Interview with Production 360. Original article published here
The theme of this issue is outside broadcast (OB) and remote production (RP). How would you assess the general health of these markets at the present time?
The market is healthy and evolving quickly. Demand for live content remains strong – particularly in sports – but broadcasters and rights holders are under increasing pressure to deliver more content across more platforms while keeping costs under control.
Traditional OB remains essential, especially for premium productions and major international events where maximum onsite capability is required. What has changed is how the industry views remote production: it’s becoming a core part of modern live production rather than an alternative workflow.
What I find particularly exciting is the move toward software-based remote production. More production workflows are shifting from fixed hardware to software-defined environments, creating new opportunities for scalability, flexibility and resource sharing. I expect that trend to continue. Software-based remote production will play a much bigger role, even for large international events that have traditionally relied on extensive onsite OB infrastructure.
I don’t see traditional OB and remote production as competing models; I see a hybrid environment where the production model is determined by the specific needs of each event.
The expansion of RP has been attributed to a variety of technical, economic and practical factors. From your perspective, why has RP grown so rapidly in recent years?
Several factors have come together at the right time. Firstly, the technology has matured. Better IP connectivity, improved contribution links and lower latency have made remote workflows reliable enough for demanding live productions.
The economic case is equally compelling. Broadcasters need to produce more content, but budgets aren’t growing at the same rate. Remote production allows them to scale far more efficiently.
There’s also a people aspect. Skilled operators are valuable resources. Instead of spending time traveling between events, they can support multiple productions from centralized facilities.
Software has probably been the biggest catalyst. As live production has moved from dedicated hardware to software-defined infrastructure, entirely new production models have become possible. For me, that’s where the real acceleration started.
Remote production today has moved beyond saving costs to creating new ways of producing live content.
There is huge pressure on broadcasters and service providers to make OB and RP more streamlined and cost-efficient. What steps has DMC taken in this regard?
We’ve focused on removing inefficiencies without compromising production quality. One of the biggest steps has been investing in our new remote production vehicles, built around Grass Valley AMPP running on high-performance servers inside the trucks. That has changed how we think about mobile production.
Instead of relying entirely on fixed-function hardware, much of the production processing now happens in software. That gives us much greater flexibility. We can scale switching, replay, audio and graphics to match each production instead of designing every truck for maximum capacity.
We’ve also invested heavily in standardizing workflows across the DMC Group. It may not be as visible as new technology, but it has a significant operational impact. Standardization simplifies engineering, improves support and reduces setup complexity.
In my experience, efficiency rarely comes from one major breakthrough. It’s usually the result of many smaller improvements in workflow, automation and smarter use of resources.
On a related note, the software-based production facility opened by DMC in 2025 was designed to provide a “scalable, cost-efficient” approach to sports production. Can you tell us about the workflow of this facility, how it delivers more streamlined sports production, and the role of Grass Valley technology?
Our software journey with Grass Valley AMPP started before many people realized how committed we were to software-based production.
DMC launched its first AMPP-based production platform in Hilversum in 2024 to support our Dutch operations. It proved that software-based live production was already capable of supporting demanding productions at scale.
We’re now building a fully software-based Broadcast Center in Stockholm, which will go live in September, while a similar platform for our German operations is scheduled to launch in 2027.
In terms of the bigger picture, this is very exciting. Within the next six to twelve months, all DMC broadcast centers will be compatible with production control rooms that connect directly to our AMPP-based remote production trucks.
A production can be handled entirely within a remote vehicle or extended into any of our broadcast centers. Just as importantly, we’ll be able to allocate operators regardless of location: a vision mixer in Stockholm, a replay operator in Hilversum and an audio engineer in Germany can all work on the same live production. That level of flexibility changes how production teams can be built and deployed.
We’re also seeing major gains in bandwidth efficiency. Modern software-based workflows make it possible to produce a full-scale multi-camera production using around 100 Mbit of public internet bandwidth without compromising production quality.
That changes the economics of live production. Events that were previously too expensive to produce remotely suddenly become commercially viable.
Instead of thinking in terms of trucks versus centralized facilities, we think about one distributed production ecosystem where compute resources, production tools and operators can move wherever they’re needed.
It’s been a very busy summer for RP and OB, especially in live sports. Can you outline some of your recent projects in this area?
It has been a busy summer for us. Across the DMC Group, we deliver thousands of live sports productions every year, and the past few months have included everything from football and horse racing to large studio-based sports broadcasts. Many of these are high-volume productions where remote workflows deliver clear operational and commercial benefits.
Football is a good example. Broadcasters want more matches covered, and not just premium fixtures but secondary leagues and additional editorial programming around the games. Remote production makes that possible while maintaining the production quality audiences expect.
Beyond our day-to-day sports production, our work supporting MagentaTV’s coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2026 is a good example of where live production is heading.
DMC Production Germany is delivering key elements of the production infrastructure for the tournament, supporting a highly distributed production model spanning studios in New York and Munich, together with remote production from stadiums across Canada, Mexico and the United States.
The scale speaks for itself: 104 matches, more than 1,000 hours of programming, three dedicated tournament channels, and delivery in UHD, HDR and Dolby Atmos.
The real difference is how the production is brought together. Rather than treating every location as a separate production island, the workflow connects multiple studios, remote venues and centralized production resources into a single production ecosystem.
For me, that’s a great example of where the industry is heading: combining traditional OB with software-defined remote production to deliver major international events with much greater flexibility.
Finally, please give us a hint of what lies ahead for the company in the second half of this year.
The second half of the year will be an important period for us. A major milestone will be the launch of our new Stockholm Broadcast Center, another significant step in our software transformation. We’ll also continue expanding our remote production capabilities while investing in automation and AI-assisted workflows.
What excites me is the broader transformation taking place across live production. We’re still in the early stages of software-based broadcasting, and over the next few years the lines between broadcast engineering, IT infrastructure and software development will continue to blur.
At DMC, we’re focused on making that technology practical, but with one principle in mind: technology should serve storytelling, not the other way around.
