From AI moving into daily workflows to a growing reckoning on security, five themes dominated IBC2026. But the industry kept circling back to one question: does this make money, or does it save money?
We have already talked about IBC2026 from our perspective, but what can we say about the wider show? What did we observe walking around the halls of the RAI with its 1300 or so exhibitors? And what did we learn from the discussion themes at the conference? As ever, there is a lot to unpack from our annual trip to Amsterdam.
Very few shows worldwide have fully recovered from Covid, with attendance still down from the high-water marks achieved before the pandemic. It taught companies that they didn’t have to send big teams to long shows for multiple nights, and most have learned that lesson. Fewer people staying a shorter time is the new reality in the post-Covid era.
IBC has confirmed 41,225 visitors this year which is 6% down on 2025 and 26.2% down on its peak pre-Covid attendance of 56,000 in 2018, which was a record at the time. By comparison. NAB is down 37.6% over the same period, so IBC is maintaining its audience better than the Las Vegas show.
IBC2026 also featured more than 1300 exhibitors, 256 of which were making their show debut. So, while footfall might be down, the show maintains its position as one of the most important global events on the calendar. And its one where the amount of genuine business being done is as high as it ever was, possibly even increasing.
While outside the RAI the news cycle focused on the potential future dangers of AI and the need for regulating its development, at the show visitors were more concerned with assessing its real world potential. 2026 was the year the industry fully pivoted from demos showcasing what AI will be able to do, to those showing deployable tools that can have a genuine impact on broadcast and streaming workflows in the present. We talked before the show about how it is now impacting the industry at three different operational levels: automation, orchestration, and agents, and that was evident across IBC.
At the conference, CNN's SVP and CTO Alex Charalambides said that treating AI as "a futuristic add-on, something tacked onto the end of a strategy deck... is no longer viable," while insisting AI "accelerates journalism but never replaces human judgment."
This is an important point. Human expertise is still critical, even if in the age of agentic AI that lies more in the setting of the initial conditions or system architecture. We still maintain that AI is not a magic bullet and has to be deployed into existing workflows with care and attention, not to mention an eye on costs (the rise in pricing of tokens may turn out to be one of the stories of 2027), but the benefits it brings are undeniable.
In August 2026, OpenAI joined more than 100 companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, warning that AI-driven cyberattacks are accelerating, and they have been an almost daily news item since. In the "WIRN: If a security incident happened tomorrow, would your organisation be ready?" panel, Terri Davies, President of media security certification program Trusted Partner Network, noted that "Trusted Partner Network sent out more security alerts in the first half of this year than in early 2025. This year's IBM report is estimating the cost of a breach at US$5m, up 12% from last year, and 56% of threats are driven by AI. There's a tsunami coming."
Bekhan Batalov, Director, Content Protection, EMEA, Motion Picture Association summed it up. "Most people expect rocket science hackers, but most causes of security breaches are simple: leaked credentials, shared accounts, phishing and AI," he explained. "AI can help or hurt very bad. Pirates are always looking for new ways and we must train people on the dangers of AI, not just deepfakes but detecting when and where AI can be used against us, trying to be a step ahead of pirates, thinking like one even."
In a separate session, Google & GC-SC's CISO Toby Scales described trust and anti-piracy as "a community effort," pointing to Google's recent open-sourcing of C2PA tools for verifying the origin and authenticity of digital content. Panelists from LaLiga and Globo meanwhile framed it as shared industry responsibility rather than a single company's problem to solve.
We have often argued that there needs to be a more holistic industry attitude to anti-piracy rather than a piecemeal approach. The arrival of AI-driven threats could be the catalyst for action in this area to ramp up.
IBC’s pivot to welcoming the creator economy has not been as pronounced as NAB’s has been, but nevertheless the platform was ever-present from the prosumer gear that the production and camera companies are increasingly promoting to the robust debate about its impact now and in the future at the conference.
Ampere Analysis's Guy Bisson made the very valid point that the "Is YouTube TV?” debate misses the real issue, namely that broadcast-level content costs four times or more what YouTube's ad model can sustain. His solution? A two-tier advertising model priced by content quality and production investment, either custom ad-sales control that lets premium content partners sell their own inventory directly against their YouTube uploads, or a system of minimum guarantees already common in long-form distribution deals.
Either way, the future mix of content consumption is likely to change. Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro pointed out that 81% of the population of Earth is under 55, and many of them in turn are smartphone natives.
“Most video on earth is watched on phones and in bed, waiting in line and on the toilet. The younger you get, the more this is true,” he said. Those who expected traditional media to be replaced dollar for dollar and audience for audience by streaming were wrong. Rather, the time spent consuming TV content is being replaced by a combination of streaming and social media on televisions and phones. “This is what I call personalized TV,” he said.
Broadcasters and operators, and the systems they operate, will need to follow this audience as it migrates.
If you want an indication of how sport continues to grow and be of major importance to broadcasters and operators around the world, look no further than the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. These are set to be the largest broadcast operation ever attempted, with over 14,000 hours of content planned as against Paris's 11,000.
The growth in interest has been phenomenal. "In 2004, broadcasters produced around 44,000 hours of Olympic programming," Olympic Broadcasting Services CEO Yiannis Exarchos said. "In Paris, it was close to 500,000 hours."
Meeting the scale of that challenge is a large part of what Exarchos and the OBS team will be working towards over the next two years. They won't be the only ones either, as the continued growth of sports presents both challenge and opportunity to media businesses around the world.
The challenge lies in satisfying audience demands for high-quality, low-latency video. On that point it was interesting to see momentum gathering around the emerging MoQ standard, which allows for ultra low-latency broadcasts below one second lag. It is still too early for real production use cases, but the technology is promising and there were by our count at least nine demos of it at different stands in the RAI. By 2027 there could be many more.
The opportunity, meanwhile, lies in new technology that provides the ability to engage the fanbase when it arrives, as well as new forms of monetization such as virtual ad insertion. Caretta Research says that sports streaming services are adopting this at an impressive 18.4% CAGR to replace static sponsorships.
Something we talked about before the show that was highlighted again and again while at it is the importance of keeping costs down. We have mentioned that the Cost Per Viewer metric, total operating cost divided by active viewers, is an effective way of understanding the health of a modern media business, and we outlined the importance of tracking it systematically. But the phrase that you heard constantly on the RAI show floor possibly put it even more succinctly: “It has to make money or save money.”
It really is as simple as that.
Whether people were looking at stripping operational overhead and engineering-heavy release cycles out of running and updating a TV service, or whether they were looking at overtly money-making opportunities with Targeted TV Advertising, it was all about delivering in the here and now. And we expect that to continue for the next trade show cycle, deepening and intensifying many of the trends listed above.
IBC2027 is confirmed for 10-13 September at the RAI Amsterdam, and we’ll be back at our usual location in Hall 1 on Stand A51. Until then, as ever, it is going to be an interesting time ahead.
All pics: IBC