Cerberus Tech – From Marginal Gains to Major Wins: Real-Time Control and Cloud-Native Orchestration in Live Video Workflows
Chris Perkiss, Head of Operations, Cerberus Tech
Live video workflows are becoming more complex and increasingly central to how media organizations engage audiences. To meet these demands, many are adopting cloud-native platforms that offer greater flexibility and efficiency. These platforms are reshaping live broadcasting, which was traditionally supported by robust but rigid on-premises infrastructure.
In the past, broadcast systems were built to handle peak demand, requiring large capital investments to ensure reliability. While effective, this approach often led to underused resources and high ongoing costs. Even minor changes, such as adding a new format or channel, were slow and expensive to implement.
Cloud-native platforms offer a more responsive model. With on-demand provisioning and elastic scaling, media teams can deploy and release resources in minutes. Usage-based pricing aligns costs with actual consumption, reducing the need to overbuild for occasional spikes in demand, and avoiding operational cost shock.
Beyond these operational efficiencies, cloud-native systems support continuous optimization. Small, targeted improvements across workflows, otherwise known as marginal gains, can accumulate into measurable advantages in speed, cost, and reliability. These gains, once considered incremental, now play a critical role in helping media organizations stay competitive and agile.
Orchestrating the Entire Workflow
Earlier cloud solutions often addressed isolated tasks like encoding or storage. This created operational silos and required manual integration. Today’s cloud-native platforms manage the entire live video workflow, from ingest to packaging and delivery, within a unified control layer.
Operators can design and manage workflows through a single interface or API. These systems support a range of protocols, including SRT, Zixi, HLS, and CMAF, and can operate across multiple cloud environments. This integration simplifies operations and reduces the risk of errors.
By eliminating the need to manually stitch together disparate tools, orchestration platforms accelerate time-to-air and simplify the launch of new channels or services. Teams can respond more quickly to last-minute changes, fulfill complex syndication requirements, and maintain reliability under pressure.
This end-to-end orchestration also improves consistency across events and regions. For example, a broadcaster managing simultaneous live streams for different markets can replicate workflows with minimal variation, ensuring uniform quality and compliance. The ability to orchestrate not just streams but the full operational context — transcoding, metadata handling, scheduling, and distribution — marks a significant evolution in live video delivery.
Automation With Real-Time Insight
Automation is essential for scaling live video operations, but it must be paired with visibility to be effective. Cloud-native platforms now embed monitoring, alerting, and analytics throughout the workflow, giving operators real-time insight into system performance.
Dashboards provide immediate access to metrics like latency, packet loss, and resource usage. Alerts help teams respond quickly to emerging issues, reducing downtime and maintaining stream quality. Logs and diagnostics are centralized, making it easier to trace problems and resolve them efficiently.
These platforms also offer detailed billing analytics. Teams can track resource usage by stream or component, identify inefficiencies, and adjust workflows to manage costs more effectively. Automation becomes more than a time-saver. It becomes a tool for strategic decision-making.
This level of transparency also supports collaboration across departments. Engineering teams can monitor technical performance, while operations and finance teams gain insight into resource allocation and cost trends. With shared visibility, organizations can align technical execution with business priorities more effectively.
Built for Change
Live video delivery is constantly evolving. New formats, shifting audience expectations, regulatory changes, and emerging platforms all influence how workflows are designed and deployed. Cloud-native platforms are built to accommodate these changes.
With platform-agnostic and protocol-flexible architectures, media organizations can deploy workflows in the environments that best meet their needs, whether for compliance, performance, or cost. Workflows can be customized, replicated, or extended without major reconfiguration.
This flexibility supports experimentation and innovation. Teams can test new formats, launch pop-up events, or adjust distribution strategies with minimal overhead. In a fast-moving industry, the ability to adapt quickly is a competitive advantage in itself.
Consider a sports broadcaster covering a global tournament. With cloud-native tools, they can spin up localized workflows for different regions, each with tailored graphics, commentary, and compliance settings without rebuilding the core infrastructure. When the event ends, those resources can be decommissioned just as easily, keeping operations lean and responsive.
Efficiency That Compounds
Improving efficiency in live video is a continuous process, not a one-time fix. Cloud-native orchestration, automation, and real-time monitoring provide the foundation for ongoing refinement, where each small improvement builds on the last.
By adopting these platforms, media organizations gain more than operational savings. They gain the ability to see and control every part of their workflow, respond to change with confidence, and build a more resilient, scalable foundation for the future.
These efficiencies are not isolated. They compound. A faster setup process reduces time-to-air. Fewer manual steps lower the risk of errors. Real-time insights allow for quicker adjustments and smarter resource allocation. Over time, these improvements reinforce one another, creating a more agile and cost-effective operation.
In an industry where teams are expected to deliver more with fewer resources, the ability to optimize in real time is no longer optional. It’s a strategic necessity, and one that turns marginal gains into lasting advantage.
