Veset – Fifteen Years in the Cloud Through the Lens of a Cloud Native Technology Company

Gatis Gailis, CEO & Founder, Veset

 In our 15-year history as a cloud-native company, we’ve seen first-hand the shift from how experimental everything felt in the early days to where we are now with cloud having become pivotal for the broadcast industry. To begin with, we were building solutions that didn’t yet have a clear market category, explaining cloud playout to clients who had never considered it before, and learning by doing. Fast forward to 2026 and the industry has changed almost beyond recognition.

 

Snapshot from the Past

When we first started to focus on cloud playout in 2011, there were practically no such solutions on the market and broadcasting was still overwhelmingly hardware based. Most broadcasters relied on expensive, rigid hardware systems, and this made it difficult to compete in what was becoming an increasingly crowded marketplace. Broadcasters’ facilities were completing the transition from analogue to digital and from physical tape-based workflows to file-based digital architectures.

Early tapeless workflows using server-based systems were rapidly replacing physical tape decks, allowing editors to access digital files directly over local area networks.

Production galleries featured a blend of old and new hardware, and bulky CRT monitors were still common in smaller operations. Master control rooms relied on massive routers and switchers to route feeds via SDI coaxial cables. Early server-based playout systems handled commercial playout, removing the need for physical tapes and reducing manual intervention.

As the market began to change following the emergence of new players offering streaming services, it quickly became clear that broadcasters needed a more flexible alternative to traditional hardware. The shift from SDI towards IP systems had begun with major broadcasters starting to invest in IP-based infrastructure. This was the precursor to lots of the cloud computing innovations that came in the following years.

 

Evolution of the Cloud From 2011 to 2026

The cloud was starting to generate industry hype as early as 2011 when it was becoming a regular topic of discussion at trade shows such as IBC. That said, it was a few more years before broadcasters started to incorporate cloud services into their workflows. Initially, cloud was used mostly for storage and archiving with the exception of a few forward-thinking operators who began broadcasting directly from the cloud with cloud-based playout.

In those early days, cloud-native companies like Veset were in the minority. The concept of cloud computing was incomprehensible for many, and there was doubt over whether it would ever be adopted wholesale by the industry; many industry folk said: it’ll never work! Gradually, the need for more flexible, resilient, scalable and efficient infrastructure won out and the industry began to slowly adopt cloud technology.

This spurred a trend of technology vendors making their existing products cloud ready. This was in fact quite damaging for the industry because solutions were marketed as cloud when they were actually software solutions adapted to work in the cloud. These cloud-enabled solutions didn’t bring the same inherent benefits that the cloud delivers, so often led to disappointment and disillusionment with the cloud. It also created confusion about what true cloud meant, adding perplexity to what was already a confusing area for most people.

Thankfully, we’ve finally got past that confusion, and there’s an understanding that moving existing solutions to the cloud by making them cloud enabled doesn’t deliver the same benefits as cloud native. It’s now generally accepted that to be effective, cloud solutions need to be built from the ground up in the cloud, with containerized, microservices-based modular architectures. This allows for agile and flexible infrastructures because solutions can be broken down into smaller components, enabling them to be updated, scaled, or replaced independently.

For a while, mistrust of the cloud and fear of the unknown continued to be significant barriers to adoption but we seem to have mostly moved past that. Nowadays, the cloud is seen as a proven and reliable technology and much less like a leap into the unknown. Suffice to say, it’s become the norm for broadcasters to operate cloud services alongside on-prem infrastructure.

 

How Will Cloud Feature in Another 15 years?

There are many ways this could unfold. One potential scenario sees broadcast facilities as we know them become a thing of the past with everything operating in the cloud, and AI orchestrating and optimizing workflows. In this future, broadcasters operate very little or even no hardware at all, and the concept of a broadcast facility becomes as unfamiliar as tape-based operations seem today.

At the other end of the spectrum, cloud usage continues to grow incrementally but broadcasters retain some on-prem infrastructure. In this vision of the future, the cloud is still used alongside hardware and software with broadcasters continuing to operate hybrid environments as they do today.

The most likely outcome probably sits somewhere between these two visions. Rather than cloud and on-prem existing as separate infrastructure, all resources may be combined into a single environment. Intelligent orchestration platforms will automatically place workloads wherever they can be executed most efficiently, based on cost, performance, energy consumption, security requirements, and demand. Some functions run in cloud data centers, others operate at network edge, and some specialized workloads continue to run on hardware where it delivers the best performance. Users won’t need to consciously consider where workflows should operate for maximum efficiency; that part will be done automatically by intelligent orchestration platforms.

If the last 15 years have taught us anything, it’s that technology adoption rarely takes the expected path. None of us has a crystal ball and with the advancements in AI seen in the last few years alone, it’s difficult to predict where technology will take us next. Perhaps broadcast engineers will all end up with cloud-connected, AI-powered chips implanted behind their ear and if they need to launch a new channel, extend to a new region or scale up resources for a live event, all they have to do is think of the command. I say that in jest, but you never know!