Bitcentral’s Sam Peterson on cloud adoption, the evolving news business

Sam Peterson, chief operating officer at Bitcentral, sees significant changes ahead for broadcast news production as media companies adapt to shifting audience consumption patterns and economic pressures.

“The way that we’re producing news content, particularly for what we thought of as a broadcast audience, is certainly changing because that broadcast audience isn’t still the number one thing that our customers are doing,” Peterson said in an interview during the 2025 NAB Show.

Peterson noted that news organizations recognize that traditional production methods designed for live newscasts must evolve to accommodate multiple distribution points. This evolution includes merging traditional broadcast workflows with digital-first approaches developed separately in many newsrooms.

“We have a lot of tooling that’s been put in place for social and otherwise inside a newsroom,” Peterson said. “How do those workflows merge a little bit? Because there’s been this alternate digital workflow outside of the production control workflow.”

He suggested the industry needs innovation after decades of similar newscast formats, with the potential for new production models that are faster and more cost-effective than traditional approaches. Overall, the broadcast industry has been slow to innovate, with many stations continuing to produce news in formats that haven’t substantially changed in decades.

The production automation control systems implemented 10-15 years ago represented one part of that evolution, but Peterson believes the industry is now ready for another significant transformation in how content is produced and distributed.

Cloud adoption gaining momentum despite economic concerns

Despite initial hesitation about operating expenses, Peterson noted that cloud-based workflows are gaining acceptance among broadcasters, particularly as vendors move from “lift and shift” approaches to cloud-native solutions.

“Even though there has been some reticence about operating expense, I think as vendors have gotten away from a lift-and-shift model and really to a cloud native model, the economics actually make that a feasible thing to do,” Peterson said.

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Bitcentral’s cloud-native products, branded under the “Fusion” name, are seeing an uptick in interest, with Peterson noting that customers are lining up to utilize them in new ways. This suggests that many broadcasters are moving forward with cloud implementation despite industry-wide concerns about subscription-based expenses.

This shift is partly driven by the continued growth of remote production workflows that began accelerating during the pandemic. Peterson noted Bitcentral’s remote contribution product, part of their Oasis media asset management solution, has seen sustained usage increases even after pandemic restrictions eased.

“Once people started realizing these remote workflows really could enable a lot of field work to be done, they haven’t gone back,” he said.

Industry consolidation likely to continue with Bitcentral eyeing new markets

Peterson expects further consolidation in the broadcast industry, particularly as some companies struggle with financial challenges.

“There’s a few really strong players, and then there’s a lot of much weaker players that are really having a struggle to make it work,” Peterson said, suggesting deregulation could benefit the industry by allowing stronger companies to acquire struggling operations.

Bitcentral is expanding beyond its traditional news focus to adjacent markets including sports production. The company recently added NESN as a client, which Peterson described as “news adjacent, but largely focused on the sports market.”

“Sports programming is something that is very, very interesting for us and really pushed some technical challenges for us in a sports environment, just completely different sizes of files and just the way that that workflow works, even though it’s very news oriented, rundown, scripted,” Peterson explained.

While Bitcentral is not a live sports production platform, Peterson sees potential in supporting the growing demand for sports content as media companies expand their direct-to-consumer offerings, which require “a lot more shoulder content and a lot more sports centers, but localized.”

The company is also seeing growing interest in its ViewNexa direct-to-consumer streaming platform as broadcasters seek to connect directly with viewers across multiple digital channels.

“We’ve got customers who are needing to connect with a consumer directly, either in their own app ecosystem, website, social, otherwise,” Peterson said. “Our customers are doubling down on how they connect with the consumer directly.”

This focus on direct-to-consumer approaches represents a growth area for Bitcentral, according to Peterson, who noted that the company has “really made strides in the last couple of years, specifically with the channels and the app ecosystem.”

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