IBC2026 trends reflect our show theme, Where Growth Takes Root. That means AI built on strong foundations, new models for interactive monetization, and sports streaming that holds up at scale.
IBC2026 takes place in its usual home of the RAI Amsterdam from 11 to 14 September, and this year the show has evolved once more to reflect the changes taking place in the industry around it. Expanding its Future Tech initiative with the launch of Future Tech Ignite, It is connecting more than 50 start-ups, entrepreneurs and emerging technologies, and continuing to build its IBC Talent Programme, which reflects concerns about maintaining the level of skills the industry workforce needs.
Over in the Conference section, there are three main programme themes: Shifting Business Models, Transformative Tech, and People & Purpose. The press statement announcing this year's show highlighted three session titles as further evidence of its focus: "Disrupt, Innovate, Create – How to embrace AI", "The New Playbook for Sports: AI, data, fans and rights", and "Security, Authenticity and Provenance". In other words, one way or another, AI is once again going to be at the centerpiece of proceedings.
For VO, that makes IBC2026 a natural opportunity to look beyond the debate around AI’s potential and focus instead on what it takes to put it to work effectively in real-world media operations.
The importance of implementing AI
That practical focus fits closely with our theme for the show this year, Where Growth Takes Root, and our emphasis on the importance of strong foundations. In practice, that means building AI on top of proven technologies, deep industry knowledge, and systems that are designed to operate reliably at scale. With over two decades of experience at the forefront of broadcast and streaming innovation, we are well placed to help customers turn AI into systems that deliver tangible operational benefits.
We touched on this when we wrote our recent post How AI Is Becoming the New Operating Layer for Media and Entertainment. AI in media is moving beyond isolated tools running fixed instructions to become a continuous operating layer that manages workflows, makes decisions, and learns from its own output. This shift is taking place across three levels: automation, which handles rule-based execution at scale; orchestration, which coordinates multiple systems into connected workflows; and agents, which make contextual decisions within defined parameters.
One key point here, which also reflects IBC’s focus on authenticity and provenance, is that trust cannot be an afterthought. As AI takes on more operational responsibility, technologies such as digital watermarking and hardware-backed authentication need to become part of the core deployment from the outset. The same applies to C2PA, the industry standard for verifying the origin and history of digital content. This is where having extensive industry experience matters most: organizations that treat AI as core infrastructure, built on governance and a trust stack from day one, are the ones better positioned to deploy it confidently at scale.
The growth of personalization
Personalization is another thread running through IBC2026's program. AI again is proving instrumental here, reshaping recommendation through more natural interaction, such as voice, and through greater intelligence, via automated metadata and semantic understanding. The caveat is that AI amplifies what already exists, so its output depends on solid data governance, not the technology alone.
That foundation matters because discovery is not a cosmetic layer. As we set out in another post this year, Why the User Experience Needs to Be More Than Just an Attractive Interface, discovery functions as the operational front door of a service, and the numbers back this up: nearly 45% of streaming users report feeling overwhelmed by content volume, with average search times of 14 to 20 minutes before selecting something to watch. An attractive interface cannot solve that on its own. Operators need discovery systems that balance editorial priorities, commercial objectives, and regulatory requirements at the same time, and that increasingly rely on dynamic logic rather than fixed layouts.
Streaming monetization and distribution
One of the prime illustrations of IBC2026's Shifting Business Models theme is the shift already well underway in AVOD and FAST. FAST has moved rapidly from niche alternative to become a core pillar of the streaming ecosystem: 45% of US households now watch FAST services, and the global market is on track to grow from $12.26 billion in 2025 to $27.14 billion by 2030, with over 2,000 FAST channels already live worldwide.
This growth is being enabled by the industry-wide rollout of targeted advertising. Trade body VAB's 2026 addressable guide reports that 53% of advertisers now treat addressable TV as a must-buy, and that 63% of those not yet buying it intend to start within a year.
Alongside all this, interactivity is becoming a core expectation rather than an add-on, with multi-view, avatar-based experiences, and creator-led channels reshaping what younger audiences expect from a "linear" stream. This will be worth watching at IBC, especially in the Future Tech area. Newer monetization mechanics such as token-gated content and micro-transactions are also worth following.
The continued strength of sports
The fact that IBC is giving Olympic Broadcasting Services its International Honour for Excellence this year helps highlight the importance of live sports to the industry. Streaming is an increasingly critical part of the live offering, both in terms of rights, with an increasing number of sports rights deals being awarded to streamers, and in terms of the overall offering for conventional broadcasters who bolster their linear coverage with concurrent streams and additional content.
Three interlocking metrics are vital for success in this area and to maintain quality of service: continuity (i.e., no buffering), low latency, and sustained image quality. We argue that hitting them at scale requires microservices architecture, multi-CDN strategy, and disaster recovery planning, backed by real-time monitoring that combines human oversight with automated alerting.
One subject worth watching at this year’s IBC will be developments in Media over QUIC, (MOQ). QUIC is a modern transport protocol designed for fast, reliable internet delivery, and MoQ applies it to live media, shifting delivery onto a transport foundation based on broadcast-style delivery rather than the request-response model of HTTP streaming, potentially delivering sub-second latency as a result. It is currently at the active standardization stage and is a subject of significant industry attention, both at the show and elsewhere.
And as always, content security remains a key challenge. Illegal IPTV redistribution is the biggest threat to sports rights holders and operates at a scale that rivals licensed services on price and user experience. DRM with key rotation as the security foundation, paired with forensic watermarking and rapid takedown, ideally within 15 minutes of detection, mitigates the threat. But technology alone will not solve the problem: it needs to be paired with a compelling legal user experience and pricing that ensures legitimate services are genuinely competitive.
The rising importance of cost per viewer
One thing all visitors to the show should have in the back of their minds is cost per viewer. As we set out in our recent piece on the metric, the era of prioritizing subscriber growth above everything else is over, and operators are now judged on sustainable unit economics, margin discipline, and operational efficiency. Cost per viewer, the total operating cost of a platform divided by active viewers over a given period, gives operators a single number that cuts across infrastructure, cloud services, CDN delivery, and operational overhead, as well as acquisition costs that are too often tracked in isolated departmental silos.
Content licensing remains the largest single cost, alongside device fragmentation, system complexity, and regulatory and cybersecurity compliance. Meanwhile, ways to keep the number down include a cloud-native, microservices architecture, automated deployment, AI-assisted development, and consolidating multiple brands onto unified backend systems.
New products and services have to be more than just capable; they need to contribute to a more efficient and sustainable operating model. That brings us back to Where Growth Takes Root: the strongest foundations are the ones that allow operators to evolve their services while keeping the economics of that growth firmly under control.
