Arqiva Cloud Playout: Flexibility, Trust, and Future-Readiness
Evolving Consumption, Unwavering Expectations
The way audiences consume content has undergone a dramatic transformation. While linear TV continues to play a vital role, especially for live events and shared cultural moments, the rise of VOD and OTT platforms has reshaped how, when, and where people watch. Viewers now expect seamless access to content across devices, locations, and times. But one thing hasn’t changed: their expectation for broadcast-grade quality.
This expectation for broadcast-grade reliability and flawless delivery applies across every platform. Whether it’s a live football match on a smart TV or a drama streamed on a mobile phone, audiences demand the same high standards. Traditional broadcast remains powerful, but now coexists with a vast and growing universe of IP-delivered content. The result is a more fragmented, complex, and demanding media landscape.
Broadcasters and content owners are expected to deliver everything to everyone, everywhere. A single feed might need to support multiple languages, accessibility features like subtitles and audio descriptions, and be available across a variety of platforms. This hybrid delivery model challenges older workflows and demands a new level of operational agility.
Agility Over Infrastructure: The Cloud-Driven Imperative
In this environment, legacy infrastructure is no longer sufficient. Today’s content owners must be faster, smarter, and more flexible. They need to launch services quickly, support new platforms on demand, personalise content at a granular level, and manage costs – all without compromising on quality.
Legacy operational models, while robust, were designed for a different era. They prioritised stability over speed, and predictability over adaptability. But agility is now the name of the game. Broadcasters need to pivot quickly, respond to shifting audience behaviours, and embrace new delivery models.
Cloud-native, software-defined services offer a powerful solution. By decoupling operations from physical infrastructure, broadcasters gain the freedom to scale, adapt, and innovate in real time. Cloud platforms allow content owners to adjust capacity based on audience demand, whether launching a new channel, testing regional variations, or spinning up a temporary service for a special event.
This agility is especially critical during high-pressure moments like live sports, breaking news, or major cultural events, where demand can spike without warning. With cloud infrastructure, content owners can respond instantly, ensuring seamless delivery at any scale. It also enables them to tailor content for specific markets or audience segments, and to experiment with new advertising models or monetisation strategies in a low-risk, cost-effective environment.
Flexibility at the Core
Arqiva’s Cloud Playout solution is designed for ultimate flexibility, placing control directly into the hands of broadcasters. Customers can choose between a fully managed service, where Arqiva handles end-to-end operations, or a platform-as-a-service model that empowers in-house teams to orchestrate their own workflows. This tailored approach ensures each broadcaster can align operational responsibility with their business needs, whether they prefer expert guidance or hands-on autonomy.
This flexibility sits at the heart of Arqiva’s Cloud Playout offer, enabling broadcasters to innovate at their own pace and on their own terms. Both managed services and solution-as-a-service offerings ensure that technology and business processes can scale quickly and efficiently. Whether adding a FAST channel or an entire multiplex, the process becomes far easier and faster for customers.
Arqiva’s flexibility spans four key dimensions:
- Flexible Capabilities: The platform supports features like live voiceovers and integration of access services to meet diverse broadcaster requirements. This gives content owners the ability to activate features for specific events or experiments and deactivate them afterward—without long-term contractual commitments.
- Configurable Resiliency: Broadcasters can choose between single or multi availability zones and single or dual-site operator setups. This allows them to scale infrastructure up for major events like the World Cup Final or scale down during low-audience periods, aligning resources with demand.
- Adaptable Operating Models: Available as PaaS, hybrid, or fully managed, Arqiva’s solution allows broadcasters to tailor their approach. They can scale their operating model alongside resiliency and capability, reduce costs, and mix-and-match service levels as needed.
- Cost-Efficient Architecture: We offer the ability to host the playout infrastructure in the broadcaster’s cloud environment or Arqiva’s. This allows them to choose the most economical and strategically beneficial environment.
Trust Built on Proven Excellence
Arqiva’s reputation for reliability has been built over decades of supporting mission-critical broadcast operations for major international players. Its clean-slate, cloud-native architecture avoids technical debt, meaning customers benefit from solutions that are not only future-ready but also faster to deploy and more cost-effective to run.
Trust is further reinforced by Arqiva’s customer-first ethos. Every deployment is tailored to deliver business outcomes, not just tick technical boxes. Arqiva’s track record of dependability, combined with a strategic partnership mindset, ensures broadcasters can rely on a collaborative, forward-thinking partner as they navigate digital transformation.
The Arqiva Advantage
Unlike many others in the market, Arqiva doesn’t carry the burden of outdated infrastructure. While competitors may be adopting cloud components, they’re often forced to integrate them into existing workflows, sometimes alongside on-premises playout systems. This dual-system approach introduces complexity, cost, and delay.
Maintaining two systems slows innovation and increases operational overhead. Teams must be retrained to work in unfamiliar ways, and new technology is often adapted to fit outdated processes.
Arqiva avoids these compromises. With no legacy systems or parallel workflows, its cloud playout offering is built from the ground up, fast, flexible, and future-ready. Customers benefit from solutions that are not only more innovative but also quicker to deploy and more cost-effective to operate.
The Cloud’s Watershed Moment
The industry has reached a tipping point. Changing viewing habits, evolving market dynamics, and rapid technological advancements have created a new reality: cloud is no longer a future ambition, it’s a present necessity.
To future-proof their operations, content owners must embrace modular, scalable workflows that flex with changing behaviours and market demands. Those who do will be better positioned to optimise performance, control costs, and thrive in a media landscape that’s more competitive and fragmented than ever before.
This is the moment for cloud. Consumer expectations, market needs, and technology have aligned. The broadcasters who act now will define the next era of content delivery.
