Real Orchestration
This year at IBC, expect the word orchestration to be somewhere on the stand design of every software vendor, certainly in halls 6 and 7. Gartner reports that 78% of large enterprises now run at least one orchestration platform, and the term has moved from technical vocabulary to marketing shorthand in the space of two or three years. As someone who has spent more than ten years insisting that the real business value – and I should say a key differentiator of the Blue Lucy platform – comes from orchestration and integration, this should be vindicating. It is not. When a word this specific becomes fashionable, it quickly loses its value.
The problem is not that vendors are lying, exactly. It is that orchestration is now being applied to just about any function that software carries out automatically, which means buyers evaluating platforms at IBC 26 have no quick mechanism to distinguish a real orchestration platform from a script scheduler or just a product rebrand. The distinction is not merely academic. For a media business it determines the future flexibility of an operation and its ongoing ability to adapt workflows to suit emerging business needs.
So it is worth being precise about what the word orchestration really means.
Running a fixed sequence of coded steps is not orchestration – that is scripting. Firing a job from a webhook or a file watcher is not orchestration either – that is automation: useful, but blind. It knows a step ran; it doesn’t know, or care, what that means for anything downstream. A BPM-style modeller sitting on top of a monolithic core, needing an engineer to configure every change, is not orchestration. And an ecosystem of partner vendors promising an end-to-end solution is very often the opposite of real integration: rather a closed, interdependent set of point solutions providing a broader but limited, and often brittle, function.
Real orchestration is dependency-aware. It understands that changing one step affects several others downstream, and manages that automatically, by rerouting, retrying, escalating, with full visibility throughout. It coordinates tools, systems and people as conditions change, rather than stepping through a fixed script. And it integrates bidirectionally with the systems it manages, so information flows back as well as out. The difference isn’t whether a system knows a step ran. It’s whether that knowledge changes what happens next without a human needing to step in to make the call.
None of that is the point though. Orchestration is a technology, a mechanism, not the outcome. The real goal that should be of concern to a media business evaluating technology ahead of investment is value: fewer hours spent on manual content handling, future operational flexibility, less risk buried in a Rube Goldberg workflow no one dares touch and more revenue earned from an existing content catalogue.
Real Value
Equally a platform can be technically an excellent orchestration engine and still fail to earn its budget if nobody can point to what it actually delivered – its business value.
This is where most orchestration vendor claims fall apart under scrutiny: these tend to focus on volume, files processed, jobs run, terabytes moved, because it’s easy to count. Volume isn’t value. A platform that processes more files faster isn’t worth more unless it’s freeing people, time, or budget that would otherwise be spent keeping the operation ticking over. The platform may be delivering significant value but throughput statistics don’t measure that.
At Banijay Rights, new publishing destinations including Amazon Prime, Roku, Pluto, Hulu, Tubi, Samsung, Amagi, YouTube and Facebook were added to the Blue Lucy platform through a visual workflow configuration, not development, or scripting. Thousands of hours of content a month are delivered through these workflows, but it is the ease with which the pipelines were built at the outset and the elimination of manual handling in the ongoing operation where the real value is. At Malaysia’s national broadcaster RTM, centralising contribution workflows across roughly 400 suppliers cut coordination overhead by 85% and turnaround time by 80% – this is significant real human effort value. At VSI, service execution has grown more than 50% without adding headcount. That’s the same team doing meaningfully more, a bigger throughput number, yes, but value comes from the fact that operational and headcount costs have not risen in order to achieve it. A real and commonly used measure of technology value is to benchmark against FTE units – so we have.
Real Measurement
This year, our R&D team has taken an academic approach to measuring FTE equivalence in Blue Lucy workflows, so that our customers can empirically measure value. This IBC, we’re showcasing the model as the Connected Value Audit.
The Connected Value Audit scores a workflow against five measurable characteristics: how many systems it spans, the decision complexity it carries, how deeply it transforms content, how much manual verification it still requires, and how resilient it is to failure and combines these into a single Connected Value Index: an evidence-based read on the value a workflow already delivers, and where the remaining opportunity sits. We’ve built the software to construct that index from each of the 600+ microservices a workflow may call on, and the effort inputs behind each score may be calibrated by the operational managers doing the work, so the index reflects a customer’s specific operational reality.
Real Deal
The foregoing will not settle every argument about what counts as real orchestration or how to measure its value. But I hope that it helps buyers properly scrutinise orchestration now that it is fashionable.
That matters more this year than most, because AI is about to make the confusion worse before it makes it better. Every new AI service a media business adopts is another system that has to be coordinated with the ones already in place, another point where a workflow can break quietly if nothing is watching the dependencies. Integration and orchestration were already the unglamorous work underneath the more exciting parts of media technology. They are about to become the precondition for using AI safely and at scale, not an optional layer bolted on afterwards.
Orchestration will be everywhere at IBC this year: on stands, in decks, in nearly every vendor’s opening pitch. We may even award a small prize for whoever sends us the most photos of the word plastered across a stand fascia. Some of it will be scripting wearing a better badge. Some will be automation with no visibility past the next step. Some will be a BPM bolted onto a monolith. Some will be an ecosystem of point solutions dressed up as a platform. And some of it will be real: dependency aware, genuinely two way, and able to prove the value it delivers rather than simply assert it. The industry does not need the word to become less fashionable. It needs buyers to start asking tough questions of the people using it.