By Eamonn Curtin, Gravity Media, chief commercial officer.

The sports broadcasting landscape underwent a major transformation in 2025. As audiences demanded more content, delivered faster and across more platforms than ever before, rights-holders pushed for greater operational efficiency, and environmental sustainability shifted from an aspiration to a contractual expectation.

From our perspective at Gravity Media, working across our two core pillars, production and content and media services and facilities, it became clear that two major developments were driving this shift: the rapid evolution of remote production for live events, and the rise of managed service models to support year-round content operations. As we move into 2026, these trends are becoming increasingly interconnected, shaping the way sports broadcasters plan, produce, and deliver content.

How remote production has evolved into a creative mindset

For years, remote production was viewed as a logistical tactic – a way to reduce costs or carbon emissions without compromising on the quality of live coverage. As we approach the end of 2025, we have recognised that remote production has matured far beyond a technical alternative.

Our experience working across high-profile sports such as Formula E, which prides itself on innovation and sustainability, has shown that remote workflows can enhance creative output as much as operational efficiency. Centralised galleries allowed directors, replay teams, EVS operators, audio engineers, and commentators to collaborate with greater cohesion, with no reliance on temporary on-site setups.

Teams who once depended on large on-site technical footprints are increasingly operating through connected production hubs, where replay operators, editors, commentary teams, and directors work side by side regardless of where the event itself is happening. The result goes beyond efficiency, it is sharper storytelling informed by richer data, more tools, and more specialist expertise in one place.

This evolution aligns closely with the environmental priorities many rights-holders have brought to the table. With global travel under scrutiny and sustainability becoming part of rights agreements, we have seen remote-first planning shift from being a nice-to-have to an operational expectation. For organisations delivering high-intensity sports across multiple cities or continents, remote production has become a structural advantage.

Managed services are becoming core to year-round output

Alongside the evolution of live production, 2025 confirmed an industry-wide shift toward non-stop content creation. Sports broadcasters now operate like entertainment brands, delivering behind-the-scenes access, documentary-style features, short-form clips, sponsor activations, and multilingual digital packages year-round.

Our work illustrates this transformation. Across multiple North American studios, our managed service teams deliver hundreds of live and virtual productions annually, combining in-studio, remote, and virtual workflows.

From creative strategy and content planning to post-production and multi-platform delivery, we have seen how a managed service approach can scale seamlessly while supporting highly complex production demands. AI-driven content tools, immersive XR stages, and centralised digital asset management ensure that live content can feed directly into social-first, partner-ready, and long-form formats without delay.

What we expect to see in 2026

Remote production and managed services are increasingly interconnected, shaping how live and non-live content flows through the industry. Remote hubs provide the capacity and technical flexibility to capture world-class live events, while managed service teams extend that coverage into ongoing digital storytelling, audience engagement, and multi-platform distribution.

A live Formula E race can feed directly into highlight packages, social content, sponsor-ready assets, and behind-the-scenes features, just as enterprise-scale operations like Meta demonstrate with their multi-studio, multi-format production pipelines. We see these two approaches reinforcing each other, creating workflows that are faster, more flexible, and more sustainable, while supporting a higher standard of creative output.

As we enter 2026, the industry is settling into a new baseline. Remote production will no longer be something broadcasters “try”, it will be an assumption. Managed services will no longer be viewed as external support, they will be embedded extensions of a rights-holder’s creative and technical capability.

The organisations that thrive will be those that embrace this interconnected approach. Remote production delivers flexible, sustainable, world-class live coverage. Managed services ensure those live moments continue to engage audiences year-round. Together, they reflect the evolving expectations of rights-holders and fans alike.

For Gravity Media, this mirrors our two pillars of services: Production and Content and Media Services and Facilities operating alongside each other to support the full breadth of modern sports storytelling. From our perspective, it represents a smarter, more sustainable, and more creatively ambitious way of producing sport, and it’s rapidly becoming the industry standard.