The UK school summer holidays have begun, which in our industry usually signals that the quiet countdown to IBC is underway (four weeks to go but who’s counting?). As IBC in Amsterdam gets closer, I think it’s worth being more precise about what the growing overlap between broadcast and enterprise media really means.
Organizations are investing more heavily in video because it has become part of how they operate. A CEO’s address can shape how employees respond to a change in direction. An earnings call can affect investor confidence. Those productions may not sit within a television schedule, but they face the kind of scrutiny broadcasters have dealt with for decades.
People spend their lives surrounded by high quality video. The same device streams live sports, creator content, and a company town hall, and audiences don’t lower their expectations simply because the content comes from an enterprise rather than a broadcaster. If it looks poor, sounds bad, or feels awkward, people switch off or go elsewhere. Poor production can also damage an organization’s credibility, making it appear careless or unprofessional.
In this context, aspiring to ‘broadcast quality’ is much more than a conversation about resolution. It’s about confidence: that everything will look and sound right, the workflow has been properly planned and the operator isn’t relying on luck when the stream goes live.
“The last 20 percent” does most of the work
One of the things we’ve learned as we’ve expanded further into enterprise is that the core platform doesn’t need to be reinvented for every use case. The same production engine can support a broadcaster or a global enterprise, so the challenge is adapting it to the way each organization works.
On one of the InfoComm panels I joined this year, I described this as “the last 20 percent.” The core platform provides the processing power and operational resilience but the remaining work is understanding how that organization actually operates. A workplace technology team has different priorities from a broadcast engineer, just as a house of worship run by volunteers has different needs from a venue delivering major live events. The underlying platform can be very similar, but the experience around it has to reflect those differences.
Software gives us much more freedom to build powerful technology underneath while simplifying what people use day to day. That doesn’t make engineering less important. If anything, it becomes more important because people stop noticing it. That flexibility also has to fit comfortably within the organization’s IT environment. Security reviews will come, infrastructure teams will ask detailed questions (and they should), and broadcast vendors moving into enterprise environments need to understand those requirements early and design for them from the start. The standards may be different from those in a broadcast facility, but expectations around resilience remain the same.
That principle extends to industry standards as well. I’m genuinely interested in where IPMX is heading because I think it has enormous potential. But adopting a standard simply because it exists isn’t a strategy! The starting point should always be the outcome you’re trying to achieve and the people who’ll use the system. Everything else follows from there.
Value is measured differently
When the conversation turns to ROI, the measures change too. In broadcast, we’re used to talking about audience figures and commercial returns. But enterprise is very different, as value lies in what the communication achieves, and that isn’t always something you can capture on a dashboard.
An executive broadcast might help a new leadership team build credibility across a global organization, while a better production workflow might allow a communications team to respond more quickly when circumstances change. Elsewhere, success might simply mean that a team can run an important event without needing outside support every time. Ultimately, the value of the technology depends on what the organization is trying to achieve. We need to understand what success looks like in each environment before deciding what belongs in the workflow.
That’s probably the biggest change I’ve noticed in recent years. We still spend plenty of time talking about cameras and standards, and we’ll continue to do so. But the more interesting conversations start somewhere else: with the organization, what it’s trying to achieve, and the people who will use the system long after the installation team has gone home.
