By Shaun Lim
As broadcasters across the Asia-Pacific region navigate vastly different stages of technology maturity, Globecast has positioned its upgraded Singapore hub as a hybrid environment built to bridge that divide, supporting traditional broadcast, IP, cloud, and over-the-top (OTT) workflows from a single operational platform.
However, despite the industry’s accelerating shift towards IP and cloud-based delivery, Globecast sees satellite continuing to play a vital role in hybrid content delivery architectures, especially for regions with limited or developing IP infrastructure.
“Satellite continues to offer unique advantages that are difficult to replicate with terrestrial networks alone,” said Biliana Pumpalovic, Managing Director, Globecast Asia.
She told APB+, “For large-scale, one-to-many distribution, especially for premium live sports, national television services, disaster recovery, and coverage of geographically dispersed regions, satellite remains highly efficient, resilient, and cost-effective. This is particularly relevant across Asia-Pacific, where infrastructure maturity varies significantly between markets.”
Looking ahead, Pumpalovic expects broadcasters to increasingly adopt cloud and IP for contribution, processing, content exchange, and OTT delivery, while maintaining satellite as a critical component of distribution and redundancy strategies. Rather than disappearing, she said, satellite will become more deeply integrated into software-defined workflows through orchestration and automation.
This is where Globecast's Content Exchange platform plays a central role. As a unified orchestration layer that allows customers to manage satellite, fibre, IP, and cloud resources through a single operational framework, Content Exchange ensures broadcasters can leverage the strengths of each transport mechanism without adding operational complexity.
Asia-Pacific's diversity in infrastructure maturity, Pumpalovic noted, is one of the defining features of the region. "Asia-Pacific is considered one of the most diverse media markets in the world," she said. Some broadcasters operate highly advanced cloud-native workflows, such as those in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, while others continue to rely heavily on satellite distribution due to geography, infrastructure availability, or business requirements, as is the case in Indonesia and the Pacific. Then there are hybrid territories, such as India and the Philippines, that sit somewhere in between.
The result, she explained, is that APAC's infrastructure fragmentation becomes Globecast's problem to solve operationally, rather than something broadcasters need to manage themselves across dozens of vendors and markets.
Globecast's strategy is to provide a technology-agnostic service model that allows customers to evolve at their own pace. “Our upgraded hub in Singapore is specifically designed as a hybrid environment that delivers satellite-based distribution into markets where it remains the preferred method, while simultaneously supporting IP distribution, cloud playout, OTT delivery, and digital-first workflows in more mature markets,” said Pumpalovic.
Content Exchange enhances this further by providing what she described as "a single pane of glass" view across multiple delivery networks. Whether content is distributed via satellite, fibre, IP, or cloud infrastructure, customers gain consistent monitoring, orchestration, and operational control.
This flexibility is particularly valuable for regional media companies that may need to deliver content via satellite into one country, fibre into another, and OTT platforms across multiple territories simultaneously. Globecast's role, she said, is to remove that complexity and provide a unified operational experience regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Globecast's ability to support broadcasters through this transition stems from having undertaken the same transformation internally. "We are simultaneously a media integrator and a managed service operator," Pumpalovic said. "Most providers force a choice — a system integrator who designs and builds then walks away, or a capacity provider who hosts but doesn't transform. Globecast does both, and that integration is precisely what de-risks a broadcaster's transition."
The company's in-house engineering teams designed, migrated, and now operate its own hybrid IP and cloud broadcast architecture in production every day. The transformation of the Singapore hub, Pumpalovic noted, was more than a facility upgrade. It was a real-world modernisation of broadcast operations and managing that transition while maintaining uninterrupted customer services gave the company first-hand experience in balancing innovation with operational continuity.
Globecast now draws on that experience to support customers through their own transformation journeys, from strategic consulting and solution design to systems integration, workflow orchestration, migration, and managed services.
For broadcasters across APAC, this offers a practical, low-risk path to modernisation. They can adopt new technologies incrementally, simplify operations, and accelerate innovation while maintaining business continuity.
"Ultimately, Globecast's goal is to make technology transformation simpler and more predictable, enabling customers to focus on content, audiences, and growth rather than infrastructure complexity," Pumpalovic said.
Anchoring this is Globecast's broader portfolio of solutions, with Content Exchange serving as the foundational platform for hybrid connectivity and orchestration.
Multi-orbit strategies redefining satellite’s role in hybrid delivery
While Globecast focuses on orchestrating delivery across satellite, fibre, IP, and cloud, the underlying satellite capacity that powers hybrid architectures is itself evolving.
SES's multi-orbit approach is built around a clear division of purpose for each orbit, with geostationary earth orbit (GEO) remaining the foundation of the company's media business and the primary layer for broadcast distribution.
Deepak Mathur, President, Media Vertical, SES, told APB+, "It is what enables us to power exceptional viewing experiences at scale, delivering consistent quality, unmatched reach, and the reliability broadcasters need for premium live content.”
Today, that translates into reaching over 700 million TV homes and nearly 2.3 billion viewers globally, with the ability to deliver more than 10,000 channels. Mathur pointed to recently signed broadcast agreements extending through to 2039 as evidence of customers' sustained, long-term confidence in the platform.
Medium earth orbit (MEO), including the O3b mPOWER constellation, plays a complementary but distinct role. Rather than traditional broadcast distribution, it is driving innovation in connectivity-led use cases, enabling high-performance, low-latency connectivity for environments such as inflight connectivity and cruise ships, where content consumption is increasingly IP-based and requires a different delivery model.
It also supports content contribution, transporting large volumes of live video from stadiums and racetracks back to production and distribution hubs, where low latency and high throughput are critical.
For Mathur, hybrid architecture is best understood as an extension of the broadcast ecosystem rather than a departure from it. "The ideal model keeps GEO firmly at the core as the backbone for linear distribution and mass reach, while integrating IP layers to support delivery to any screen, anytime, and anywhere," he said.
This allows broadcasters to maximise reach, unlock growth opportunities across platforms, and ensure content can move between linear and on-demand environments. "Hybrid is not about replacing broadcast, but about enhancing it, combining the scale and reliability of GEO with the flexibility of IP to support evolving viewer behaviour,” he said.
On the question of declining satellite video revenues as OTT grows, Mathur offered a different perspective. ResearchandMarket’s forecast shows the overall APAC video market will exceed US$165 billion by 2029, with streaming taking a larger share of revenues over time. That shift, however, will not diminish satellite's role. "It reinforces its importance in a hybrid ecosystem,” he argued.
Satellite, Mathur added, will continue to power broadcast reliability and remains the most efficient way to deliver high-quality linear content at scale, particularly for premium live programming such as sports and major events. These moments, he said, remain central to audience engagement and monetisation in a region as diverse as APAC.
The commercial opportunity, he said, lies in enabling broadcasters to reach every audience segment on any screen, supporting hybrid delivery models, enhancing the value of premium content, and enabling targeted, regionalised distribution at scale.
SES's long heritage in direct-to-home and linear broadcast distribution across APAC remains a core strength, with its infrastructure supporting over 1,300 hours of premium live sports and events every day.
But Mathur was clear that satellite's role is becoming more central within hybrid distribution, rather than being treated as a fallback option. "Rather than being positioned as a backup, satellite is increasingly becoming the backbone of hybrid content distribution."
That evolution includes integrating satellite with IP networks, cloud infrastructure, and managed services to support content contribution, aggregation, and delivery across multiple platforms. "Satellite is not being replaced, it is being redefined as an essential part of a more flexible, scalable, and future-ready content distribution model."
