Levira Media Services News

The Transition Nobody Can Do Alone

lisa.collins@levira.com (Lisa Collins) — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:14:25 GMT

The Transition Nobody Can Do Alone

The satellite replacement conversation has finally moved from theoretical to operational. What it reveals is a challenge that will reshape broadcast distribution and demand a very different kind of partner.

The moment Brad Chaney of Fox Sports put a number on it, somewhere north of $100 billion into the US Treasury from a government-mandated spectrum auction the room at NAB Show 2026 stopped feeling like a panel discussion and started feeling like a briefing.

This was not a conversation about what might happen. It was a conversation about what is already happening, and what the industry needs to be ready for before the decisions are made for them.

The executives around that breakfast table from Disney, Fox, CBS were not there to present a unified solution. They were there because no unified solution exists. And the honesty of that admission was, in its own way, instructive.

The scale of what is actually being replaced

Dave Johnson from Disney put the operational reality into numbers: 96,000 live feeds acquired so far this year, with 15% still arriving off C-band. Two playout facilities that need to failover seamlessly under whatever comes next. Ken Fuller from CBS Paramount distilled the challenge into three words quality, reliability, availability and was clear that no single technology on the market today delivers all three at the standard C-band has maintained for four decades.

That is the honest starting point. Not a technology gap, exactly. More a confidence gap, the gap between what broadcasters know works and what they are being asked to trust will work, at scale, under pressure, every time.

The transition is real. C-band spectrum is going. The question is not whether to move, but how, and in what sequence, over what timeline, with what redundancy built in at every stage.

Hybrid is not a compromise. It is the architecture.

What emerged across the two panels was something more nuanced than most vendor conversations allow for. Ku-band, IP terrestrial, fiber, cloud, LEO none of these were presented as the answer. All of them were discussed as components of a hybrid architecture that each major broadcaster will need to design individually, based on their own footprint, their own workflows, and their own appetite for risk.

That framing matters. It means there is no single replacement play. It means every organisation faces a genuinely unique transition challenge. And it means that the technology, despite advancing rapidly, is only part of the problem.

LTN is already delivering to 98% of MVPD eyeballs. Zixi has processed 1.7 exabytes of video traffic in the past twelve months. Next-generation Ku-band satellites are already in RFP. The infrastructure is moving.

What is harder to solve is the operational layer: deterministic switching, last-mile redundancy, latency at scale, and perhaps most disruptively the shift from a CapEx model that broadcast finance teams know how to plan around, to an OpEx reality that is still being worked through across the industry.

The real challenge is integration

Here is what rarely makes it into the headline summary of these conversations, the technology is not the bottleneck. The integration is.

Every broadcaster making this transition will work with multiple technology providers. They will run parallel paths, legacy and new for longer than they would prefer, because the risk of a single cutover is too high. They will need someone who understands both what came before and what is being built, who can operate across the full chain rather than optimising one piece of it in isolation.

That is not a gap that any single point solution fills. It is a gap that requires depth of experience, engineering credibility, and the operational flexibility to sit between systems rather than simply replacing one of them.

Where Levira fits

Levira has been delivering IP-based media services at scale for years. Not as a pivot, not as a product extension as the core of what we do. We understand what broadcast-grade reliability looks like in practice, because we have been engineering for it across IP infrastructure long before the current transition made that expertise urgent.

What the satellite replacement challenge demands is exactly what we are built to provide - the ability to act as connective tissue across a complex, multi-vendor, hybrid architecture. To bring the engineering rigour of broadcast operations into the IP world. To work alongside existing systems rather than displacing them overnight. And to do the hard, unglamorous work of making different components behave like a coherent whole.

We are not the only piece of the answer. Nobody is. But for content owners and broadcasters who are looking at this transition and trying to work out who helps them manage the complexity, not just sell them a component of it, we think we have something genuinely useful to offer.

That conversation is continuing. And we are in it not as observers, but as a partner already doing this work.

If you are navigating the satellite transition and want to compare notes on what the operational reality looks like in practice, we would welcome the conversation.

Building What Matters: Why Real Innovation in Media Technology Starts with Control, Not Hype

sven.rekkaro@levira.co.uk (Sven Rekkaro) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:56:10 GMT

Building What Matters: Why Real Innovation in Media Technology Starts with Control, Not Hype

In an industry defined by constant evolution, "innovation" is a word I hear every single day. It gets attached to the latest platform, the newest tool, the freshest trend. But after years working at the sharp end of broadcast and media technology, I've come to believe that real innovation has very little to do with chasing what's new. It is about improving the way we work. It is about revisiting the requirements and the ways to deliver. Innovation is a re-iterative process, not a one-time job. Also, it's about building systems that work, scale, and endure and about maintaining genuine control over the technology you rely on.

That conviction shapes almost every decision we make.

The Hidden Layer of Innovation

When people talk about innovation in our industry, they tend to focus on the visible stuff, the platforms, the hardware, the headline partnerships. What they rarely talk about is the software layer underneath it all.

In my view, every technology company must have software development capability, but I don't mean that in the narrow sense of having a team of dedicated programmers. What I mean is that engineers working with systems, broadcast engineers, IT specialists, AV media professionals need to understand the core principles of programming techniques and be able to use them to produce what I'd call "software glue." That's the integration layer that makes products from different vendors work together, without having to rely entirely on external development partners.

When you build that capability internally, it changes the dynamic entirely. Systems become more adaptable, integration problems get solved faster, and crucially, the knowledge stays inside the organisation. Innovation becomes something you own, not something you outsource.

Enabling Engineers to Evolve

The talent doesn’t come from hiring differently it comes from developing what we already had. The engineers who've built this capability are people from the IT domain, from broadcast, from media operations. What they share is an open mindset and a willingness to learn. The job of leadership is to enable that.

We have supported access to micro-degree programmes through local universities, online learning platforms like Coursera, and technology conferences. But honestly, the most important thing has been the culture we've built around it. If an engineer wants to learn something new, we say yes. If someone has an idea for how to improve a process, we listen. If it's a good idea, we try it. That sounds straightforward, but it's rarer than it should be.

The result is a team that evolves alongside the technology rather than being left behind by it.

AI: A Powerful Tool, If You Stay in Control

Used in the right way, AI is a genuine enabler. I see it as a partner in the learning process, something you can use to validate ideas, explore different approaches to technical challenges, and accelerate your understanding of new domains. That's valuable. But if you trust it too much, it will bring problems.

The issue is dependency. If you allow AI to do your job for you rather than support you in doing it, you can end up in a situation where you don't fully understand what you have built. And the day that system collapses, you have no means to fix it. I've seen this pattern emerging, and it concerns me.

The trend of low-code and no-code development is a good example. It's genuinely useful for prototyping, for testing ideas, for helping people without deep engineering backgrounds see what's possible. But to build something solid, something secure, scalable, and maintainable over time you still need to understand the underlying process. You need domain knowledge. You can't just chain together AI prompts, add a new module because it seemed to work, and call it a system. It doesn't work like that.

My principle is simple: AI should support expertise, not replace it. Stay in control of what you build, validate the output, and make sure your team understands every layer of what they've created.

Security Is Not a Layer, It's a Foundation

Security cannot be retrofitted. When we implement something, we do it securely from day one, not as an afterthought, not as a final checklist item. That means validating the software solutions we write ourselves, but it also means understanding how our partners' development processes work and what their cybersecurity policies actually look like in practice, not just on paper.

There is a specific risk I want to highlight that doesn't get nearly enough attention - software supply chain attacks via programming libraries. When AI suggests a library to use in building a software product, that library may contain vulnerabilities. If you automate that process without scrutiny, you can automatically introduce serious security flaws into your own system. The very efficiency that makes AI appealing can, if you're not careful, become a liability.

This is exactly why working with experienced partners matters. The ability to build something quickly is different from the ability to build something that is secure, reliable, and fixable when something goes wrong.

Cutting Through the Noise

Fear of missing out is one of the most expensive forces in our industry. The pressure to adopt the next big thing leads to decisions that aren't well thought through, and systems that don't perform when they meet real-world conditions.

We try to be genuinely mindful of technology hype without dismissing anything outright. We meet potential partners at trade shows, visit them, test their solutions, and, critically, we make a clear distinction between what a product actually does today and what is promised on a roadmap. We're transparent with our customers about that distinction. If a function isn't there yet, we say so. If a vendor's roadmap looks credible, we say that too. We give vendors direct feedback on what we've found in testing, which shapes how we work with them going forward.

Occasionally, we walk away entirely. From time to time, we reach a point where we can see that a vendor has stopped improving their products, that the willingness to evolve isn't there anymore. When that happens, we start looking for alternatives. Organisations, like their products themselves, have a lifecycle.

The Role of a Technology Partner

If you are a content owner or broadcaster building a modern media workflow, the amount of groundwork involved is significant: evaluating vendors, testing interoperability, understanding where solutions fall short, and planning for how everything evolves. Most organisations simply don't have the time or expertise to do all of that thoroughly.

What we offer isn't just access to technology, it's the practical, tested knowledge of what works. That's a meaningful difference, particularly as low-code tools and AI make it easier than ever to build something that looks like it works but hasn't been properly validated.

Innovation Starts with Challenging Assumptions

If there's one piece of advice I would give to any organisation in this space, it's this: "we've always done it this way" is not a strategy.

I say this to my own team as often as I say it to customers. We constantly ask ourselves whether we're solving problems in the best way, whether the landscape has shifted beneath us, whether we're holding onto assumptions that stopped being true. That kind of internal questioning is uncomfortable, but it's necessary. And when we work with customers, if we can see that a change would genuinely benefit them, we say so and help them think through how to make it happen.

For content owners specifically, I'd encourage the same mindset around platforms. Don't be afraid of YouTube or TikTok, use them. Upload promotional content, pilot series, build an audience, create attention. Then bring those viewers into your own ecosystem. Use every platform available as an opportunity rather than seeing it as a threat to your existing environment.

Looking Ahead

I'm genuinely excited about what's coming. AI will continue to improve what's possible, if carefully applied, it's going to make a real difference. I'm also watching developments in TAMS, Time Addressable Media Store, closely. TAMS' magic lies in changing how content is stored and making it easily accessible via an open API. TAMS will be the enabler of building content-centric workflows in hybrid cloud environments. The potential gain in increased efficiency is significant, and I'm keen to see how that develops in practice.

But if I'm honest, the technology itself isn't what excites me most. What excites me is the capability we are building the combination of internal expertise, trusted partnerships, and the discipline to cut through hype and focus on what actually works. That's what will make the difference for our customers, not the tools themselves.

The organisations that succeed in the years ahead will be the ones that maintain real control over their technology, build genuine expertise inside their teams, and stay honest about what's proven versus what's promised. That's the approach we've always taken, and I remain convinced it's the right one.

Same Content, Same Audience. So Why Are We Still Running Broadcast and Digital as Two Different Operations?

martti.kinkar@levira.co.uk (Martti Kinkar) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:31:02 GMT

Same Content, Same Audience. So Why Are We Still Running Broadcast and Digital as Two Different Operations?

The media industry is changing fast but from where I sit, it's still not changing fast enough!

The conversations I have with content owners every week tell a consistent story. The old divisions, broadcast versus digital, linear versus streaming, in-house versus outsourced are breaking down. Audiences have already moved on. They don't organise their viewing lives around the distinctions we built our industry on. They just want their content, on whatever screen they are looking at, without friction. The endpoint is the customer. Everything else is internal plumbing.

The question I keep coming back to is why are so many media businesses still structured around divisions that their audiences gave up on years ago?

Stop Arriving with the Answer Already Written

One of the most common frustrations I hear from content owners is that their technology partners arrive with the answer already decided.

There is a trap a lot of providers fall into, they build a capability, and then they go looking for problems that fit it. It's a solution in search of a problem and customers end up paying for something that was never quite right for their situation. The provider has a preferred stack, a preferred commercial model, a preferred way of working, and the customer gets squeezed into it whether it fits or not.

That's not how Levira work. We come in wanting to understand the problem first what’s not working, where the commercial pressure is coming from, what growth looks like for that business. Only then do we work out what the right solution is. It sounds obvious, but it's genuinely rarer than it should be. And in a market where too many providers are still leading with their own agenda, a genuinely consultative approach makes a real difference.

We are not a consultancy we get things built and we get them done. But we start from the same place a good consultant would - understanding the customer's reality before recommending anything.

Built to Flex, Not to Defend

To deliver that kind of approach consistently, you must build your business in a way that doesn't lock you into one answer.

We run four different playout stacks. We support private cloud and public cloud environments. We work with six different SLA and service provisioning models. That's not complexity for its own sake, it's what genuine flexibility looks like in practice. We don't preference any one vendor or push any one architecture because it's convenient for us commercially. If a particular solution is the right fit, we use it. If it isn't, we don't. Full stop.

That flexibility carries through into how we structure commercial relationships too. We work with monthly recurring models, short-term contracts, and low barriers to exit. We actively avoid locking customers into long, capex-heavy commitments. If a customer wants to test something new, we make that easy. If they need to scale up quickly, we can do it. If they need to pull back, that's fine too.

This is possible because of how we are set up as a managed service provider. We're running services for multiple customers simultaneously, which means we have real capacity available at short notice. In-house teams are built to a fixed ceiling when demand exceeds that ceiling, everything becomes difficult. We don't have that problem. Scale up, scale down it's not an issue. And I think that's one of the strongest practical arguments for the outsourced model right now.

Outsourcing Is Having Its Moment. But the Conversation Needs to Grow Up.

Cost pressure is driving a lot of the current interest in outsourcing, and I understand why. But if that's the only lens through which content companies are evaluating it, they're leaving most of the value on the table.

What's happening in the industry right now is a dual squeeze. On the broadcast side, cost cutting is aggressive. On the digital side, the pressure is different, it's about monetisation, about getting more value from every piece of content, more revenue from more eyeballs. Both ends of that equation need external partners to achieve what they've set out to do. The targets content companies have put on themselves are simply too ambitious to hit by working harder internally. It won't work. You need partners who can help you move faster, think differently, and access capability that isn't sitting inside your own four walls.

So yes, outsourcing is in a stronger position than it's ever been. But the conversation should be about growth and reach and new revenue models, not just about trimming the cost base. That's the shift I'd like to see happen more quickly.

The Audience Doesn't Care. Neither Should We.

Here is the thing that frustrates me most about how the industry is still structured, content companies have a broadcast division and a digital division, and in many cases, they operate almost independently of each other. Different teams, different workflows, different KPIs, different thinking.

Meanwhile, the viewer sitting on their sofa has absolutely no idea which division delivered the content to their screen. They don't care. They found what they wanted, they're watching it, and that's the end of their involvement.

The question every content owner should be asking is brutally simple, how do I get this piece of content in front of as many people as possible? Not is this a broadcast project or a streaming project. Just how many eyeballs, and what do I need to do to reach them?

Answer that honestly and the unified workflow becomes obvious. You need a channel out, a stream out, VOD assets out, and presence on every relevant platform, connected TV, apps, linear, on demand. That's not complicated. The technology to do it exists. What's holding it back is the thinking, not the tools.

What Excites Me Right Now

The most encouraging thing I see is that content owners are beginning to genuinely understand the value of what they hold. They're starting to recognise that the more access points their content has, the more valuable it becomes. Viewing time is increasing across the whole spectrum. There is more content, more platforms, more demand and the businesses that move fastest to meet audiences where they are will capture a disproportionate share of that.

We are entering a phase where the industry needs to move faster. The technology is ready. The commercial models exist. What's needed now is the willingness to let go of legacy thinking and organise around what matters which is getting great content to as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible.

That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. And it's exactly what Levira Media Services is built to help with.

The CTO is No Longer the Only Person in the Room

stephen.stewart@levira.co.uk (Stephen Stewart) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:39:15 GMT

The CTO is No Longer the Only Person in the Room

When I started in operations, connecting different technologies together was genuinely hard. It required close collaboration between high quality engineering teams, vendors and broadcasters, and it took time to get right. Because of that complexity, the people making decisions about who to work with and what to outsource were almost always the technical leadership the CTOs, the heads of engineering. They were the gatekeepers, and quite rightly so. The technology demanded it.

But that world has changed considerably. And I'm not sure the industry has fully caught up with what that means.

From Channel Thinking to Content Thinking

For as long as I can remember, linear has been treated as the parent model. Everything else including streaming, FAST, on-demand, social distribution has been the child. Important, perhaps, but ultimately derivative of the linear feed it came from.

That logic is breaking down. Streaming has grown up. It's ready to leave home. And the industry's job now is not to protect the parent model but to recognise that the content itself is what matters not the channel it arrives through.

People have said "content is king" for years. But in practice the industry has often continued to behave as though the channel is king. What we should be doing, what I believe Levira's role genuinely is, is working with content owners, broadcasters, and production companies to get that content to the right eyeballs at the right time, in whatever form makes most sense.

That might mean a peak-time appointment-to-view broadcast on a Saturday night. It might mean spinning up a niche streaming channel around a rich archive of content within a matter of days and if that takes off, adding sub-channels tailored to even more specific audiences. The point is that the delivery model should follow the content opportunity, not the other way around.

Operations Should Be Seen as a Revenue Enabler, Not a Cost Centre

When a broadcaster thinks about launching a new service, the conversation almost always starts with cost. How much is this going to cost me? What do I have to spend? Of course there are costs. There always will be. But that framing misses the bigger picture entirely.

The way I would rather content owners thought about us is this- Levira is the most efficient route to getting content in front of the audiences in order to monetise it. That is a fundamentally different conversation. It moves operations from being a back-end expense to being a strategic part of how content generates value.

Advertising revenue is under pressure everywhere. Production costs are going up. The only way to square that circle is to find more viewers, more eyeballs on content, even if the revenue per eyeball is lower than it once was. Double your reach and you can hold your margins even as unit rates fall. The shows people love get cancelled when the economics stop working. Getting content to more people isn't just a commercial nice-to-have, it's what keeps those shows alive.

The Decision Maker Is Shifting

One of the most significant changes I see happening, gradually but unmistakably, is in who we are having conversations with.

For years, the CTO controlled the technology decisions, they managed the vendor relationships, and they defined what was possible. That made sense when the technical complexity was the dominant challenge. But as content strategies diversify and the pressure to reach more audiences intensifies, the conversation is moving closer to the people responsible for content, distribution, and commercial performance.

Increasingly, the people who need to understand what we do and what we can unlock for them are heads of content, heads of digital, heads of operations, commercial teams and rights holders. These are people who think in terms of audiences and revenue, not infrastructure and integration. And that means how we talk about what we do needs to change too.

The technology should be invisible to them. That's not a criticism of the engineering that makes it work, quite the opposite. It's the highest compliment. When technology is truly doing its job, the people using it don't have to think about it. It's like driving an electric car. You plug it in, charge it up, and it goes. You don't need to understand what's happening under the bonnet. You just need to know it will get you where you're going, reliably, without unnecessary cost or complication.

That is the experience we should be delivering for content owners. And increasingly, it's the experience the people we're talking to expect.

A Wider Conversation That Needs to Happen

There is a structural challenge in how the industry currently organises its conversations that I think is worth naming directly. The technical conversation and the content conversation happen in separate rooms, and they too rarely meet in the middle. The creative and commercial people who increasingly need to understand what is possible in distribution need to be part of the same dialogue as the engineers and technology teams.

That gap has real consequences. Creative teams make ambitious promises about what they can deliver, and then it comes back to the engineers who must work out how. Meanwhile, technical innovation that could genuinely change what is commercially possible for content owners doesn't reach the people who most need to understand it.

The industry needs better translation between what is technically possible and what it means commercially. And service providers like Levira have a role to play in that - not just delivering services, but helping content owners, digital teams and creative leaders understand what they can now do that they couldn't before.

The Role We Are Here to Play

The future of media services, as I see it, belongs to providers who can do more than keep the lights on.

Reliability remains the foundation, without it, nothing else matters. But above that foundation, the most valuable thing a partner can offer is the ability to make powerful delivery feel straightforward. To absorb the complexity, present the outcome clearly, and make it easy for content owners to act on opportunities without unnecessary friction or long-term lock-in.

The buyers we are talking to are changing. The questions they are asking are changing. The value we can offer if we position it correctly goes well beyond what operations has traditionally been asked to provide.

Content owners don't need to become broadcast engineers to get their content to market effectively. They just need the right partner. One that understands both the technical reality and the commercial opportunity and can bridge the two.

That's the role Levira is genuinely well placed to play. And it's one I'm increasingly excited about.

The Control Room of the Future Demands More Than Technology Alone

victoria.butt@levira.co.uk (Victoria Butt) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:19:54 GMT

The Control Room of the Future Demands More Than Technology Alone

There is a lot of conversation in our industry right now about transformation new platforms, new workflows, new commercial models. And rightly so. Things are changing quickly. But in the middle of all that change, I keep coming back to something that hasn't changed at all - audiences still expect content to arrive in the right place, at the right time, at the right quality. They always will.

They don't care what sits behind it. They don't care whether the workflow is cloud-based, IP-driven, automated, or managed across a dozen different systems. They just expect it to work. And when it doesn't, they notice immediately. That's why operations still matters as much as it ever did, arguably more.

The Fundamentals Don't Change. The Way You Deliver Them Does.

I spent years working in traditional linear environments. The workflows were fixed, well understood and reliable. There wasn't much need to change, and so things largely stayed the same.

That world is behind us now. The direction of travel is very different, cloud-based playout platforms, IP delivery, new automation layers, dynamic advertising workflows. The tools are changing fast, and the range of platforms content needs to reach is growing all the time. But at its core, it's still the same job. It's still about getting content to the consumer at the right quality, on the right platform, without friction. The fundamentals of what good operational delivery looks like haven't shifted. What's changed is how you achieve them.

That distinction matters because it's easy to get distracted by the newness of the technology and lose sight of what it's there to do. However sophisticated the stack gets, the measure of success is still the same - did the content get there, exactly as it should?

More Platforms, Higher Expectations

Audiences are consuming more content than ever. More platforms, more devices, more formats, more niche programming tailored to more specific interests. But their tolerance for poor delivery hasn't gone up. If anything, it's gone the other way!

That creates a real challenge for operations teams. The range of environments we need to support is broader than it's ever been, traditional linear, streaming services, FAST channels, pop-up event services, digital-first propositions. Each has its own characteristics and its own demands. But the expectation running through all of them is the same, it needs to be seamless.

That means operational teams must think beyond the legacy definition of playout and take ownership of a broader responsibility ensuring content reaches the consumer smoothly and consistently, regardless of the platform it's travelling through.

Automation Should Make Operators More Valuable, Not Redundant

One of the things I feel strongly about is how automation and AI get talked about in operations. There is a narrative in some corners of the industry that these technologies are about reducing headcount. That's not how I see it, and it's not how we are approaching it.

Used properly, automation removes the repetitive, laborious work that takes up far too much of a skilled operator's time. In older workflows, content would be checked, rechecked and handled multiple times at different stages of the chain, not because it needed to be, but because the systems weren't connected well enough to carry confidence forward. That created inefficiency, and it meant operators were spending hours on work that didn't require their full attention.

Modern workflows can change that. If content is validated properly at one stage and passed through the chain with the right metadata and status, operators shouldn't need to repeat the same work at every step. AI can handle monitoring, flag issues like black on air faster than any human watching a screen, and alert teams to anomalies before they become problems. That frees operators to focus their attention where it genuinely matters, oversight, live reaction, quality control, and the judgement calls that no automated system can make.

Technology’s role is to make our operations smarter not simply leaner. I want to build teams where automation handles the repetitive work so people can focus on the problems that truly require human judgment and expertise.

Legacy and New Technology Have to Coexist

One of the most honest things I can say about where the industry is right now is that the transition isn't clean. A lot of customers are trying to achieve familiar outcomes using new technology not necessarily rethinking what they are delivering, but trying to recreate existing operational expectations on a different technical base. That's understandable, but it's genuinely challenging.

Cloud-based playout platforms don't always behave the same way as legacy environments. Live workflows are particularly demanding latency in IP transport, timing sensitivities, the way monitoring works all these need to be managed differently, and the margin for error in live is zero. We have been working through exactly those challenges with live event channels, and getting the latency right in an SRT environment when you are dealing with live sport is the kind of thing that sounds straightforward until you're doing it.

What that means practically is that our teams need to be able to work across both worlds. We can't just champion the new and walk away from the legacy requirements that customers still have. The ability to bridge between the two, protecting service quality while helping customers move forward is where operational adaptability really proves its value.

Building Teams for a Multi-Skilled Future

As the range of what operations covers expands, the profile of the people doing it has to expand with it. I don't think the future belongs to narrowly defined operators who know one workflow deeply and struggle outside of it. It belongs to people who can move across playout, live feeds, content handling, system monitoring, and different technology stacks and who are genuinely curious about learning what they don't yet know.

Broadcast experience still matters. Particularly when you are dealing with live sport or other reactive services, having people who understand the discipline and the pressure of live television is genuinely valuable. But I would not rule someone out because they have come from a software background or a systems environment rather than a traditional broadcast one. Adaptability and technical curiosity are just as important as a CV full of linear playout.

What I'm building towards is a team where those different backgrounds complement each other, operational calm, broadcast instincts, and the flexibility to pick up new systems quickly. That combination is what a modern media operations environment needs.

One thing I'm particularly focused on is making sure the team gets proper hands-on time with new technology before it's carrying live customer services. The strongest operations don't get built by waiting until launch day. They get built through testing, training, and developing real confidence with the systems in advance.

Tailored Over Generic. Every Time.

Large providers often lead with scale. And scale matters, I'm not dismissing it. But for many customers, particularly in a market that's moving toward more niche, more targeted content propositions, what matters more is whether a provider can shape its operational model around the service they are trying to build.

That might be a live event channel. It might be a hybrid workflow combining legacy and cloud. It might be a specialist content service built around a very specific audience. The ability to tailor the operational answer to the actual requirement rather than squeezing every customer into the same model is increasingly the thing that makes a real difference.

We are smaller than some of the names in this market. I think that's an advantage. It means we can be more responsive, more flexible, and more focused on getting the right answer for each customer rather than defaulting to a standard offering.

What Comes Next

The direction of travel is clear to me. More content will move online. Video over IP will become the norm. FAST channels and dynamic ad insertion will continue to grow. Live event-based services and news will always have a place, but the broader shift toward niche, on-demand, targeted content is not going to reverse.

For operations, that means the job keeps getting broader. More platforms to support, more delivery models to understand, more technology to get across. But the purpose stays the same - make sure the content gets there, exactly as it should, every single time.

The platforms will change. The workflows will change. The tools certainly will. But the businesses that will build real trust with their customers in the next era of media services are the ones that never lose sight of that core responsibility.

Levira Media Services Opens Advanced Media Services Facility in Leeds, UK

lisa.collins@levira.com (Lisa Collins) — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:23:24 GMT

Levira Media Services has officially opened its new facility in Leeds, marking a major step forward in the company’s UK expansion and its commitment to delivering agile, future-ready broadcast and media distribution solutions.

Located within AQL’s Salem Chapel data centre, the new facility represents the next evolution of Levira’s infrastructure, combining broadcast-grade reliability with IT-driven flexibility to support the next generation of content delivery. The site provides a technical backbone for broadcasters, OTT platforms, and content owners across the UK and beyond.

Importantly, the launch reinforces Levira's belief that while technology is key, so is a local team with years of hands-on experience running services for all the major broadcasters and content owners in the UK. Levira’s UK-based specialists bring deep operational knowledge, on-the-ground responsiveness, and a partnership-led approach that ensures technology is matched by trusted service delivery.

The facility is fully integrated within AQL’s Tier 3+ colocation and telecom hub, featuring redundant power, ISO 27001-certified security, and IXLeeds peering. This environment underpins Levira’s IP-based playout, cloud ingest, transcoding, and real-time delivery services for both linear and non-linear workflows. The result is a hybrid broadcast–telecom node that delivers low-latency, high-availability media operations capable of scaling with the industry’s growing demands.

“Our new Leeds facility embodies what Levira Media Services stands for – agility, flexibility, and enabling true partnership,” said Martti Kinkar, CEO of Levira Media Services. “We’ve built an environment that fuses proven broadcast performance with forward-thinking, IT-driven innovation. This facility is not just about capacity; it’s about enabling UK broadcasters and media organisations to adapt faster, collaborate more closely, and embrace technology built for the future.”

Tiit Tammiste, CEO of Levira, added: “The decision to invest in the UK was driven by our belief in the strength and creativity of this market. Establishing a state-of-the-art facility in Leeds, backed by a dedicated UK team, ensures we can deliver the same quality, resilience, and innovation that Levira is known for across Europe, now tailored to local needs. This is about long-term partnership and building a sustainable foundation for growth.”

The opening of the Leeds facility follows the establishment of Levira Media Services, the company’s UK entity launched earlier this year. Together, they form the cornerstone of Levira’s strategy to expand its presence in key global media markets and to deliver scalable, secure, and future-ready solutions for content delivery.

Levira Media Services at DPP Leaders' Briefing

lisa.collins@levira.com (Lisa Collins) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:31:54 GMT

According to the DPP Media CTO Survey 2024, not a single CTO surveyed relies primarily on in-house development to build and manage their software. Instead, most are adopting a hybrid approach, combining different sourcing models to balance control, cost, and agility.

As the media landscape continues to evolve, adaptability and efficiency have become essential. That’s where Levira’s media services come in delivering flexible, scalable solutions that grow with your needs, without the complexity of full in-house development.

It will be fascinating to see how these trends develop when the next DPP survey is released later this year.

In the meantime, explore our report on Agility in Media Tech, published at IBC - International Broadcasting Convention 2025 and produced by Lorenzo Zanni - a must-read for anyone navigating today’s fast-changing media ecosystem. Click here to read.

T he Levira team including Martti Kinkar, Stephen Stewart, Sven Rekkaro and Victoria Butt are looking forward to attending the DPP Leaders’ Summit in a few weeks to discuss these findings first-hand and hear how the industry is responding to this shift.