What are your overall expectations for 2020?

“We expect to see an acceleration in areas of mobile production, including using IP for contribution and distribution. We’ll also see an acceleration in cloud adoption for actual production. We’ve had many proofs of concept, but people are now beginning to use the cloud for real-world news production. Finally, we expect a further increase in the amount of spend around building out digital infrastructures to serve consumers on mobile platforms, including technologies to not only mine meaningful information about viewing habits, but also to turn that into ad revenue on digital platforms and drive traffic towards their own apps,” said Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions at Avid.

“We are very excited with the possibilities that the major events like the Summer Olympics and the European Soccer Cup, that will surely reflect in new business for content creation and delivery. In terms of content creation, we expect new proposals in terms of workflows and new visually engaging content,” said Miguel Churruca, marketing and communications director at Brainstorm Multimedia. 

“We expect 2020 to be a great year for Chyron, particularly with our move to consolidate and develop our product lines around three primary solution areas: broadcast graphics, graphics asset management, and production-in-a-box software. With several high-profile events approaching in 2020, we expect the market to take advantage of our advanced product offerings to address the demands of providing flexible, dynamic, and data-driven graphics,” said Olivier Cohen, head of commercial strategy in ChyronHego’s Broadcasting Business Unit.

“There’s more data available (stats, descriptive metadata, data populated by the networks, cloud, IoT, etc.) which is used to enrich video and offer better storytelling opportunities. For example, FIFA has recently authorized the use of wearable technology, which will soon be used to acquire specific information, such as biometric data about players, speed of actions, etc. Ultimately, data and video will offer the opportunity to progressively move towards an automated personalization of live stories for viewers according to their preferences, demographics, etc.,” answered Benoit Quirynen, senior vice president of market and products at EVS.

“Facilis is expecting a strong year in 2020. The demand continues to build and we don’t see that changing,” announced Facilis Vice President Jim McKenna.

“It’s the year of the cloud. With the consolidation of so many large content owners and creators, it’s almost impossible to use legacy approaches to combine, conform and service these libraries using traditional on-prem storage systems and MAM’s. I don’t see any way to achieve this without centralized libraries with multiple cloud compatible vendor systems working against these masters from a single shared location,” Aaron Sloman, chief technology officer at Ownzones, told us.

“In 2020, the volume of content being created will continue to grow to meet the demand for high-quality content for an increasing number of OTT services. In addition, growing demand for 4K and HDR content means file sizes will only get bigger. As a result, we expect to see the growing demand for high-performance, highly available and reliable storage designed for studio editing, rendering, and other performance-intensive workloads,” said Eric Bassier, senior director of product marketing at Quantum.

“2018 was a record year for Signiant with our SaaS business growing by more than 40% and 2019 looks to be just as exciting. With all the new content being created, the globalization of said content, and all the new platforms and formats, there’s lots of great tailwind for Signiant. Specifically, we are seeing more media companies turn to cloud solutions and fully embracing hybrid cloud/multi-cloud environments to promote flexibility and business agility and that’s an area where Signiant really shines. With all of the new opportunities for the media industry in general, and what we’ve seen over the past few years, 2020 is promising a bright horizon for Signiant,” said Jon Finegold, the company’s CMO.

“Cloud technology and AI technology adoption will increase and likely go hand-in-hand. We’ve seen a trend where there is still some hesitation in adopting the cloud, yet both AI and cloud technologies are becoming necessities to accelerate workflows, reduce costs, and stay competitive. For 2020 I see organizations moving past their objections and embracing the many advantages the cloud and AI will bring,” added Greg Loose, head of media and entertainment for Veritone.

“The market is rapidly evolving as OTT platforms continue to expand and multiply, satellite spectrum is being reduced and broadcasters are looking for the more modern and flexible economic models. This means that Zixi is perfectly positioned to continue to be the default standard for live video over IP and our business around the world will continue to grow as we add significant broadcasters and technology partners to our ecosystem,” said Zixi’s senior vice president of alliances and marketing, John Wastcoat.

What trends are you seeing in the year ahead?

“Mobile journalism will accelerate in 2020, which means more people relying on devices like tablets and phones for field production. With 5G enabling higher bitrate content delivery and a better overall experience, AR and VR will be easier to deliver. And as more devices become available, consumer adoption of AR and VR will grow. For example, Apple is launching its own head-mounted display that’s very different to what’s been available so far. We’ll also see more cloud-based workflows, whether that’s certain segments of the workflow or a way to aggregate multiple stations’ content in a centralized location and sharing or routing that content more easily using both the cloud and IP delivery mechanisms,” Thompson said.

“We’re seeing ongoing migration to IP by media organizations, as well as a continued shift toward 4K and HDR. In terms of solutions deployment, we expect to see further investment in-studio video walls, virtual sets and augmented reality, and touch-screen and illustrated replay technologies. To simplify operations or ease further growth, we also see more organizations adopting production-in-a-box solutions for OTT content creation and publishing,” Cohen told us. 

“In our market, we continue to see continued 4K and 8K (and higher) adoption,” McKenna said.

“The demand for content localization is increasing rapidly, especially as online services are launched in more countries. These supply chains are poorly optimized, utilize large amounts of human capital and are very time-consuming. This is one of the use cases we have moved to the cloud via IMF component-based video and expect to be one of our largest growth areas,” said Sloman.

“Multi-site communications, the continued expansion of investment in wireless communications, simplification of workflows for right-sizing complexity to user needs in further stratification of live production in some new, sometimes less formal production tiers,” said Bob Boster, President of Clear-Com.

“As we head into 2020, we’re seeing increasing interest in non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage. NVMe is better equipped to handle the demands of higher resolution content combined with higher frame rates, more bits per pixel and more cameras per project. It’s on track to exceed traditional solid-state drive (SSD) storage capabilities much faster than predicted. With ultra-fast read and writes and the ability to support a huge amount of parallel processing, NVMe is orders of magnitude faster than traditional SSD and HHD storage,” Bassier asserted.

“As discussed above, we see a continued embrace of cloud technology and more hybrid cloud/multi-cloud environments. We also see a move towards more off-the-shelf multi-tenant SaaS solutions as opposed to large, custom projects, and a move to more loosely coupled event-driven integrations, which will help media companies remain agile,” Finegold said.

“The need is to become more extensible and integrate into the customer, supplier and partner workflows will become necessary to achieve business strategies and goals. As such, more companies will rely upon APIs and ‘low code’ workflow solutions to achieve these integrations without the heavy expense of application development. One example only possible through these kinds of integrations is with advertisers looking to determine where to place their dollar spend and relying upon analytics post-spend from a number of places to look at the results,” Loose maintained.

“Consolidation of systems is a big trend that we are seeing from our customer base. Either by moving to products that provide the combined features and functionality of legacy siloed offerings or through tightly integrated offerings from multiple vendors, broadcasters are mandating that they be able to access their deployments from a unified interface and not be forced to shift from disparate system to disparate system,” said Wastcoat.

“Exciting new ways organizations are using video walls. I would say this goes beyond news (e.g. sports, all broadcast really…) but for news, it’s been a transformative experience and an evolution of technology that has a direct impact on the consumer. Video walls increase interactivity, enhances the visual experience, and offer new innovative ways to expand the editorial platform, all very exciting. The flexibility from a workflow and studio perspective to quickly adapt/shift to new environments has been made possible by video walls and other technical solutions,” said Kathy Skinski, general manager for broadcast & media at Planar.

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