How to Balance Complexity, Efficiency, and Scalability in Hybrid Streaming Infrastructure Design
Strategic discussions about migrating streaming infrastructure to the cloud typically revolve around a few key issues like CapEx vs. OpEx and which elements should or must remain on-prem. LiveU Solution Specialist Ben Ratner, Qualabs CEO Juan Pablo Saibene, and AI & Streaming Technology Strategist Bhavesh Upadhyaya examine how these issues tend to play out today with particular attention to upfront infrastructure investment, operational complexity, and scalability often in a live sports context in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026.
OpEx, CapEx, Scope, and Scale
Upadhyaya kicks off the conversation by asking Ratner to walk viewers through his thought process for making hybrid streaming infrastructure decisions "when you go from contribution to production. What makes sense to stay at the venue? What makes sense to go to a centralized facility or run in the cloud?"
"For starters," Ratner replies, "there's always the big debate about OpEx and CapEx. Are you willing to spend money upfront to build out your infrastructure? For a control room, that could be $100,000, it could be a million dollars, and you've got that one control room that you can work with. Or do you need something with more flexibility that you could spin up for a couple bucks an hour and have as many of those control rooms as you need?"
These decisions tend to hinge, he says, on "how your organization is able to spend money. You could bill an hourly thing to a client, but certain organizations could only work with CapEx. So that's one of the things to think about."
Ratner identifies the other critical factors in how streamers apportion infrastructure to on-prem vs. the cloud as "the scope and scale of your production. Scale is obviously the big term here... Most people would prefer good, high-quality content all the time, but there is a large audience that just wants access to their content, which means scaling up what you're able to do to provide it to them. So this might mean not losing the quality of your production, but actually lowering the scale of your production to ultimately do more. Take a soccer game or a football game, for example. There are smaller Tier 2 or Tier 3 leagues and games where you just can't put a whole 10-camera production on for the maybe thousands of people watching. It just doesn't pay off. But one camera with a really sleek graphics package that has live data built in with scores and everything, that's what they want. They want a good play-by-play, they want access to the game. So scaling down the complexity of your production allows you to scale up the amount of productions you can do within your audience's expectations."
The Risks of Over-Scaling Streaming Infrastructure
Upadhyaya picks up on Ratner's point about proportional scale and scaling down realistically to manage infrastructure costs to suit the scope of your productions and asks Saibene, "When you're engineering these systems, how do you avoid the opposite problem? How do you avoid designing something that's enormously complex to scale the business [knowing] that it may never reach that complexity?"
Acknowledging that "there are a variety of different use cases" where these considerations come into play, Saibene says, "the sooner you understand how your business and streams scale, the better. Scalability is a design problem more than a runtime problem. It's going to be a runtime problem if you didn't design it well. So it's got to be done the proper way."
So how can streaming developers thread that needle? "I'd say that you design for the future, but you build for the present," he says, to ensure that "those scalability problems don't appear later. But if you don't take into account the potential complexity in the future, then you're going to have a lot of reworking to do. But keep in mind that you've got to design for the future, but build for now."
Join us November 9–11, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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