It doesn’t seem possible that the end of 2023 is around the corner – time certainly flies when you’re having fun! There has been lots of change for Cerberus Tech this year, with huge developments and feature releases across our suite of solutions, as well as some management structure changes. And whilst we have been making our own adjustments, so to has the industry with some large commercial developments, increased adoption of SaaS solutions, continued diversification of workflows and the big ticket challenges facing us all.  

This review picks out some of the highlights of our year, together with a look at what 2024 has in store at Cerberus HQ, as well as some industry predictions for the year ahead. 

Industry Developments, Challenges and Opportunities

At the IABM’s ‘State of the Industry’ presentation at the beginning of IBC 2023, macro headwinds, efficiency and resourcing were cited as the main challenges facing the media tech industry. This was reassuring to some extent and is certainly reflective of many of the conversations we have had with customers and suppliers during the year, particularly in the face of bleak global economics, sustainability concerns and the evident shift to organisations needing to do more with less. 

All of that said, the conditions being what they are, it is the responsibility of vendor organisations to innovate and present solutions to the market that are not only viable and flexible, but ultimately contribute to purchasers responding to these very challenges.

At Cerberus Tech, we have worked tirelessly to create solutions that can be adopted in both a self-serve or managed service capacity, with diverse, resilient and on-demand cloud infrastructure provisioning capabilities. Our solutions have been built by broadcast engineers for broadcast engineers and, to quote one of our customers from earlier in the year, “For our broadcast operators, the platform made everything operationally smooth” and, “The ease of use and reliability of the platform meant that it really fitted the bill for what we needed when we needed it.”

Read more about our customer deployments here.

Sharpening Up our Toolsets

In response to customer and market demand, throughout the last 12 months, we have announced several huge enhancements to Livelink which include:

• An entire UI rework, putting more tools at your fingertips,
• The introduction of file transcoding capabilities,
• Launching motion-compensated frame rate conversion in the cloud,
• Adding support for HDR colourimetry, audio loudness control and Dolby Atmos,
• Adding logos or bugs as overlays on video (with one of the coolest preview features we developed that doesn’t get enough credit!), and, 
• Multi-bitrate encoding and push packager for OTT CDN distribution.

Responding to the challenges mentioned above through product development is one thing, but having them validated by customers is something else entirely. We have been blown away by the variety and scale of some of the opportunities that have come our way this year.  Where Livelink is concerned, this has really come into its own this year and having tier 1 global broadcasters say “The user interface stands out by a country mile…It’s clear to see that the platform has been designed with real-world broadcast delivery at its core,” proves that we are on the right track.  

There has been so much innovation around cloud-based technologies, and wider acceptance of IP workflows across all aspects of the industry, but it is a good idea to maintain a sense of caution when it comes to heading down these roads. Earlier this year, we ran a Setting the Standard blog series to take this right back to basics and explore what “IP” actually means when it comes to the vast world of broadcast workflows, and how to overcome the hurdles associated with infrastructure, compatibility, knowledge and expertise. If you missed those blogs, have a read here.    

2023: A New Beginning

Recently, we were delighted to reveal an enhanced management structure and a fresh new look as we enter a new chapter for Cerberus Tech. Summarising these changes, newly appointed Chief Revenue Office, Chris Clarke said, “Updating the logo is more than just a visual change for us; alongside the management changes we’ve made, it is a reflection of the company’s commitment to creativity, innovation and a nod to the evolutionary process we have been through as a business.”

Read more about these announcements here.

So, what’s next in 2024? 

Owing to the speed of innovation within the industry, we have tons of additional features waiting in the wings, set to be released to the Livelink platform in the early stages of 2024. More will follow in due course but as a sneak preview, our Pull Packager will be ready very early in the new year, as well as some huge enhancements to our TAG VS integration.

But what about the industry in general? 

At the recent SportsPro event in Madrid, it was interesting to hear about how changes to sports rights sales are evolving, with a pivot to non-exclusivity. This sort of change has the potential to really mix things up in the way that rights are sold and acquired, but also presents a huge opportunity for workflow enhancements using innovative tools.

Further to that, we have had a lot of conversations about the industry’s desire for a common orchestration layer.  This was first highlighted during some amazing conversations at IBC 2023 and commented on again at IABM’s BAM Live event in London earlier this month. It seems there is a desire for a common control plane that can access best-in-class software from any vendor utilising a common API for provisioning and basic orchestration, allowing the customer base to build their own workflows using any available vendor’s technology. 

This is an exciting opportunity that we will explore for Livelink as it already auto-provisions and orchestrates technology from Ateme, TAG VS and Zixi across 3 different cloud platforms.  We are already in discussions with a number of other technology vendors to explore other integration opportunities so that Livelink continues to be the platform of choice for on-demand cloud infrastructure provisioning and workflow orchestration. 

Next year, Cerberus Tech will continue to raise awareness of our live cloud transport and processing solutions, and making sure that content owners are able to fully realise the potential of non-traditional broadcast workflows in order to achieve revenue growth, increase efficiency and address the challenges faced in the constantly evolving media and broadcast ecosystem. 

Keep up with the latest news from Cerberus Tech Ltd on our website and remember to follow us on LinkedIn!

In the meantime, we wish everyone a very happy festive season, and we look forward to working with everyone in 2024!