This Essential Guide discusses the development of COTS systems and more importantly, the applications of flexible licensing. Although this concept has been available in mainstream IT for many years, the recent improvements in COTS hardware speeds leading to higher data throughput and faster processing has led to its adoption in broadcast television.Dynamic systems are the future of infrastructure design and optimizing for peak demand has never been so important. No longer do we have to build constrained systems that are costly and not used to their optimum efficiency. Instead, we are free to greatly improve performance, scalability and flexibility