IBC2026 welcomed 41,225 attendees from 170 countries to the RAI Amsterdam, down around six per cent on 2025’s 43,858. But if the number of people through the doors was slightly lower, the exhibitor picture told a rather different story. More than 1,300 companies filled the halls, including 256 first-time exhibitors – an increase of 36 per cent year-on-year and comfortably ahead of the almost 230 newcomers anticipated before the show.
Those figures perhaps reflect what IBC CEO Mike Crimp had predicted ahead of the event. Against a backdrop of geopolitical instability and disruption to global trade, he suggested businesses were becoming more intentional about investment and innovation, and would arrive in Amsterdam with a greater focus on collaboration, practical innovation and solutions to shared challenges.
Four days at the RAI suggested he had called it pretty accurately. “IBC’s superpower is the power to convene our industry,” said Crimp as the show closed. “Our industry has always been at its best when people come together, embrace new technology, and work through challenges to create real opportunity.”
The most striking impression from the show floor was not the emergence of one dominant technology. Rather, technologies that have been discussed individually for several years – IP, cloud, software-defined production, AI, virtual production and immersive media – increasingly appeared as parts of interconnected production environments.
For Installation readers, however, there was another significant shift. Technologies and workflows developed for broadcast are increasingly being applied in corporate, education, venues, houses of worship and live events, while AV technologies and suppliers are becoming part of the same IP-based production ecosystem. The much-discussed convergence of broadcast and pro AV increasingly looks less like a future trend than the market IBC is already serving.
That breadth was also reflected in Future B2B’s Best of Show awards, with judging across Installation and its sister titles recognising products spanning production, networking, audio, control, AI and software-defined infrastructure. Installation chose two winners: VITEC’s X-View integrated displays, which combine IPTV and digital signage technology with integrated display hardware, and Vizrt’s TriCaster Prizm, a scalable live production system aimed at applications including corporate communications, education, live events and sports streaming.
BROADCAST MEETS AV
Prizm exemplifies the AV and broadcast crossover, serving organisations increasingly producing their own content. Diversified’s first IBC appearance also reinforced this: its booth focused on workflows as brands behave like media companies and sports teams and venues build direct audience relationships.
Such customers need hybrid platforms combining collaboration and presentations with live production and distribution. Broadcast-quality production is consequently becoming part of wider enterprise and venue strategies, changing integrators’ roles.
Grass Valley’s AVORA addresses this by combining switching, graphics, audio, remote guests, replay, recording, monitoring, playout and delivery for sports, events, venues, education and enterprise media. Ross Video also serves broadcast, sports and corporate users, while Lawo’s Edge One stagebox, making its European trade-show debut, was developed specifically for broadcast and pro AV. AVORA and Edge One both won TVBEurope Best of Show awards.
The widening constituency was evident in the emphasis on supporting content creation as an everyday organisational function. For integrators, the challenge is increasingly to connect production capabilities with the collaboration, presentation and distribution systems their customers already use.
AI DISCUSSIONS
Crimp’s pre-show observation that AI discussions had shifted from theoretical possibilities to practical production challenges was borne out across the halls.
Vizrt’s TriCaster Vizion AI/R combines real-time AI keying and AR graphics, reducing the specialist skills needed for immersive production. Its TV Tech Best of Show award underlined how sophisticated techniques are becoming accessible to organisations with fewer production resources.
ENCO’s enCue – debuting at the show – analyses programmes and podcasts to identify clips, generate titles and captions and reformat content. It can also match footage to scripts or narration to assemble initial news packages for editorial refinement. The aim is to automate repetitive work around editorial judgement. Both enCue and enCaption Sierra won TV Tech awards.
ENCO’s Qimera platform supports green-screen studios, AR graphics and LED-based XR within one system, allowing multiple production environments in a single studio. This emphasis on space and operational efficiency has obvious relevance to corporate studios and universities.
Sony combined OCELLUS camera tracking, XYN spatial capture and Crystal LED displays, while ROE Visual unveiled its Sirius IC driver. Leyard Europe worked with KST Moschkau, Panasonic and Brompton Technology on a functioning studio using 0.9mm Planar DirectLight Pro LED. Acquisition, automation, robotics, production, processing and visualisation formed an end-to-end ST 2110 workflow, connecting display technology directly with broadcast infrastructure.
For an AV market increasingly involved in studios, corporate content spaces and immersive environments, Leyard’s display demo offered a useful illustration of how collaborative system design can bring those capabilities together. The display formed a part of a complete production environment, with supporting infrastructure equally prominent.
SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE
Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine 12K LF 100G introduced 100Gb Ethernet connectivity to ST 2110 workflows. Its cinema/live-production crossover and Fairlight Live software and hardware illustrated the overlap between previously separate production environments.
Matrox Video integrated ORIGIN with NVIDIA Holoscan for Media in its EBU Dynamic Media Facility showcase, enabling software-defined services within Kubernetes and connection through the Media eXchange Layer (MXL). MXL, established by the EBU with the North American Broadcasters Association and hosted by the Linux Foundation, won IBC’s Content Creation Innovation Award.
Grass Valley also combined AMPP, MXL, shared compute and orchestration to connect software-defined workflows with existing infrastructure across on-premises, edge and cloud environments. The principles are familiar to AV: open architectures, interoperable endpoints and processing deployed where needed.
Other Innovation Awards recognised Reuters’ API-orchestrated distribution, Globo’s broadcast/broadband DTV+ implementation and an AI-powered sign-language solution from G&L Systemhaus, Signapse, Norsk/id3as and Akamai. Jury chair Fergal Ringrose highlighted “collaborative, cloud-native, software-first digital ecosystems”.
DirectOut’s new RAVENNA capabilities simplify distributed audio production through synchronisation from incoming network streams and NMOS BCP-008 support. Lawo’s HOME Stream Share App similarly enables media exchange between facilities, OB trucks, cloud resources and partners using open NMOS standards.
Ross Video’s Ultrix FR30 combines routing, processing, multiviewing, audio, switching and control with SDI and IP support. Its broadcast, sports, OB and corporate positioning again shows the widening customer base. FR30 won a TVBEurope Best of Show award, reinforcing the prominence of infrastructure products across the awards programme.
FR30’s support for both SDI and IP also reflected another recurring theme at IBC2026: the transition to IP remains a work in progress. With many customers migrating existing infrastructures incrementally rather than replacing them wholesale, exhibitors continue to cater for hybrid environments. Cobalt Digital expanded IPMX capabilities for hybrid SDI/IP workflows; AJA’s OG-FiDO-4 fibre conversion cards reinforced the continuing importance of SDI and fibre in multi-camera deployments.
FAMILIAR WORKFLOWS
MultiDyne’s SilverBack-IP connects cinema cameras to ST 2110 networks while retaining familiar workflows. The platform, already used in concerts and houses of worship, turns the camera edge into IP infrastructure without forcing operators to change how they work. SilverBack-IP also collected a TVBEurope Best of Show award.
Matrox supported IPMX alongside ST 2110 and NMOS, with Chyron using Avio 2 IP KVM extenders for centralised production access. PlexusAV also demonstrated IPMX technology, linking broadcast-style networking with AV-over-IP.
G&D and VuWall publicly debuted vsNEO for OB vehicles, esports and corporate control rooms. Adder’s AIM 6 management environment offers greater visibility and control over complex IP KVM installations. Alongside APANTAC, these vendors addressed a shared need across broadcast, command environments and corporate media: secure access to distributed resources with manageable infrastructure.
AIM 6 also collected a TVBEurope Best of Show award, reflecting the emphasis at IBC2026 on solving practical migration and management challenges rather than assuming that an IP deployment automatically makes production simpler.
ONE MEDIA MARKET?
The changing exhibitor mix provided perhaps the simplest evidence of all. Exhibitors including Sharp, Analog Way, ROE Visual, Adder, G&D, VuWall, PlexusAV and APANTAC showed how comfortably companies familiar to Installation readers now sit within IBC alongside established broadcast manufacturers.
Conversely, technologies developed for TV production are increasingly being packaged for corporate communications, universities, sports venues, live events and other AV environments. Vizrt Prizm and Grass Valley AVORA are obvious examples, but the same direction could be seen in networked audio, KVM, LED production, virtual studios and software-defined media processing across the halls of the RAI.
That does not mean broadcast and AV have suddenly become identical disciplines. Their operational requirements, cultures and standards remain different in important ways. But the tech layers beneath them are increasingly shared.
IBC’s Accelerator programme reinforced the wider picture, with nine projects addressing real-world challenges spanning agentic AI, immersive experiences, private 5G, accessibility, content provenance and live-event streaming. The AI Agent Assistants for Live Production project, named Accelerator Project of the Year, brought ITN, the BBC and Channel 4 together with multiple technology vendors around a vendor-agnostic framework in which AI agents augment production while editorial control remains with people.
EASY DEPLOYMENT
What connected much of IBC2026 was therefore not a single protocol or fashionable technology but a desire to make increasingly sophisticated media systems easier to deploy, connect and operate. Software-defined infrastructure is allowing resources to move away from dedicated hardware; IP is turning signals into network resources; AI is increasingly handling repetitive or technically difficult tasks; and production capabilities once reserved for broadcasters are becoming accessible to a far wider range of organisations.
Even in a year when attendance slipped, IBC hardly felt like an industry retreating. The rise in first-time exhibitors and sheer number of collaborative demonstrations pointed instead towards a market attempting to make several years of rapid technological development genuinely useful.
For readers of this publication, perhaps the clearest conclusion from Amsterdam was that it is becoming increasingly difficult to discuss the future of AV without discussing media production at the same time. The technologies on display at IBC2026 were increasingly open, software-defined, IP-connected and AI-assisted – but they were also increasingly being designed for a world in which broadcasters, venues, enterprises, universities and other content creators are drawing from the same expanding technology toolbox.
IBC2027 will take place at the Amsterdam RAI from 10-13 September 2027.
You can subscribe to Installation magazine for free here and the daily newsletter here.
