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News production infrastructure is under immense strain. Daily operations require a certain baseline of switching, routing, and processing capacity. Peak coverage events like elections, the Olympics, or major breaking stories require . And the traditional production hardware sitting in most news control rooms can鈥檛 flex between those two realities.

The result is an industry that either over-provisions for peaks that occupy a handful of nights per year, or scrambles to assemble temporary capacity every time a major event arrives. As news operations continue to expand , scalable workflows have become essential. Traditional approaches, however, were never designed for this level of flexibility and growth.

天美传媒 Video built Carbonite HyperMax around a more flexible architectural model for news production. Its physical switching and processing resources can be configured, licensed, and reallocated through software, allowing capacity to be shared more effectively across control rooms and productions.

This article will explore how that works, and what it means for news organizations that need to scale for peak events without building infrastructure that sits idle the rest of the year.

HyperMax and the Resource Pool apply that principle to the production switching layer through a unified, hardware-based 天美传媒 Video platform.

Peak news events quickly show how resilient your crew and your technology stack actually are. And if they鈥檙e not resilient鈥攁nd able to rise to the moment鈥攖he quality of your news broadcast and viewer trust can quickly be impacted. But that鈥檚 not to say that you need to spend an exorbitant amount of time, money, and energy creating the perfect newsroom just to cater to a single news event. That鈥檚 not fiscally responsible and puts a great deal of strain on your operations.

Let鈥檚 take NBC News as an example. The spanned 15 studios and 13 control rooms across NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and NBC News Now. More than 100 cameras, with over 100 channels of graphic rendering. To make this possible, the engineering team built a custom web application from scratch because nothing off-the-shelf could synchronize that many production environments at once.

Once election night was over, the news operation changed significantly. Even at NBC鈥檚 scale, building custom systems for short-lived peak events adds cost and complexity. For smaller news teams, that model is even harder to sustain.

Every news organization faces some version of this problem. A peak coverage event arrives: an election, the Olympics, a major breaking story. And demand for production capacity spikes far beyond what the infrastructure was built to handle.

The only option is to stand up temporary control rooms, rent trucks and flypacks, and repurpose studios; and pull staff from their regular assignments and hope the integrations hold.

It works because it has to. But it鈥檚 getting harder to sustain over time because the infrastructure these surges are built on top of is stretched to its limits.

The defining characteristic of a peak coverage event, whether it鈥檚 an election, an Olympics, or a fast-moving national story, is that production demand doesn鈥檛 increase incrementally. It surges. The and SVG Europe鈥檚 operational benchmarks put the figure at three to four times normal capacity for major events.

The 2024 election cycle illustrated what that multiple looks like in practice.

• At 30 Rock, required eight control rooms, six studios, over 50 cameras, and nearly 200 render engines鈥攋ust for the core operation. That鈥檚 before accounting for MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo, which brought the group-wide total to 13 control rooms and 15 studios.
• its CBS Mornings studio in Times Square into the 鈥淎merica Decides鈥� Election Headquarters with 39 dedicated render engines. inside Studio TV2 using rented modular frames, LED walls, and outside equipment layered on top of permanent infrastructure.
• On the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC for the 2024 UK general election. The team needed to ingest 369 simultaneous live feeds from constituency counts nationwide. Rather than replicating hardware, the BBC鈥檚 engineering team used a cloud platform to scale the feeds and deliver outputs into the existing broadcast chain. As BBC News鈥� Geraint Thomas put it, the cloud approach 鈥渁llowed us to scale up a vast number of feeds and handle peak traffic seamlessly without investing in additional hardware.鈥�

Each of these examples is a different response to the same underlying constraints of modern newsrooms. Peak events required major infrastructure upgrades, but their permanent infrastructure wasn鈥檛 built to handle those additions effectively.

The reason peak events require so much improvisation comes down to how production switching infrastructure is designed. A traditional production switcher is a fixed-configuration system. A 3 ME switcher is always a 3 ME switcher. 听A traditional production switcher is typically sized for the most demanding show it is expected to support. If election night requires more capacity than the system was designed to provide, the newsroom may need to add, install, and integrate additional hardware. The existing switcher cannot simply expand temporarily to meet the increase in demand.

In a multi-control-room news operation, each room is typically equipped and sized for the most demanding production it may need to support. When one control room is operating below capacity, however, its unused switching and processing resources generally cannot be reassigned to another room or production.

market director for broadcast at highlighted the scale of this utilization challenge in a 2025 analysis of broadcast infrastructure. Looking specifically at ingest systems, he found that actual utilization can fall below 10 percent of theoretical operating capacity.

While that figure does not measure production switching directly, it illustrates a broader issue across broadcast facilities: infrastructure is often provisioned for occasional peaks, leaving significant capacity underused during normal operations. In fixed production environments, that unused capacity also cannot easily be reassigned to another control room or production when demand shifts.

This stands in stark contrast to how IT infrastructure has evolved over the past two decades. Computing moved from dedicated servers per application to virtualized, pooled resources that scale with demand. No IT team would provision a dedicated physical server for an application that runs at full load two nights a year. But that鈥檚 essentially what broadcast production infrastructure still requires.

Each control room is its own island, sized for its own peak, with no mechanism to share or borrow resources across the operation.

In practice, that means M/E banks, keyers, and processing capacity that can be created, shared, and reassigned across control rooms from a common pool. And this is possible today. Hyperconverged platforms pursue a similar goal to the MXL project: making production resources more flexible, shareable, and responsive to changing demand. They take a different technical approach, combining routing, switching, and processing on a unified hardware platform and using software to configure, license, and dynamically allocate those resources.

Broadcasters, sports networks, and enterprise production teams are adopting them. But the transition is early, and it鈥檚 important to be honest about where things stand. Most news control rooms still rely heavily on SDI, particularly in North America, although hybrid SDI and IP environments are becoming more common.

The credible near-term path isn鈥檛 necessarily a full cloud-native or IP transition. It鈥檚 pooling on-premises production resources, using dynamic licensing to flex for peak events, and introducing IP where it delivers a clear operational benefit.

The newsrooms navigating this transition most effectively share a common set of operational principles, regardless of their size or market. They鈥檝e moved toward unified production environments where ingest, editing, asset management, planning, and publishing operate within a shared platform rather than across disconnected applications.

This eliminates the handoffs and re-ingestion cycles that slow down multi-platform output. Content is available to every part of the workflow the moment it enters the system, and metadata follows it automatically rather than being re-entered at each stage.

They鈥檝e adopted modular architectures that allow them to start with the capabilities they need today and expand as demands evolve, without re-platforming or rebuilding infrastructure each time requirements change. In an environment where technology budgets are tightening and every purchase decision is evaluated on efficiency and total cost of ownership, the ability to scale without starting over is essential.

Keep Reading: 8 practical ways to make multiplatform newscasting easier

Additionally, these newsrooms have prioritized browser-based, platform-agnostic tools that support the blended roles and distributed teams that define modern newsrooms. When one person is expected to shoot, edit, write, and publish, they can鈥檛 afford to learn and maintain five separate applications. The tools need to be intuitive, accessible from anywhere, and designed around the task rather than the legacy architecture underneath.

And lastly, they鈥檝e built for continuous adaptation and accept that the platforms, formats, and audience behaviors that define 鈥渄igital-first鈥� today will look different in 18 months. The organizations that thrive aren鈥檛 the ones that perfectly predict the future. They鈥檙e the ones whose production infrastructure can absorb change without requiring a capital project every time the landscape shifts.

Existing workflows, media, and integrations carry forward. The upgrade brings those capabilities into Indigo鈥檚 unified environment, with the option to expand into additional modules over time.

For teams running a mix of 天美传媒 Video and third-party tools, existing integrations stay in place/ And as those other products come up for renewal, consolidating into an Indigo module is always on the table.

With yesterday’s production technology, a three hundred thousand dollar switcher might have idled for over half of the day. Today, that same silicon can drive three concurrent shows, across multiple studios.

What changed? Forward-thinking engineers stopped locking capacity inside single-purpose hardware and started treating MEs, keyers, and scene engines as portable software licenses that can be assigned to flexible hardware solutions.听

Below, we’ll unpack the hidden costs of purpose-built gear, show how dynamic licensing flips budget drains into productivity gains, prove the impact through 天美传媒 Video’s Carbonite HyperMax platform, and leave you with a clear ROI checklist and next-step playbook.听

A traditional switcher or effects engine looks busy when its fans spin and LEDs glow, but diagnostics tell a different story. High-end engines inside newsrooms can often sit idle for 50-75% of the day.听

That under-use can impact virtually every department within the organization, including:听

• Finance 鈥� Every component continues to depreciate whether its generating revenue or gathering dust.
• Production 鈥� Since single-function hardware can鈥檛 鈥渇lex鈥� when more inputs or effects resources are needed, the creative team is often forced to make unnecessary compromises.
• Engineering 鈥� In order to meet the demands of News or Production, Engineering must design, purchase, install, and maintain duplicate hardware to cover peak periods. 听

Additionally, the entire organization feels the impact of 鈥渉idden鈥� operating expenses like power听consumption, cooling costs, and increased space requirements.听

Fixed-function boxes听worked well when each show was linear and all were produced in the same format and sent to the same transmission point. But in the 24/7, multi-format, multi-destination world that broadcasters live in today, capacity has to move at the speed of the schedule, not the limitations of purpose-built hardware. The answer is to treat processing power as a shared pool, not a stack of siloed frames.听

This is where software-defined hardware and dynamic licensing dramatically changes the game.听

Picture a switcher that behaves less like a monolithic appliance and more like a shared pool of resources. That鈥檚 the essence of dynamic licensing.鈥�

Dynamic licensing, like that offered through the Carbonite HyperMax system, treats advanced switcher effects modes听as portable software based modules that can be assigned wherever they鈥檙e needed鈥攐n-prem, in an OB van, or halfway across the world.听

At the heart of the system sits 天美传媒 Platform Manager (RPM), a control layer that assigns and reassigns features across multiple hardware platforms and can transfer resources in real-time without rewiring or major system downtime.听

RPM allows engineers to drag-and-drop processing capacity across all connected frames as demand or needs change. For example, if Control Room A is off-air after the morning show, its ME licenses can be reassigned to the REMI hub for an afternoon soccer match, then reclaimed for prime-time news.听听

Operationally, HyperMax licenses are assigned to Software-Defined Production Engine (SDPE) hardware blades, which are mounted in an Ultrix advanced routing and processing platform. Each blade can be licensed as a MaxME (a full-featured ME), a group of MiniMEs (each with its own transition effects), or a MaxScene for scene-based compositing. Multiple blades can also be pooled together to build larger switcher configurations.听

Nigel Spratling, VP of Production Switchers at 天美传媒, sums it up by saying that:鈥�

For organizations the payoff is immediate:听

• CapEx flattening. Buy capability once and maximize its efficiency by dynamically assigning it wherever its needed.听 听
• Lean studios. Fewer chasses mean lighter racks, lower power draw, and reduced maitenance time.听

Dynamic licensing turns processing power into shared resources, freeing broadcasters to focus on creativity, not installation. Let鈥檚 dig more into how HyperMax works and how it helps to solve the underutilization problem in newsrooms.鈥�

It all starts with a 天美传媒 Video FR5 or FR12 advanced routing and processing chassis. Certain slots can accept Software-Defined Production Engine (SDPE) blades 鈥� identical hardware boards whose function is determined by the software that is loaded. Each SDPE is discrete and can be loaded with different software, including HyperMax licenses, to suit the production requirements.听 听

A single HyperMax license can be used to flip any SDPE into one of three powerful processing platforms, including:

• MaxME – Fully-functional Mix/Effects bank with multiple keyers, independent transition engines, 2D and 3D DVEs, and more.
• MaxMini – Three independent transition and layering engines (per SDPE) separate from the full MEs.听
• MaxScene – Additional multi-layer scene-based compositing resources.听

Because each HyperMax mode is software-based, the SDPE hardware itself never has to sit idle.听One blade that powered an election night control room at dawn can be reassigned to the REMI hub by lunch and come back as a scene engine for prime-time entertainment. No additional chassis, no new cabling or re-patching, and most importantly, no downtime required.听 听

The 鈥渢raffic cop鈥� that makes this juggling act invisible, as mentioned earlier, is 天美传媒 Platform Manager (RPM). From a browser dashboard, operators can allocate blades to be MEs, MiniMEs, and MaxScenes across every HyperMax in the facility鈥攐r across the country鈥攚ithout patch-bay gymnastics. Think of it as resource sharing.听

Keep Reading: Carbonite HyperMax: Smarter, More Efficient Production with 天美传媒 Platform Manager

Why does all this matter? Fewer boxes mean lower power and cooling bills, less maintenance, and control rooms that aren鈥檛 hemmed in by yesterday鈥檚 peak-day calculations. Most importantly, creative teams stop worrying about resource ceilings.鈥�

Need extra MEs for election night visuals or a pop-up stream? Assign an open license to an available blade, then reallocate it elsewhere when the buzz dies down. HyperMax turns processing capacity into shared resources, so broadcasters can invest in storytelling, not spare hardware.听

Broadcasters often run premium switchers at a fraction of their potential, with daily utilization dipping as low as 25%. HyperMax helps unlock that latent capacity. By allowing single pieces of equipment to be dynamically reassigned across shows and teams, utilization can climb significantly.听

Instead of planning CapEx around peak events, HyperMax lets you maximize the equipment already in your racks. That means fewer idle systems, greater productivity from existing investments, and less pressure to over-purchase hardware that sits unused for most of the year.听

With dynamic licensing and centralized management, HyperMax shifts the ROI conversation from 鈥渉ow much hardware can we afford?鈥� to 鈥渉ow much more can we do with what we already own?听

Purpose-built hardware switchers were built for yesterday鈥檚 linear schedule. HyperMax is built for the non-stop, multi-platform reality of today鈥攖urning every ME, MiniME, and scene engine into a portable license you can deploy for the next show, truck or remote feed in seconds. By treating processing power as shared resources, broadcasters avoid expensive hardware duplication, trim ongoing power and maintenance costs. And provide more opportunities for creative teams to attract and maintain viewers.听 听

If you鈥檙e ready to see how software-defined hardware and dynamic licensing can lift utilization, and how that translates into stronger production teams and better ROI from your equipment investments, schedule a conversation with the 天美传媒 Video sales team. We鈥檒l map your current load, run the ROI numbers, and show HyperMax in action.听

Is that massive production switcher servicing your news control room, providing the best value for your budget?

In too many facilities, production switchers run up the electric bills 24/7 but are of limited value outside of the news broadcast windows. Still, that idle capacity has long been the cost of ensuring systems are available during those precious peak revenue hours when the news is live.

Until now.

The fact is, underutilized equipment limits creativity, ties up engineering resources, and has a direct impact on the bottom line. A strategic software-defined workflow can provide greater efficiency at a lower total cost of ownership.

Many legacy switchers were built for a world where HD was the gold standard and news broadcasts followed a predictable format. In that world, those systems performed well because production demands were consistent and relatively straightforward. But as the number of news outlets has exploded and the demand for 24/7 news has grown, the need to provide compelling visual content and locations is now paramount in the battle for viewers.

Fixed hardware systems often can鈥檛 deliver the necessary production horsepower, so broadcast news facilities are forced to make difficult choices: Cut creative content or deploy additional, often redundant, hardware that increases complexity and drives up costs, but sits idle during non-peak periods.

The result?

Facilities must invest in expensive equipment that sits idle for most of the week, waiting for the next big story. This mismatch between static infrastructure and dynamic production has become the root cause of widespread underutilization, and a growing pain point for broadcasters trying to stay competitive in a fast-paced, multi-platform world.

On the balance sheet, a switcher looks like a single line of capital expense. On the production floor, it’s an ongoing tab. When that box sits unused for more than half of the broadcast day, it becomes an expensive luxury. It continues to burn power, it still requires cooling and maintenance, and depreciation keeps grinding away whether the “On Air” light is on or not. The extra capacity needed to cover peak periods, which might only last a few hours a week or just a few months a year, ties up cash that could fund new content or more staff.

And the consequence isn鈥檛 just financial. A rigid, under-utilized news control room also impacts creative decisions. Maybe there鈥檚 not enough I/O for an extra remote, or there鈥檚 not enough keyers for that one additional graphic, simply because the switcher鈥檚 resources are fixed and inflexible.

The consequences of underutilized hardware are costly and complex:

• CapEx burn: Every underused board represents capital that could be put to better use.听
• Diluted ROI: Buying extra switchers for limited spikes lowers the return on all installed gear.听
• Higher TCO:听 Switchers run 24/7, racking up electricity, cooling, and maintenance costs even while idle.听
• Hardware duplication: Covering peak demand with legacy systems means duplicate frame and panels, additional licenses, and more staff retraining.听
• Missed opportunities: In remote or centralized models, you can鈥檛 spin up extra capacity fast enough to chase breaking stories.听

Taken together, these costs create an invisible drain on every production. Why does this problem feel bigger every year? Content formats keep multiplying, live events keep expanding, and remote workflows push resources to their limits.鈥�

Just a decade ago, one operator on one switcher could punch out two linear shows per shift and call it a win. Today, that same operator, using the same switcher, is asked to send feeds to multiple destinations, each in a different format, and each with its own creative and technical requirement.

In this landscape, that explosion of outputs turns any extra headroom into a shortfall. Switchers designed for a single HD path can struggle to adapt when productions require alternative formats, such as archiving in UHD, while down-converting the broadcast to HD. While most broadcasters still operate in a single format at a time, the ability to quickly reconfigure between formats without major hardware changes offers a significant advantage.

Meanwhile, production is becoming increasingly decoupled from geography. Remote workflows enable crews to produce shows from thousands of miles away, and while not all remote setups require it, the ability to share resources on demand dramatically increases flexibility and efficiency. Parking a fully loaded switcher in one studio while another show across town, or across the continent, hunts for additional resources no longer makes sense.

Add in today鈥檚 economic backdrop of higher energy prices, squeezed CapEx, and aggressive sustainability targets, every idle watt becomes a missed opportunity. To stay ahead, broadcasters are under pressure to shrink racks, cut power, and prove that they are getting the most out of their gear.

In other words, the cost of underutilization isn鈥檛 just rising. It鈥檚 compounding.

The solution? Software-defined hardware.听

In the modern broadcast television industry, any organization that fails to closely monitor expenses, eliminate overhead waste, and maximize return on investment (ROI) is bound to lose out to competitors that do. Optimizing your onscreen graphics system for financial efficiency certainly won鈥檛 solve all your financial problems, but in a world where streaming and other forms of content delivery are taking ever bigger segments of a rapidly dwindling television audience, broadcasters must do all that they can to cut expenses wherever they can. And graphics infrastructure is far from cheap.听

With the exceedingly challenging nature of today鈥檚 broadcast environment in mind, read on for a brief exploration of how to control costs while delivering outstanding broadcast graphics to your viewers.听

To avoid the often-crippling capital expenditure (CapEx) upfront costs that go hand in hand with the purchase of new production and/or broadcast equipment, organizations are increasingly turning to subscription-based operational expenditure (OpEx) models. By taking the OpEx approach, they can avoid the expense of installing and housing additional equipment onsite by contracting with providers that offer graphics capabilities through subscription agreements. These OpEx models allow broadcasters to budget for production and distribution needs as recurring operational expenses that come with predetermined (and therefore predictable) pricing structures.

But just because these pricing structures are often predictable and allow broadcasters to avoid large upfront CapEx expenses, you shouldn鈥檛 immediately assume that they are cost-effective for every organization. As virtually anyone with a monthly subscription to anything can readily attest, those small regular charges can really add up over the long term. This is particularly true of some providers that offer only subscription-based pricing models, as well as others that are increasingly promoting lease-based pricing structures.

While subscription and leasing models can offer flexibility and easier entry points, they may also create challenges in long-term budgeting, scaling, and infrastructure alignment, especially for broadcasters with changing needs. This is particularly true for any organization that needs to scale its video production and broadcast graphics capabilities to adapt to new demands and objectives.

While the OpEx approach is great for controlling upfront investment costs, it requires ongoing budget allocations for recurring payments tied to your provider contract. The CapEx approach, by contrast, generally involves a single, large purchase, after which an organization wholly owns that purchase in perpetuity. This approach might come with a substantial upfront expense, but it can significantly reduce ongoing costs.

The value of any CapEx graphics infrastructure investment can be challenging to assess before you make it. Although one of these systems can require a substantial initial payment, it can lead to lasting advantages and value generation over time. If it delivers month after month and year after year of dependable service, your graphics system will inevitably pay for itself.

When it comes to choosing between the CapEx and the OpEx approach, different paths will make sense for different broadcasters. Are you looking for the flexibility of ownership without tying yourself to a never-ending subscription? Then you should gravitate toward the CapEx approach. Do you have significant cashflow problems at the moment, or do you want to protect yourself from catastrophic financial risk in the future? Then you will certainly want to consider the OpEx approach.

Both the CapEx and the OpEx approaches can provide exceptional video production and broadcast graphics, and both have their own unique but generally equal benefits and drawbacks in terms of workflow integration and operational efficiency. So, wouldn鈥檛 it be great if you could select a high-quality graphics system that meets your needs and then come up with a CapEx or OpEx pricing structure that works best for you? Well, with 天美传媒 Video, you can.听

A comprehensive 2D and 3D graphics engine,听XPression has a highly scalable architecture. This means that broadcast organizations can start with a streamlined setup and expand capabilities as needed without being locked into restrictive pricing models. The most powerful real-time motion graphics system on the market, XPression allows you to build striking onscreen visuals and animations with amazing ease.听

And, thanks to its flexible pricing models, 天美传媒 makes paying for XPression as easy as using it. XPression is available as a perpetual (CapEx) model, which provides organizations with outright ownership, or as a subscription (OpEx) model, allowing them to pay for graphics capabilities as needed. The 天美传媒 team can even help you determine which of these models better suits your current and projected business preferences and requirements.听

Whether you鈥檙e managing a long-term investment strategy or responding to shifting production demands, XPression empowers you to scale on your terms. Its flexible purchasing options鈥攑aired with powerful, real-time graphics capabilities鈥攇ive you control over both performance and spend. For broadcasters seeking to balance innovation with financial strategy, XPression delivers the best of both worlds.听

Visit the 天美传媒 Video website for more information about the XPression. Knowledgeable company representatives are ready to explain how cost-effective these systems can be.听听