LiveU – The Digital-First Imperative: Broadcasters Rewriting the Rules

Roy Hasson, VP Product Marketing and SaaS Sales, LiveU

The transition to digital-first is no longer aspirational – it’s foundational and increasingly urgent. Digital-first has become an operating-model decision, not merely a publishing strategy, as broadcasters recognise that digital platforms are primary destinations for content creation, distribution, and engagement, rather than extensions of linear operations.

This shift is being reflected across content output and the appetite for this new wave of creative storytelling is expanding quickly. Millennials and older generations are increasingly tapping into the trend, making digital, social and mobile platforms their primary destination for entertainment, sport and news. Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends survey backs this up, showing 56 percent of Gen Zs and 43 percent of millennials surveyed find social media content more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies.

Creator Economy Influences Production
The digital first trend is reshaping how studios operate, stories are produced, and content flows across ecosystems. To ensure smooth technical processes, broadcasters are consolidating production and contribution into unified, IP-native environments to avoid duplicated workflows, fragmented teams, and rising operational costs. Cloud-based production, IP contribution, and unified digital and IP-based platforms enable organizations to manage live feeds centrally while supporting distributed teams and creator-driven workflows. As the creator economy influences storytelling formats and audience expectations, news, sports and entertainment programming are adapting with more flexible, story-centric production models that prioritize speed and accessibility – without compromising accuracy, editorial integrity, or the importance of the stories they tell.

Digital-first organizations are better positioned to scale coverage, experiment with new formats, and meet audiences where they are – maintaining the quality and standards of existing productions without increasing overheads.

ITV Expands Love Island Digital First Content
Last summer, ITV celebrated the tenth anniversary of its popular reality dating show, Love Island, produced by Lifted Entertainment, part of ITV Studios, and GroupM Motion Entertainment. To ramp up the excitement of series 12 and to engage younger demographics the broadcaster, supported by LiveU, expanded the show’s highly successful digital-first strategy. For the first time, ITV live streamed the official podcast, Love Island: The Morning After on ITVX and YouTube to give fans the added benefit of a live ‘watch-along’, which aired at the same time as the main launch show on ITV2.

For the live stream to ITVX the production team needed to build a flexible, agile cloud workflow that could handle precise live on/off-air timings and real-time communication with its playout provider. To achieve this, ITV turned to the LiveU Studio cloud video platform, which streamlined the workflow between Majorca, where the main show is filmed, and London, home of the podcast.

A LiveU Video Return server in Majorca delivered a low-latency stream of the main show to a LiveU LU800 unit in the London studio. There, The Morning After presenters Amy Hart and Indiyah Polack, viewed the main show on a monitor via an HDMI output. The London LU800 then sent the podcast feed to LiveU Studio, while another LU800 in Majorca sent the main programme feed to the same platform. In LiveU Studio, a picture-in-picture output was created so viewers could watch the live podcast alongside the main programme in the corner of the screen. With minimal assets and a live feed, ITV created the feeling of a fully Love Island branded show.

For the final episode, which aired on Monday 4th August 2025, an exclusive 30-minute live teaser show, fronted by Amy and Indiyah, was streamed immediately before the main show.

Solid Connection For Drake’s Iceman Cinematic Livestreams

Global icons are also embracing the creative freedom that digital first content delivers. Last summer, world famous musician and rapper Drake continued the rollout of his album Iceman, by live streaming the second and third episodes of a series of cinematic-style short films, blending symbolic visuals, track launches and real-time streaming. To orchestrate a seamless global live broadcast, LiveU assisted creative streaming partner Groovy Gecko with the delivery of the live streams to Drake’s YouTube channel, which has over 31 million subscribers. Groovy Gecko coordinated with YouTube and partnered with production company Canada Canada to create a unique hybrid of narrative, performance and live audience engagement.

The flexibility of the LiveU technology enabled the production crew to shoot immersive footage from different angles. Patrick Hanlon, Online Video Solutions Specialist at Groovy Gecko said, “Drake wanted us to capture a cinematic short film live across a citywide network of locations. This included underground clubs and moving vehicles, all while maintaining an ‘extra crispy’ level of production quality.”

Episode 3, which live streamed on 4^th September, was set against a visually striking backdrop across 12 locations in Milan. Groovy Gecko used a mix of 40 LiveU multi-cam LU800 and compact LU300 units, with the LU800s serving as the primary units and the LU300s operating as backups. They also used five return servers, 19 cameras and live drone feeds. Challenging locations were boosted using Peplink and Starlink units for LiveU, ensuring zero dropouts.

For Episode 2, the LiveU units supported 12 cameras strategically positioned around the city of Manchester, plus two Steadicams used to capture dynamic tracking shots. The feeds were transmitted wirelessly over 4G and 5G to Groovy Gecko’s production hub in London. The stream had over one million live views and 1.2 million additional on-demand views over the following weekend.

These examples illustrate how digital first has become a critical imperative, and broadcasters that align technology decisions with business priorities will be better positioned for long-term sustainable growth.