If there’s one constant in this business, it’s change. Over the course of my career in live production—across roles in engineering, product strategy, and executive leadership—I’ve worked through major shifts: from analog to digital, SD to HD, and from fixed hardware to programmable, hybrid, and cloud-based workflows.
What we do today bears little technical resemblance to what we relied on 50 years ago. And as technology advances, the workflows, infrastructure, and even roles within a production environment shift with it.
Undoubtedly, technology has changed tremendously over the years. But for most, it’s still a means to an end: something that makes the show happen, while the focus stays on the final output. The end result, deliverable media, has always been the goal.
It’s the technical and engineering teams that concentrate on the means: figuring out how to turn creative vision into a finished product. What keeps shifting is how we get there. The tools, timelines, and teams keep evolving, but the need to deliver the best possible outcome within those constraints stays the same.
Defining Quality and Delivery
Not long ago, broadcast quality meant the best of the best, the gold standard for production value. That phrase once carried weight, signaling the highest level of technical excellence available. But today, it doesn’t mean what it used to. The standards have shifted and so have the tools.
High-quality production no longer depends on expensive, specialized gear. Mobile devices, for example, can now deliver images that rival or even exceed what traditional broadcast systems once could. Exceptional output no longer requires exceptional capital expense.
Expectations extend well beyond traditional broadcast environments. Today’s production ecosystems include houses of worship, corporate teams, and creators putting content directly online—and many of them expect the same quality and reliability that once applied only to broadcasters.
Delivery has shifted just as dramatically. Today’s systems must distribute hundreds (sometimes thousands) of channels, delivery paths, and transport streams. With limited bandwidth, compression becomes unavoidable. That’s not new; we were compressing signals in the analog era, too, just in different ways. What’s changed is the scale, and with it, the expectations. These choices have made production more complex and far less predictable than it once was.
New Complexities
There are now countless ways to capture, produce, and deliver content. Production and technical teams face an increasing number of tradeoffs—budget, delivery method, platform requirements, content type, and shelf life.
The best approach depends entirely on what the content is, who it’s for, and how it will be delivered. Will it move through a traditional broadcast chain? Be streamed over the internet or an OTT platform? In many cases, the delivery path ends up dictating the production approach.
The sheer number of options creates its own challenges. With so many viable workflows, you can ask five experienced people how to tackle the same project and get five different answers. The choice itself becomes a source of friction.
And those choices have long-term implications. The conversation is no longer just about how to deliver a project today, it’s about how long the material needs to live. Will it be archived? Reused? If it’s heavily compressed now, how difficult will it be to repurpose or redistribute it later? These considerations are now routine across modern production environments.
Shifting to Integrated Systems
A major turning point came with the introduction of FPGA technology. Once hardware became field-programmable, engineers could evolve a switcher instead of rebuilding it. That shift changed the entire trajectory of production tools.
High-quality production no longer depends on expensive, specialized gear. Exceptional output no longer requires exceptional capital expense.
Before that, everything in a control room existed as a discrete function—graphics, playback, switching, rundown systems—and all were handled separately, often by different operators. In a large newsroom, 15-20 people might be running the show, and every piece of equipment had to be tied together manually. If the gear came from different vendors, there was no guarantee it would communicate properly. Often, it didn’t.
As systems became more integrated, those once separate functions began to merge. Switchers took on tasks that had previously lived elsewhere in the workflow. That meant fewer boxes, fewer handoffs, and in some cases, fewer people required to run the same show. It wasn't necessarily a concerted effort to reduce staff, but because every additional touchpoint introduced the risk of error, consolidating functions into fewer systems made production more consistent and more reliable.
Interoperability is also improving dramatically, even between third-party products. That’s what real change looks like today: the collapsing of once-separate roles and systems into a control room that is far more integrated than anything seen in the past.
Evolving Importance of Trade Shows
Trade shows have always been valuable and they still are—not just for spotting new gear, but for actually seeing how it works. You can read specification sheets all day long, but specs never tell you how a system behaves when someone has to operate it under pressure.
During the SD-to-HD transition, for example, I helped build full working systems on the NAB show floor so people could see entire workflows end to end. Even now, with information everywhere online, that kind of hands-on evaluation still matters.
There’s also the human side. Being on the show floor gives you a sense of the people behind the products, how knowledgeable they are, how they approach support, and whether they truly understand your needs. That kind of relationship-building and trust is still important.
The industry will keep changing. What’s different now is how broadly that change reaches, reshaping tools, workflows, and environments where content gets created—all within a community that’s still surprisingly small and tightly connected.
