Broadcast news production is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by evolving audience behavior and economic pressures. Sam Peterson, chief operating officer at Bitcentral, observes a shift away from the traditional broadcast audience as the primary focus. “The way that we’re producing news content, particularly for what we thought of as a broadcast audience, is certainly changing because that broadcast audience isn’t still the number one thing that our customers are doing,” Peterson stated during an interview at the 2025 NAB Show.
This necessitates a move toward more versatile production methods capable of serving multiple distribution platforms. News organizations are increasingly merging traditional workflows with the digital-first approaches already established in many newsrooms. “We have a lot of tooling that’s been put in place for social and otherwise inside a newsroom,” Peterson explained. “How do those workflows merge a little bit? Because there’s been this alternate digital workflow outside of the production control workflow.” The industry requires innovation to break away from decades of established formats and create faster, more cost-effective production models.
While there was initial hesitation, cloud-based workflows are gaining traction, especially with the shift from “lift and shift” to cloud-native solutions. “Even though there has been some reticence about operating expense, I think as vendors have gotten away from a lift-and-shift model and really to a cloud native model, the economics actually make that a feasible thing to do,” Peterson noted. Bitcentral's cloud-native "Fusion" products are experiencing increased demand, indicating a broader industry embrace of cloud implementation despite concerns over subscription costs.
The rise of remote production, accelerated by the pandemic, is a key driver of this change. Bitcentral's remote contribution product within its Oasis media asset management solution shows sustained growth even after pandemic restrictions ended. “Once people started realizing these remote workflows really could enable a lot of field work to be done, they haven’t gone back,” Peterson said. He anticipates further industry consolidation, with stronger companies potentially acquiring struggling operations, potentially aided by deregulation.
Bitcentral itself is diversifying beyond news into related markets like sports production, recently adding NESN as a client. “Sports programming is something that is very, very interesting for us and really pushed some technical challenges for us in a sports environment, just completely different sizes of files and just the way that that workflow works, even though it’s very news oriented, rundown, scripted,” Peterson detailed. The company also sees opportunities in supporting the growth of direct-to-consumer offerings which need “a lot more shoulder content and a lot more sports centers, but localized.” Their ViewNexa platform is attracting interest from broadcasters aiming for direct viewer engagement across various digital channels. “We’ve got customers who are needing to connect with a consumer directly, either in their own app ecosystem, website, social, otherwise,” Peterson concluded. “Our customers are doubling down on how they connect with the consumer directly.”