As broadcast facilities transition to 4K/8K production, cloud-hybrid workflows, and AI-enhanced post-production, file-sharing infrastructure has emerged as an unexpected bottleneck. Whilst the industry invests heavily in storage hardware and networking equipment, the protocols enabling file access often remain overlooked until they limit production efficiency.

Modern broadcast operations demand unprecedented data throughput. Virtual production requires real-time rendering with immediate access to multiple asset versions. Post-production teams transfer massive files for editing, color correction, and VFX work. Live operations require rapid ingest and distribution. Yet whilst facilities deploy cutting-edge storage and 100GbE networking, traditional file-sharing implementations often operate at a fraction of available bandwidth – creating productivity constraints that slow collaborative workflows.

We’ll examine performance characteristics impacting broadcast operations: multi-threaded architecture requirements, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) implementation differences, SMB compression impact on uncompressed formats, and multichannel performance for bandwidth aggregation. Using anonymized performance data from media production environments, the presentation demonstrates measured throughput differences between implementations, examining impact on collaborative editing, render operations, and archive access.

Practical guidance addresses protocol performance evaluation during storage procurement, integration for IP-based facilities and virtualized environments, container deployments, and cloud-hybrid models. The paper will examine how protocol optimization integrates with existing infrastructure investments, drawing on implementation patterns across industries handling similar data challenges.

The speaker brings unique expertise as former Microsoft architect who designed the SMB protocol, now applying this knowledge to enterprise storage challenges across broadcast, medical, and high-performance computing. This combination provides insights bridging theoretical design and practical facility deployment, particularly relevant as facilities plan infrastructure supporting AI-enhanced workflows, virtual production, and distributed operations.