry, and also through Grass Valley. All of the company’s playout, asset management and live production workflow components now operate through AMPP. But Maycock stresses that Grass Valley will continue to produce hardware where it is needed. “What has become clear from engaging with the market is that people aren’t looking for an either/or situation,” he says. “We think hybrid is going to be the case for a long time. So really, our strategy is about having this hybrid portfolio that allows you to use AMPP where it makes sense and then use hardware where that makes sense.”

The current TV landscape has transformed as viewing habits have changed, streaming giants battle it out for subscriptions and new players and emerging direct-to-consumer offerings enter the fray, shaking up the status quo.

In an always-connected era, consumers are tech-savvy and demand round-the-clock entertainment at the touch of a button—anytime, anywhere. And they want it at the best value for money possible. Since the turn of the century, we have seen the dramatic rise of on-demand content services and major changes in the way consumers want to access content across multiple devices—place and time shifting. 

Moreover, the way in which audiences are willing to pay for this content is also evolving.

Traditional TV advertising remains the principal revenue source for content owners and service providers, totaling $166 billion in 2019. But revenues are declining—in 2020, there was a 12% year-over-year fall, due partly to the impact of Covid-19. Although starting from a lower base, OTT video ad spend is on a healthy growth curve.

On the subscription side, traditional cable and satellite pay-TV revenues are also declining, with subscriptions set to fall to just a 40% share of TV services in 2026, compared to 81% in 2016. In contrast, spend on OTT subscriptions rose 34% in 2020—in the U.S. market, consumer spend is set to reach $76 billion by 2024. 

Although the various forecasts differ by a few percentage points, a likely picture is that OTT subscription and ad revenue will eventually eclipse all other sources of income—with some estimates suggesting $221 billion by 2025. 

THE RISE OF DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER

On the production side, content costs are increasing as new media players enter the bidding for key producers, brands and sports rights. In response, traditional media is consolidating to secure intellectual property, reduce overhead cost and pool technology investments.

However, further back in the content supply chain, rights owners and content creators are bypassing incumbent distributors and creating direct-to-consumer OTT offerings. Sports TV is a key battleground with players like Formula One, MLB and NHL all creating domestic and global offerings that remove a layer of distribution and capture a greater share of revenue directly from consumers.

These early pioneers are not alone. Individual and small-scale content creators are growing, enabled by low-entry barriers for semi-professional production and low-cost distribution models that utilize platforms including YouTube, Twitch and Patreon.

It is a complex and fast-evolving landscape—difficult to navigate for traditional broadcasters that have to fend off rivals from the world of telecommunication that see “content” as an opportunity to create stickier broadband and 4G/5G bundles. At the same time, broadcasters are up against internet rivals who are jostling for the number one spot with different goals such as supporting retail sales via “Prime-Style” subscriptions or tying users into walled garden ecosystems like Apple or Google.

Broadcasters, caught between a rock and a hard place, are trying to attract and retain eyeballs to support advertising revenue and ultimately create innovative, unique content that not only consolidates traditional viewership but engages new audiences. In short, the market is in a state of flux. Over the course of the next few years, we will see who comes out on top—and those who struggle to adapt to this changing landscape.

NEWS VIEWERSHIP HOLDS STEADY

However, several interesting trends are worth further investigation. One of the areas where traditional broadcasters have retained a consistent viewership is within the news. 

The three main news networks in the U.S. have experienced only a mild decline in viewership over the past three years, primarily due to the rise of alternative news sources such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. What is more interesting is at the local level. The Pew Research Centre for Journalism and Media showed that local TV news is still more popular than national news networks, and the hours-per-day of local TV news consumption has grown by 62% between 2013 and 2018. 

Although traditional local TV advertising revenues have declined over the last few years, digital advertising around news content has seen strong double-digit growth leading to only a marginal overall shortfall.  

These data points suggest an overall positive growth trend for local TV news and point to an optimistic future. Local news can harness opportunities in new technology and innovative Electronic News Gathering (ENG) methods to power more news quantity, quality and diversity, while internet networks can provide a greater reach for localized news and enhance cost-efficiencies.

HOME ADVANTAGE

The localization trend also plays into the other big success story for traditional TV—live sports. Although the world’s two most popular sports leagues, the NFL and English Premier League, have seen a multi-year decline within their home nations, audiences have increasingly tuned in from around the globe.  

For example, the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup was the most watched sporting event of that year, with the tournament achieving a cumulative live audience of 1.6 billion viewers. And in esports, international viewership is surging—live streaming audiences are set to hit 920 million by 2024, growing approximately 10% year-on-year.

Sports that may have been too niche for traditional TV in the past—such as formula E, MMA, darts, rowing and competitive cycling—have found audiences on DTT, cable and increasingly OTT services where they can support an FTA (free-to-air) model that is backed up by digital advertising. Local sports—as grassroots as a town’s football, cricket or rugby club—may well tie into the desire for local news delivered via OTT, as long as production costs can be kept low and the production quality can remain acceptable to viewers.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE CURVE

The current TV landscape is exciting—success is up for grabs for those who are willing to innovate. Increased localization opportunities and future-proofed distribution models present just some of the promising avenues for growth. The digital revolution has ushered in a consumer shift that is forcing many to reevaluate their business structure, and media players now face more competition than ever before. 

For more than a year, our industry has witnessed the economic impact of the global pandemic, and in that time, data points and longer-term trajectories may have been skewed. The status quo between content producers, distributors and consumers has irreversibly changed, while innovation in future-ready production and distribution models has accelerated. Right now, media players need to be bold to stay ahead of the curve—and to shape a successful roadmap for the future.

Neil Maycock is CMO and general manager, playout for Grass Valley. 

The rapid evolution of the media industry means broadcasters and content producers are striving to deliver more content, rich viewing experiences, stunning images and access across all screens. As a result, we have a situation whereas in some instances, broadcasters’ revenues are growing more slowly than their costs. Against this background, the big question facing all broadcasters today is how to create more first-class content more efficiently.

Timescales to market are also compressing; from conception to launch for new services is now weeks or a few months, compared to the years it would have taken in the past. Services today must also evolve very rapidly to keep pace with their core audience demands and need to be able to spin-down as fast as they are spun up.

On an operational level, a vast amount of content is now being produced, ingested and managed. Entrenched models and traditional broadcast architectures can no longer be relied on to take on the challenges of this new mediascape that requires high levels of scalability and adaptability.

LOOKING BEYOND VIRTUALIZATION

The media industry needs technology and commercial models that can support highly nimble operations and today, vendors must deliver platforms that can be deployed at speed and rapidly evolved. Looking ahead, broadcasters are going to need to be more agile than they’ve ever been, delivering services that can stay ahead of the shifting needs of the consumers.

The move from CAPEX to OPEX and workflows virtualized on commodity hardware are steps in the right direction, giving broadcasters the flexibility to add and pay for additional capability and capacity as needed. 

A cloud-native, or microservices, approach is the next logical evolution to the virtualized software-based approach, enabling broadcasters to make the necessary step change. Microservices separate processes into smaller, more autonomous functions, allowing multiple services to be combined to deliver specific applications in an ultra-agile way.

Not only do microservices add greater degrees of inherent flexibility to existing IT infrastructure, they deliver the inherent nimbleness and flexibility needed to shape successful media businesses for the future. This approach also opens up new ways to build, maintain and operate services and provides the capacity to scale these services—up or down—in a very compressed time frame. 

LIVE HARNESSES THE TRUE POWER OF MICROSERVICES

While new technologies always create a buzz, the challenge for the broadcast industry is not to get sidetracked into replicating old workflows or business models; shoehorning an existing approach into a new paradigm means you miss all the benefits that new technology brings. It’s critical to look at where these technologies can make the biggest impact. For example, while playout is technically the easiest thing to implement in a cloud environment, it’s typically a 24/7 service, running with very high utilization of the underlying infrastructure. This doesn’t make the best use of the nimbleness that microservices deliver. 

Live production—and particularly live sports—is where the power of microservices has the potential to really come into its own. Furthermore, they are willing to pay for this type of content—PWC estimates that over 90% of sports fans subscribe to services for access to live games. 

Rapidly spinning up temporary, subscription services like a pay-per-view event or targeted, seasonal sports packages—all New England Patriots games for instance—fast and cost effectively is hugely valuable to broadcasters. Leveraging microservices, capabilities can be fired up just before a game then be turned off after the final post-game analysis wraps up. In short, you are only paying while the infrastructure is in use.

As the technology matures, we can expect microservices to be central to delivering transitory, live services, where very “bursty” capacity is needed. On a technical level, live is undoubtedly more challenging to do due to the time constraints, but it’s certainly solvable and we’ll see solutions hitting the market this year. 

THE ROLE OF VENDORS

The onus is now on the vendor community to develop applications that use microservices, rather than taking our existing products and reshaping them for the changing market. While broadcasters have a real need for solutions that underpin new business and operational models, our customers tell us they want technology adoption to be largely hidden from them. The applications and operation should be familiar and work as they need to.  

As customers face real-time pressure and need to rapidly change business models, we, as technology providers, need to create technology to facilitate that for them. Just as broadcasters will have to rapidly conceptualize and deliver new services, vendors have to increase innovation velocity, delivering fast iterations of microservices architectures, that help customers to keep running successful, agile businesses.

The internet has really shaken up the broadcast industry, shaping the way consumers access content and throwing down the gauntlet to traditional broadcast models. While this has presented a challenge for the vendor community, at the same time it’s provided the solution. Here at Grass Valley, we can now put our unique intellectual property and expertise in media and live production on internet platforms. Furthermore, we can now leverage technologies that allow us to exploit our intellectual properties in a way that just wasn’t possible before. 

We’re seeing long-held beliefs about what a broadcast facility looks like, or how content is created and delivered, really opening the industry up to new possibilities. Our customers need partners that can understand the shifting dynamic and deliver solutions—regardless of technology—that allow them to adapt and scale at speed.

Neil Maycock is senior vice president, strategic marketing and playout for Grass Valley.

MONTREAL—Two out of three media industry professionals responding to a 2018 survey on IP uptake favor a hybrid approach of SDI and IP for signal transport and infrastructure, possibly reflecting concern over costs and the desire to get as much mileage out of existing SDI equipment as possible.

The finding — from Grass Valley’s 2018 Global IP Barometer study, which was released today — is consistent with a growing concern over the price tag of an IP transition. The study of some 750 media professionals from the United States, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the Middle East found the percentage of respondents reporting that cost is their top concern when considering a move to IP has increased from 27 to 32% since the 2017 Global IP Barometer.

Despite the concern, many respondents have ongoing deployments or soon plan to deploy IP-based solutions. The study found that 43% of respondents say they have IP rollouts in the works, and 26% report they are planning to start projects by Q3 2019.

[Read: IP Distribution Challenges SDI]

Perhaps this level of adoption can be attributed to a greater comfort level about the impact of IP on the quality of productions as successful IP installations around the world come online. This year’s study found 22% of respondents say they are concerned about how IP affects quality, down from 31% last year.

“Two years ago, it was clear that the industry recognized and understood how central IP was going to become to workflows and new, innovative ways of working, yet the market lacked the confidence to invest in IP solutions. Now, we’re seeing more broadcasters, OB companies and service providers forging ahead with adopting IP — or making concrete plans to do so within the next nine months,” said Neil Maycock, Grass Valley VP, global marketing.

Other key findings:

• Flexibility topped the list of business priorities for a move to IP;
• Nearly half selected an open standards approach as most important from five key technology factors;
• A seamless IP and SDI control system –the second highest technological consideration — was chosen by 30% of respondents;
• By a two-to-one margin, respondents say they prefer working with best-of-breed vendors rather than a single source, underscoring the need for open standards and interoperability.

The study also looked at how respondents characterized the need for IP training inside their organizations and how they intend to address it. Among U.S. respondents, 38% say they believe they have the right skills in place to manage the migration to IP. Thirty-six percent of respondents from Europe say so. Both groups are up from the 2017 survey, which found 36 and 28%, respectively, saying the right skills were in place.

Half of surveyed Americans and 55% of Europeans surveyed say they believe they “partially” have the required skills to manage an IP migration, which compares to 47 and 56%, respectively, last year.

The survey also found that 77% of respondents said they plan to bridge the IP skills gap by training their current staff internally.

According to Maycock, it is “encouraging to note that the skills gap is recognized and is actively being addressed across the industry.”

More information is available on the Grass Valley website.

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