Facing rising operational expenditures, many broadcast and production companies are reassessing their cloud strategies. Instead of abandoning cloud technology entirely, a significant number are adopting hybrid or on-premise solutions to regain financial control while preserving essential cloud capabilities. “Things decentralize, then re-centralize,” explained Sean Lee, CEO of OpenDrives. “As soon as you reach a limit on one side, it just swings back to the other. It’s the nature of things.”
This shift reflects a broader industry trend. “We saw large enterprise customers begin to repatriate out of the cloud,” added Lee. “It’s really expensive to maintain these OpEx budgets where it’s just inflation, inflation, inflation.” Executives across storage, workflow management, and distribution confirm this change in approach: Cloud remains valuable for specific tasks, but companies are increasingly discerning about which operations truly benefit from cloud deployment. Early adopters are leading the charge, having gained sufficient experience to distinguish between cost-effective cloud and on-premise workloads.
“We are seeing a retreat quite in a big way. But it hasn’t necessarily felt like they’re stuck. It’s really a case of what is actually the alternative,” noted Barry Evans, SVP of product development at PixitMedia. This isn't a complete rejection of cloud, but a more refined strategy. Companies are evaluating workflows individually, utilizing cloud environments for peak capacity, collaborative projects, and global access, while retaining predictable, high-volume workloads on-premise. “Certain projects make a lot of sense in the cloud and certain projects make more financial sense to do on-prem. People are finding is that if I’m acquiring or processing content that already exists in the cloud, why would I bother bringing it down,” said Mark Wronski, EVP of product at Telestream.
Several factors are driving this move towards hybrid models: “There are some workloads that are better in the cloud. The problem is everybody moved to the cloud. And then they quickly realized the productivity, the value add of the moving is offset by the cost of the evenness. And they’re coming back,” stated Abhi Dey, general manager and chief operating officer at PixitMedia. Daniel Marshall, EVP of global sales at Amagi, highlighted data transfer costs: “Cloud only works if you’re not having this time to pay the back and forth because the egress and ingress costs are killing.”
Containerization is simplifying the transition between environments, enabling applications to run consistently across various infrastructures. “We introduced containerization into our Atlas platform four or five years ago,” Lee shared. “Everyone I talk to is like, ‘Oh, yeah, we either are completely containerized or have a project to containerize.’ Everybody is moving in that direction.” OpenDrives' Astraeus platform facilitates deploying cloud-native environments on-premise, offering flexible resource utilization as workloads fluctuate throughout the day.
Cloud providers are responding to these cost concerns. Nina Walsh of AWS acknowledged that cost efficiency is a top priority for customers. “It really is unique for every company,” Walsh explained. “I think it depends what their operations look like. Are they in one location, are they in 20? Where is the majority of their production happening?” Walsh also mentioned media-specific services designed to maximize value and automation, AI, and improved audience targeting as ways to offset costs.
Marshall from Amagi anticipates that competition will drive down cloud costs. “In the next year, year and a half, you’re going to see some of those ingress and egress charges really come down…because some new cloud providers are going to force that,” he predicted. Deep archiving presents unique challenges in hybrid setups, with high retrieval costs. “Deep archive is a problem,” Dey noted. “The egress price there…it’s very expensive. If you are asking out-of-band data, if you want the rest of it to happen now, then you’re paying premium prices for it.” Evans added, “When it comes to deep archive-type situations, you’re stuck. There’s no two ways around that.”
The industry is moving towards a more mature approach to cloud adoption, focusing on targeted use cases rather than complete migration. “We don’t talk to any customers that are swimming in excess management,” Wronski stated. “Everything seems to be lean and mean, and that’s just where we are today.” Broadcasters are now prioritizing optimization of existing investments while retaining the flexibility for future innovation. The shift between centralized and decentralized technologies continues, with companies striving to find the ideal balance for their specific operational needs.