Why Streaming Demands a Different End-to-End Workflow From Broadcast
When pre-existing live broadcast operations add streaming for the same events or content, there’s a temptation to “bolt on” streaming to the existing workflow and treat it as just another output or destination, but Warner Bros. Discovery distinguished video platform engineer Neal Roberts insists that doing so means sacrificing the streaming end-user experience in this conversation with Alchemy Creations founder and principal Andy Beach at Streaming Media Connect 2025. He says that also means duplicating operator requirements and goes on to discuss comms between streaming and broadcast teams and other best practices for optimizing experiences for all viewers regardless of platform.
Rethinking Workflows for More Streamlined Operations
Beach begins the conversation by noting that he’s heard Roberts isn’t a fan of “just bolting streaming on as sort of a sidecar to the broadcast workflow.” He asks Roberts to talk about the changes that come with ingest, contribution, and streaming operations.
The most obvious answer, Roberts believes, “is that when you rethink your workflow and not just bolt on your stream experience to the end of a legacy broadcast workflow, of course you lower latency, you improve quality through less transcodes and conversions and compression points. You’re lowering your points of failure.” A less obvious piece is operations, he shares, “as they relate to the end user experience. And so if you, again, just bolt that piece onto the end, you’re now duplicating your operator requirement. And sometimes duplicating that as many times as four times, depending on what your workflow looks like, and they’re all different. But by streamlining those operations, you’re also streamlining the final output and you’re gaining consistency from show to show, which I think is really important [for] a viewer.”
Roberts cites an example of a director in production control counting down to an ad break, “and they go to black, then your master control operator may be counting additional counts because of the latency in the workflow before they fire off a SCTE trigger for that ad break. Then you’re handing that signal off to a digital operator who’s distributing that out to your OTT platform, your direct-to-consumer platform, and they are counting some more and adding different triggers depending on what the requirement is of that platform. You just have inconsistencies everywhere.”
Integrating and Consolidating Teams for Better Performance
Streamlining these pieces improves the consumer experience, Roberts says. Doing so means a tight integration with the broadcast team. “You almost need to act as a single team rather than bespoke pieces across that workflow,” he suggests.
Beach says, “Yeah, so it sounds like you’re not only consolidating experience across the programming and the shows, you’re doing it across the devices and the destinations that you do.”
Roberts confirms this, saying it’s “super critical.” He continues, “Our content is our content. So if I deliver that to HBO Max, but we’re also handing that off to Comcast, they should be the same level of quality. Not everybody can take the same level of quality on ingest for your syndication partners, but that’s okay. You still have a single flow and you derive everything from those points for those deliverables.”
Beach asks, “When you talk about treating it as a single team versus the multiple, how does it change the way you talk to the teams across broadcast and direct to consumer?”
“It’s definitely forced us to have brand new lines of communication, and we do have to integrate very, very tightly,” Roberts acknowledges. He’s in constant communication with the broadcast team via calls, Slack, etc. “So I think it’s been a unique and interesting few years for us as we’ve learned what each other’s passions and restrictions are across some of these different functions and try to find unique ways to get around them,” he concludes.
Join us February 24–26, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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