Scheck, meanwhile, suggests that “the real effect of tariffs has yet to materialise, especially since they seem to be a moving target. “On the whole, the impact of tariffs on sales seems to have been subdued so far. In Lawo’s case,” he points out, “a lot of solutions are based on services and apps that run in the cloud or on generic servers,” marking them largely safe from fees enforced on physical products. As a leader of IABM, Moote sees how tariffs impact each of the association’s members. “Tariffs are causing variability,” he tells us, with some members getting hit multiple times within a single supply chain. Many companies make parts in certain countries and assemble them in others. Apple, for instance, relies on Chinese production partners while outsourcing to India, Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries as well. In instances like this one, a solution might be to stick to as few places as possible. “Tariffs are part of our global day-to-day issues,” Moote notes. “The challenge has been to pinpoint their extent.” Geopolitical conflicts also have a significant impact on the supply chain. Since 2020, the world has witnessed wars between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and now, the US, Israel and Iran. Exports from these countries have slowed down on the whole, and any relevant trade routes have been disrupted – creating shortages as well as driving up costs. The age of AI While “tariffs immediately increase costs through the global supply
chain,” begins Thomas Tang, the founder and president of Apantac, “AI is creating a different kind of pressure. As the AI industry absorbs more components and manufacturing capacity, the rest of the technology sector inevitably feels the impact.” AI data centres, for instance, “are causing a huge shortage of semi-conductors, which in turn is causing supply chain and inflation issues,” suggests Moote. “The prices on non-volatile memory used in SSDs is forcing the industry back to spinning drives for many media- tech applications.” He expects this trend to continue well into 2027. Kaszycki recognises the duality of AI: it can both automate and complicate. “On the demand side, the explosion of AI-driven content workflows increases the compute and infrastructure requirements for media organisations. On the operations side, AI is genuinely useful for enriching asset data. It can identify patterns across large technology estates and surface actionable insights that would take a human team weeks to compile manually,” he explains. Despite its drawbacks, AI has the potential to change the supply chain positively. “In the short term, our hope is greater standardisation and orchestration across the ecosystem,” shares Strachan. “In the long term, though, we expect AI-driven automation to materially improve the supply chain, not just in content discovery, but in assurance, incident response, workflow optimisation and also orchestration. This will help the
industry deliver higher reliability with lower operational friction.” What comes next The future is never certain, but the industry can take an educated guess on what might happen to the media supply chain. “Most players are well aware they need to do more with less, which requires an agile, virtual infrastructure that can be built and rebuilt several times a day where necessary,” says Scheck. “The industry is evolving, and it remains to be seen exactly how baseband-only operations can hold up in the future.” Compared to pre-pandemic times, “the media supply chain today is fundamentally more complex,” Kaszycki reiterates. “Technology infrastructure has outpaced the systems meant to manage it. The supply chain does not end when equipment arrives on the loading dock; it extends through installation, configuration, maintenance, renewal, as well as eventual replacement. “The future is about smarter management of the technology organisations already own,” he says. “Those that build operational visibility into their technology estates will be better positioned to navigate the uncertainty of tariffs, shortages and accelerating refresh cycles.” Over time, Kaszycki hopes to see more ongoing partnerships between broadcasters and system integrators too, thus adding resilience – and benefitting the chain from one end to the other.
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