Vendors say broadcasters are increasingly looking to expand virtualization of their operations across the whole chain, and they’re also seeking to take that virtualization off-premises, either in their own master control hubs or the public cloud.

Captioning, monitoring and translation vendor Digital Nirvana is seeing broadcasters move away from vendor-specific hardware to a running a virtualized stack on-prem for their monitoring needs, says Digital Nirvana CEO Hiren Hindocha.

“A lot of our customers have moved away from sourcing the hardware from us to just getting a spec from us, saying this is the hardware that we’re looking for, it’s just a commodity hardware that we certify, and then we sell our software to run on that hardware,” Hindocha says.

Digital Nirvana sells a cloud-based product called Trance for closed captioning, translation and transcription. But its loudness monitoring systems for recording audio for CALM Act compliance rely on on-premise hardware residing at the local station. However, Hindocha says the monitoring of those systems can be centralized in a master control hub, even for 100 to 200 stations.

For its part, supply chain software vendor SDVI saw a big uptick last year in captioning and subtitling work for non-live programming being done in the cloud. One key driver was that SDVI’s large media customers were doing more distribution deals with more platforms, says SDVI Chief Product Officer Simon Eldridge.

“Captioning and subtitling are becoming a step in the media prep phase instead of the distribution phases,” says Eldridge. “With that goes a change from a device that monitors a feed on the way out, to a piece of software that does that function and prepares the media beforehand.”