Late last year, Corrivium supported one of the world’s largest cloud computing summits. From a production perspective, the defining challenge at that scale is flexibility under pressure: expectations around reliability are extremely high, with zero tolerance for downtime.
When you are delivering an event of this size, the focus quickly shifts to resilience and operational control. We needed workflows that could be stood-up quickly, monitored centrally, and adapted in real time without introducing risk. That requirement shaped every technical decision going into the project.
As events grow in size and complexity, traditional hardware-led production models start to show their limits. Physical infrastructure brings constraints around capacity, logistics and speed of change, particularly when adjustments are required late in the process.
For this event, we needed to treat production infrastructure more like a utility – available instantly when required, adjustable in real time, adjust routing and monitoring without re-cabling or re-engineering and shut off & tear them down afterwards
This led us to expand our use of AMPP, building on our existing relationship with Grass Valley.
Platform-driven delivery
Using AMPP has changed how we approach large-scale live events. Instead of engineering each production as a one-off, we now work from a platform mindset: focussing on the specific components that need to be assembled for a given use case, rather than rebuilding infrastructure for every event. That shift has improved consistency across projects and increased confidence during delivery, particularly when running multiple workflows in parallel.
Two aspects of the platform stood out early on. The first was modularity, allowing us to deploy only what is required for each workflow. The second was centralised visibility, giving us a single operational view across the entire environment.
At this scale, monitoring and routing flexibility are essential. Operators need to see what is happening across many concurrent workflows and respond immediately when requirements change. During our most recent event, we needed to reconfigure routing and add new monitoring outputs while live, and we were able to do this without touching the physical infrastructure, keeping changes contained and controlled.
Operational considerations and skills
One of the questions we are often asked is whether cloud-based production requires teams to become IT experts. In practice, operators don’t necessarily need deep infrastructure knowledge to run workflows day to day. However, organisations do need people who understand infrastructure well enough to design and deploy these systems correctly.
At Corrivium, this has influenced how we think about skills and training. We increasingly look for operators who understand cloud concepts and can think in terms of software-defined workflows, particularly how feeds are transmitted and managed.
Software-defined production removes many physical limitations, but it introduces different operational challenges. When things don’t behave as expected, strong troubleshooting skills are essential. The key difference is where constraints now sit. With software-defined workflows, limits are largely defined by design choices rather than physical availability.
Planning and delivering at scale
Operating in this way has delivered clear benefits. We have seen faster deployment times, improved consistency across projects, and the ability to support more concurrent productions without increasing operational overhead.
It has also changed how we plan events. We now work from templates rather than bespoke builds, which allows us to focus earlier on client experience and resilience instead of rebuilding infrastructure for each project.
For our customers, this approach enables scale and flexibility without adding complexity. Clients are increasingly moving beyond a single live stream towards multiple outputs designed for different audiences and platforms. Having a platform that supports this makes those conversations practical and achievable.
A long-term approach to cloud production
As cloud-based production continues to mature, the organisations that succeed will be those that combine broadcast discipline with software-defined thinking. Reliability, operational control and consistency remain fundamental, but they are now delivered through more flexible architectures.
Our partnership with Grass Valley reflects that long-term view. We see it as a strategic relationship built around shared investment in software-defined production that maintains broadcast-grade standards.
Large live events are a stress test for production infrastructure: they highlight where systems hold up and where they do not. Platform-based approaches have proven to be an effective way of meeting those demands, and they are shaping how we design and deliver live events at scale going forward.
