Devoncroft Founder: There's no stopping the move to IT/IP

Devoncroft Partners' Joe Zaller is reluctant to make predictions about the media technology marketplace, even though he is a expert analyst of it. However, one thing he sees clearly is the inexorable movement of TV media from baseband video to IT files and IP infrastructure. The reasons for it, he believes, are many and compelling. Zaller draws his insights from the two principal sources: The Global Market Valuation Report, a joint venture between him and the International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers, which tabulates the sales of more than 2,500 tech vendors, and his own annual Big Broadcast Survey of media companies, which tries to ascertain technology trends and their technology spending plans.

In Q&A, Zaller said, "What we’re seeing is that there is this shift that’s coming with the move to IP, with the move to software. At the same time, there’s a lot of uncertainty around ATSC 3.0, HEVC, 4K and other technologies. If you listen to the comments on the conference calls [of publicly traded vendors], some of the CEOs talk about a pause in spending ahead of the next wave of investment, whatever that might be...The customer wants to buy software not hardware, which is inherently less expensive, so the vendors, who have been making hardware forever, have to find a way to transition what they’re doing into software and then it has to run on something which may be datacenter architecture -- you know, a room full of servers. Some people are moving very quickly to a data center architecture and can’t get there fast enough. They need to wring out the inefficiencies and they need to be able to have flexibility and agility. They have said that they think that IP is the best way to achieve that because there is an enormous economic leverage that comes from the IT industry and there’s a huge innovation cycle. You can move much more quickly in software."