Visitors to the 2025 IBC Show were eager to discuss the latest trends and test out new products and services, all with the goals of content monetization and learning more about improving the cost, efficiency and speed of producing that content.
Whether you’re a traditional broadcaster, streaming service, sports producer or content creator, the show, which took place Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, had something for everyone—whether you were focused on improving production efficiency and flexibility through cloud and IP-based workflows, using AI to automate tasks, optimize archives and expand content discovery, or learning about new standards that promote interoperability.
“IBC2025 has delivered real business outcomes with overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees,” IBC CEO Michael Crimp said. “What struck me most was the sense of optimism and purpose—exhibitors, visitors, speakers and partners all came here to shape the future of our industry. We look forward to continuing the journey together next year.”
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The show reported 43,858 visitors, a slight decrease from the 45,085 who attended in 2024. Attendees came from more than 170 countries and there were more than 1,300 exhibitors scattered throughout the 14 halls that make up the RAI labyrinth.
More Options for Viewers, Broadcasters
Thomas Lind, product management director at Appear, summarized today’s media consumption market and the impact younger viewers are having on how media companies will respond.
“The younger generation uses everything, but the way we distribute the TV content to the consumers has changed,” he says. “The underlying technology to do that is fundamentally the same—yes, we may have new codecs, different network structures bringing live video. We’re consuming more and more video, it’s just coming from different sources.”
Jeff Moore, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Ross Video, commented on how product development has been impacted by the move from hardware to software.
“There’s always incremental improvement, but I think we’re just used to a pace of improvement that has increased over the years,” he said. “The amount of change that’s happening in business is huge, and it’s true on the supplier side as well; the amount of innovation that we can drive across the board on our products is accelerating. It’s gotten easier to build things. First of all, we used to have to develop all this stuff almost from scratch. And then we went to software-based libraries, platforms, Windows or Linux or things like that, that gave us some capabilities that we didn’t have before.”
Remote Production Comes of Age
With the move to work-from-home scenarios accelerated by the pandemic, companies now have a much wider pool of professionals to pull from, Moore added. While sales will always need to be within close proximity to their customers, tech developers can come from anywhere in the world now.
“Remote collaboration has gotten easier,” Moore said. “You can hire experts and they don’t have to move to Ottawa [Ross’s home base] to be part of the team.”
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As has been the case for years now, interest in using IP and cloud computing for live production was top of mind for many attendees. What was once a growing trend turned into a tech tsunami five years ago when remote production became the default for broadcasters worldwide. Moving to that phase meant taking the cloud and IP more seriously.
But each case can be different—the demands of live sports can be different from broadcasting a legislative session or town hall, for example. While some low-profile events can be broadcast entirely in a cloud-based platform, the vast majority of live production is done in a hybrid on-prem and cloud architecture.
Jon Wilson, the new CEO of Grass Valley, noted as much when discussing how customers are deploying Grass Valley AMPP, the company’s cloud-native live production platform.
“Let’s demystify the fact that AMPP is a cloud-only solution, as over half of our customers today are running AMPP on-premise with COTS compute, whether it’s a single remote control solution, a monitoring tool or a full end-to-end software-defined production,” he said.
Emerging Standards
As an industry that operates on standards-based technology, new protocols such as IPMX and MXL were also most popular discussions on the show floor.
Developed by the AIMS Alliance (Alliance for IP Media Solutions) to bring the functionality of the SMPTE 2110 video-over-IP transport protocol, IPMX has gained substantial ground in AV and, in many ways, is helping to blur the lines between television and AV.
Suzana Brady, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, discussed the advantages IPMX brings to both customers and vendors, many of which share the same goals and infrastructures.
“IPMX is a simplified version [of 2110] for Pro AV,” she said. “So now Pro AV companies that deploy equipment in high densities of many vendors together—if all vendors are on the open-standard IPMX, it’s so much easier. Everything talks, it’s easy to implement, and you don’t need new personnel, because it’s very, very basic.”
To address this expanding market, Cobalt has introduced two new Sapphire BBG mini converters that were illustrative of the industry’s move to bridge both worlds. “It’s a 2110 IPMX conversion to HDMI and SDI and vice versa,” Brady says. “So you can put it in a truck and receive JPEG-XS content, or IPMX content onto HDMI monitors.”
Grass Valley Chief Product Officer Adam Marshall discusses the latest advances in the company’s AMPP SaaS platform. (Image credit: GV)
Another emerging industry standard that was the talk of the exhibitor floor was MXL, also known as Media eXchange Layer. Just prior to NAB Show in April, the Linux Foundation, an organization that promotes collaboration on open-source software, hardware, standards and data, announced the Media eXchange Layer Project in collaboration with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA). MXL is designed to enable seamless, real-time, in-memory exchange of video, audio and timed metadata between media functions within modern, software-driven, distributed media production environments.
Andreas Hilmer, chief marketing officer for Lawo, says MXL advances a more open approach to IP-based media production.
“The concept is basically to build a facility where the processing is based on standardized servers running software with licensing that also allows you to allocate your resources flexibly,” Hilmer says.
Characterizing SMPTE 2110 as a “linear approach,” Hilmer says MXL will bring more interoperability between vendors in a 2110 environment.
“With ST 2110 going into a server, you do your processing, and you’re getting out again, but in a production workflow, usually it is multiple elements from different vendors and this can cause delay,” he says. “The concept of MXL is that it is a standard server compute … the signal is already in the memory of that device. So we need to basically define how multivendor access is possible to that image, which is already in memory—that is Media eXchange Layer. It’s about standardizing on principles which allow us to keep multivendor environments up and running without this need to get in, get out, get in, get out, which obviously adds latency as well and have direct access to anything.”
Del Parks, president of technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group, touched on the importance of MXL at the Grass Valley Forum just prior to the opening of the show, announcing that NABA had just joined the company’s GVx customer council.
“MXL is going to be really important,” he said. It will allow us to freely exchange information, video files, without a lot of transcoding, without a lot of interference,” he says. “It really is a very important step in our industry.”
AI on the Floor
As was the case at the past couple of shows, artificial intelligence was also front and center among attendees and vendors. At the AWS stand, more than 70% of the demos featured generative AI workflows in one form or another, according to Stephanie Lone, Global Director of M&E Solutions Architecture for AWS,
Lone talked about the use of multiple AI agents that can now be used to handle automated workflow tasks in the media supply chain.
“What we’re trying to show here is how to optimize your workflow [with agentic AI],” she said. “For example, a piece of content can come in, and one agent takes a look at the content and through video understanding, it says, ‘this is a film, OK?’ So the first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to go check its compliance check its color, check this, check this or that.
“So it starts calling out to all these other agents…what’s that agent really good at?” she continued. “Well, this one’s really good at checking the frame rate. This one’s really good at checking color correction, etc. So it’s farming out in these little sub jobs, basically, to all of these agents, and getting the responses back and then deciding what to do next.”
Jean Macher, senior director of Global SaaS Solutions for Harmonic expounded on how his company is deploying AI to manage elements in a media production.
“AI brings three types of benefits,” he said. “First, better quality experiences, so you improve your video quality with AI. We do video compression, which has been using machine learning for years that delivers great results in terms of compression efficiency. But then there’s also lower operational costs; you can use AI to detect ad breaks, to come up with highlights automatically, wherever human labor can be reduced.”
The third benefit is of course, monetization opportunities and Macher described recent steps Harmonic has taken to improve targeted advertising.
“In the past year, we have introduced new ad units for live sports,” he said. “We call them ‘in- stream’ where they merge the live content with the ad using double box format or L shaped format, but we do that on the SSAI [server-side ad insertion]. “We do that at the streaming level, server side, which means that you can sell that based on impressions, and you can tap into the programmatic ad ecosystem.”
Macher talked about how Harmonic’s use of AI can better manage ad breaks amid the randomness of live sports.
“You can use AI to analyze, in real time, the live sport action and contextually detect certain moments, and then, based on that, trigger the insertion of these ad units, because you don’t have a pretty fine ad break,” he said. “This is all happening randomly based on the action in the game.”
The Mood
Costa Nikols, Telos Alliance’s strategy advisor, M&E, summed up the mood at the show, comparing it to the NAB Show, which was overshadowed by the Trump administration’s tariff threats, a topic that didn’t seem to impact IBC as much.
Nikols noted that the uncertainty that tinged the spring gathering in Las Vegas over future projects was less of a factor at IBC.
“Day one was pretty busy. Day two had more of an ebb and flow,” he said. “But there was a level of consistency in the conversations that we did have that projects are happening, customers are buying things. People are talking about the technology trends like virtualization, AI, even a continuation of 2110 projects, all that stuff is going on. So it does seem to be a little bit more buoyant.”
