The continuing push throughout the IT industry toward cloud-based technologies and processing has so far not made its way to the video market with the same veracity it has to other markets. However, the benefits of virtualized and unified video components (often within a video headend) are great: decreased TCO, decreased time to revenues, faster service rollout, and greater platform flexibility for future trends and services. As more and more Pay TV operators look toward IP-delivered video technologies to better compete with the likes of Netflix and YouTube, the need for properly supporting both broadcast and IP content grows, and unified headend with virtualized components will enable this.