The Camera Operator Is Not Going Away. Yet.
A study said our industry is collapsing.
Three reports said the same thing about our industry this week. One from a tutoring company. One from the trade press. One from a network executive in an email I almost deleted.
They line up on one number. The number is real. But it is the wrong number to read for most of us.
Here we go.
1. What the headlines got right.
A study from Wiingy this week named broadcast technicians as one of the occupations most damaged by AI. They were citing a specific Bureau of Labor Statistics of the USA (BLS).
The BLS defines that role (occupation code, 27-4012) in narrow language. “Set up, operate, and maintain the electronic equipment used to acquire, edit, and transmit audio and video for radio or television programs. Control and adjust incoming and outgoing broadcast signals to regulate sound volume, signal strength, and signal clarity. Operate satellite, microwave, or other transmitter equipment to broadcast radio or television programs.”
In plain language. Master control operators. Transmitter engineers. Signal-flow technicians. The people whose work lives between the camera and the antenna.
That role got destroyed. The US had 31,580 of them in May 2018. May 2024 had 21,080. Ten thousand five hundred jobs gone, a third of the workforce, on the same BLS classification system.
The Wiingy framing reads this as the AI story. The timeline does not quite hold up. The slide started in 2019, three years before ChatGPT, deepened through the pandemic, and accelerated through 2023 and 2024.
The wave that broke this area of our industry was master control consolidation, IP-based workflows replacing dedicated transmission hardware, REMI and at-home production thinning the field crew, cord-cutting collapsing the pay TV subscriber base, and yes the recent AI layer on top. All of that is automation in the operational sense, plus the platform shift from broadcast and pay TV to streaming. Generative AI is the most recent push, not the foundation.
So the headline number is real. The story behind it is older and broader than AI.
2. What the headlines got wrong.
When you put the broadcast technician role next to the other four occupations in the same BLS broadcast and video family, only one line falls off the chart.
Audio and Video Technicians ( code 27-4011) finished May 2024 at 92 percent of their 2018 level, after a deep pandemic dip and a strong recovery. Sound Engineering Technicians (code 27-4014) at 97 percent, basically flat. Film and Video Editors (code 27-4032) at 102 percent. Camera Operators (code 27-4031) at 116 percent. These last 2 occupations were larger in the last reports than they were six years ago.
The roles that require a human in a specific physical place, looking at the actual frame, with the actual equipment, are stable or growing. The transmission specialists are not. That tells you what was getting automated and what was not. It also tells you that the Wiingy headline of “AI is eating broadcasting” reads as true if you only look at one row of the table. It is not true for the rest of us.
3. Camera operators deserve a closer look.
This is the role that surprised me most.
Camera operators went from 21,080 in 2018 to 24,460 in 2024. Three thousand three hundred eighty new jobs. Up sixteen percent over six years. The median annual wage rose from $54,570 to $68,810. A twenty-six percent nominal gain.
Read the wage number carefully. Cumulative US inflation from May 2018 to May 2024 was also about twenty-six percent. In real terms, camera operators’ wages have been flat. The headcount growth is real. The salary growth, after inflation, is roughly zero.
That is still a better outcome than what the broadcast technicians saw. The camera in the room kept the people behind it.
4. The yet is doing a lot of work in that title.
The 2025 BLS release lands later this year. 2025 was the year AI tools moved from demo to production. The release will likely show:
— Broadcast technicians continuing to fall.
— Audio, sound, and editing roles pressured by AI captioning, audio cleanup, editing assistants, and graphics tools.
— Camera operators? Probably stable for now.
Probably. Not certainly. And not for long.
AI-driven robotic cameras are not yet good enough for top-flight live sports. Shot selection on a Premier League, NFL, or NBA match needs a human reading the play inside a two-second window. AI cameras handle amateur and lower-budget work. Not the top tier. Not yet.
That “yet” is doing the same work it does in the title. If AI learned to drive a car in the streets of Manhattan or LA, it will learn to operate a camera. My honest guess: twenty-four to thirty-six months before automated cameras start displacing operators in second-tier live sports, longer before the top tier feels it. The pressure is coming.
What it means for camera operators is what it means for everyone still in the room. Learn the tools that complement you. Run the AI-driven camera array as well as the human-driven one. Be the operator the system depends on, not the one it replaces.
One line I keep coming back to
“The camera operator is not going away. Yet.”
The word “yet” is doing more work than the rest of the sentence combined.
Curious to know if there is information like this in other countries. Let me know if you hear about it.
See you next week.
Oscar S.
Bulletin board
You read this and thought, “I want to be the operator the system depends on, not the one it replaces.”
Here is your next move.
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