Content production is becoming a strategic procurement challenge for broadcasters. As traditional production models come under pressure, procurement can help rethink how content is sourced, produced and delivered while protecting creative and editorial quality.
- Structural shifts are creating new options for managing production costs and capacity
- Technology and new production models are changing how and where content is created
- Procurement can bring greater transparency and structure to production decisions
- A systematic transformation approach helps turn individual levers into sustainable P&L impact
- Procurement-led levers are already cutting content spend by 10–15%
Why and how should broadcasters turn to procurement to manage content costs?
Broadcasters should turn to procurement because production has become one of the largest controllable cost pools on the P&L, just as revenue shrinks and costs climb. Four pressures make the case for why now:
- Linear-TV revenue continues to erode, shrinking the budget available for content
- Advertising spend keeps shifting from broadcast to digital and streaming platforms
- Audiences are more fragmented than ever, splitting attention across more platforms
- The cost of producing content keeps climbing, even as revenue keeps falling
The how starts with a mindset shift: treating production the way other industries treat direct spend, benchmarked, restructured and re-engineered without compromising creative or editorial quality. Procurement-led levers are already cutting content spend by 10–15% without cutting a single hour of programming, which is why this now belongs on the boardroom agenda.
What Structural Shifts Are Changing TV Content Production Costs?
The way content is produced is changing, not just its price. Behind this shift are a handful of structural changes that have opened new levers for cost and capacity management across the industry.
These levers are about how and where content gets made, including budgets, suppliers, locations and workflows, not about setting headcount targets. Several are designed to free up crews and creative teams for higher-value work rather than to eliminate roles.
The levers include:
This isn’t just about buying AI tools internally. Leading broadcasters are starting to make AI capability a condition of doing business, pushing suppliers to prove they’re pioneering smarter workflows rather than simply executing the old model at a discount.
AI is moving into both the writers’ room and the pre-production desk, assisting with script coverage and structural analysis before greenlight, and automating the script breakdown that turns a finished screenplay into a production plan (cast, props, locations, stunts, effects). Purpose-built AI breakdown tools can now tag thousands of individual elements in a single hour-long episode in under an hour. This work traditionally took assistant directors and production coordinators several days, freeing that team to focus on the judgment calls AI can’t make: creative problem-solving and troubleshooting on set.
Best-cost-country filming means shooting scripted and unscripted content in lower-cost locations that offer strong crew availability, favourable incentives, and comparable production quality. The lever increasingly pairs with virtual production, like AI-generated backgrounds, letting broadcasters cut location and travel costs further without sacrificing visual fidelity.
Remote sports production means producing live sport centrally rather than sending full crews and outside-broadcast trucks to every venue, cutting travel, logistics, and duplicated infrastructure. This approach has already been applied to Premier League coverage, moving away from fully on-site OB production in favour of remote integration, with matches now being produced remotely using fibre-connected feeds. The same logic now extends to AI-assisted camera direction: Bundesliga’s host broadcaster trialled a fully automated AI camera system for a top-flight fixture in August 2026. For suitable lower-tier fixtures, not top-flight coverage, industry benchmarks report 40–60% per-event cost reductions, with the on-site technical footprint for this specific format shrinking to roughly 4–6 crew from the 15–20 a traditional OB set-up requires.
Source: Live Production and AI: How Automation Is Redefining Real-Time Broadcasting in 2026 | The Streamic
Shared studio facilities means pooling studio space, equipment, and technical crews across genres, channels, or even broadcasters, instead of maintaining dedicated, underutilised capacity. This is increasingly formalised through multi-year facility-sharing agreements rather than ad hoc rentals, giving all parties planning certainty and volume-based pricing.
Post-production consolidation means replacing a fragmented vendor landscape, often a different supplier for editing, grading, VFX and delivery on every title, with fewer, broader-capability partners to capture scale pricing and standardise workflows. Cloud-based pipelines are accelerating this shift, letting editors, colourists and VFX teams collaborate on the same project from different locations and time zones, while cutting the duplicate infrastructure and storage costs that come with a scattered supplier base.
Individually, each of these levers can shift the cost base of a single production. Together, they add up to a fundamentally different content supply chain and production model.
The broadcasters who recognize this are the ones capturing the most value, treating these levers as part of a structured transformation rather than a series of side projects. And this is just the starting point. There are many more levers to pull in addition to the ones mentioned above.
The Broadcaster Transformation Playbook for Procurement
That transformation is where procurement comes in, not as a cost centre, but as a co-owner of the broader playbook. When procurement takes a core role from the outset, broadcasters can move from insight to impact in months rather than years.
- Build a rapid, fact-based baseline of current production spend, contracts, and suppliers, benchmarked against best-cost alternatives and comparable broadcasters.
- Translate this into a category-by-category business case that quantifies realistic savings across best-cost-country filming, remote production, shared facilities, and post-production consolidation.
- Prioritize based on quick wins versus structural levers, to ensure P&L impact throughout the transformation.
- Build the right mix of owned, shared, and outsourced capacity, and renegotiate commercial models with production partners and facilities providers accordingly.
- Embed these new production models into commissioning and scheduling processes, with clear ownership and tracking, so that savings show up in the P&L rather than staying on a slide.
Procurement’s role throughout this is not to dictate creative choices, but to give broadcasters and content producers better options, more cost transparency, and more flexibility. It’s a tool to stay relevant in an industry under sustained structural pressure.
Why Does Reshaping Content Production Economics Matter Now?
We have seen these levers reduce content spend by 10–15% without cutting a single hour of programming. That’s the kind of headroom procurement rigour can unlock when it’s applied to how and where content actually gets made, rather than to how hard suppliers are pushed on price.
As linear pressure continues to intensify, the ability to reshape production economics, without touching what viewers see on screen, is becoming one of the clearest differentiators between broadcasters managing decline and those actively repositioning for it.
Our TMT Experts
Matthew Rose
Managing Director
London
Sabrina Morton
Principal
London
Acknowledgements: Harry Jones, James Chisnall, August Karlén and Manuel Schorn
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