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.
