AMSTERDAM — 12 September 2026 — Broadcasters chasing one dramatic cost saving are looking in the wrong place. That is the argument BroadView Software President & CEO Michael Atkin put to the IBC2026 show floor this week in an opinion piece, “The savings are hiding in the seams,” published in the IBC Daily — The Daily, the official newspaper from IBC — in its Saturday 12 September Day 2 edition, distributed in print at the RAI and as a PDF on the IBC website.
The piece lands on a question every channel group is asking in Amsterdam this year: how do you serve linear, FAST and on-demand audiences on a budget that was sized for one of them?
“Ask a broadcaster where the money goes and you will usually hear about content. Ask where the money leaks and the room goes quiet.”
Atkin’s answer is that the industry’s cost problem is rarely one enormous line item. It is forty small ones, each individually defensible, that together decide whether a channel group is viable — and that the compounding happens when operators optimise in many places at once rather than hunting a single headline cut.
Three places the money leaks
1. What a system actually costs, not what it was quoted at. Database licence fees, service contracts, per-seat charges, extra environments for testing and training, and the IT staff needed to keep it all upright are what separate a quoted price from a real one. Anything above product cost deserves challenge, and pricing should be one predictable figure rather than a series of surprises.
2. Duplication between teams. Sales, traffic, programming and on-demand teams working from separate systems spend a remarkable share of the week reconciling each other’s numbers. Put them on a common database and that reconciliation work disappears. Building non-linear and FAST schedules automatically from linear ones turns a new service rollout into an extension of an existing workflow instead of a new department with its own headcount.
3. The manual work nobody budgets for. Repairing incomplete metadata, improving synopses and producing translations are the tasks AI is genuinely good at today, particularly with natural language interfaces that query across all metadata — and they are where BroadView has focused its own product effort. Atkin sets firm conditions for that AI use: opt-in, enabled user by user, monitored, with consumption limits, and never at the expense of a customer’s data.
“None of this is glamorous”
“Broadcasters who attack cost in ten places rather than one tend to find they have funded next year’s programming without touching the schedule.”
Optimisation seldom is glamorous, Atkin concedes — which is precisely why the seams go unexamined while the search for a single big saving continues.
Continue the conversation at IBC2026
BroadView is at Stand 2.C46 at the RAI Amsterdam through 14 September, where the team is demonstrating its broadcast management platform, new AI capabilities and schedule planning tools. Book a demonstration or stop by the stand — as Atkin puts it, IBC is the best place to have twenty of these conversations in four days.
The original opinion piece by Michael Atkin appeared in the IBC Daily (The Daily, the official newspaper from IBC), Day 2, Saturday 12 September 2026.
About BroadView Software. BroadView Software is a Canadian-based provider of broadcast management solutions, serving clients worldwide and managing over 6,000 channels across more than 20 countries.
