Inside IBC's innovation boom: what's powering the future of media?

Speaking exclusively to TVBEurope, four of its experts weigh in on the IBCs role in fostering innovation, the technological shifts on the horizon, and why sport remains a key driver of industry change

By TVBEurope Staff

Published: February 5, 2025

Speaking exclusively to TVBEurope, four of its experts weigh in on the IBC's role in fostering innovation, the technological shifts on the horizon, and why sport remains a key driver of industry change

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IBC continues to solidify its status as an innovation hub, bringing together the brightest minds in media, entertainment and technology to develop ideas. As the media landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, industry leaders recognise IBC as an essential platform for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and breakthrough advancements.

From practical new AI advances to pioneering 5G applications to innovations cutting the industry's carbon footprint, IBC2025 is poised to showcase the latest tech trends shaping content creation, distribution, and audience engagement. As IBC prepares to accept its latest Technical Paper submissions (deadline 14th February) and its Accelerator Kickstart Day (12th February), four of its experts weigh in on the event's role in fostering innovation, the technological shifts on the horizon, and why sport remains a key driver of industry change.

Is IBC becoming more of a hotbed for innovation than ever? Why? Fergal Ringrose Fergal Ringrose, chair of the IBC Innovation Awards Jury: Innovation in the media content supply chain and the content consumption landscape is accelerating. Content providers are in a battle to retain audiences, whether broadcasters or streamers or social media platforms, and that competition for eyeballs is increasing each year - so the role of IBC as the Innovation Hub becomes more compelling, more essential. It's the one global forum where the industry comes together to share knowledge as a community for innovation.

Paul Entwistle, chair of IBC's Technical Papers Committee: The breadth of technology that impacts media and entertainment continues to grow. If you look at the complexities around delivering across all the different devices and platforms - from HD to smartphones to VR - the hybridisation of IP technologies and television continues to grow. You see that in the personalisation, targeting and data mining. On top of all that, operational efficiency, sustainability and regulation are also driving innovation.

Mark Smith, co-lead for the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme: I'd echo all that. In the Accelerator Programme, we're right in the middle of all the ideas that come in, seeing firsthand how collaboration is really the fuel for progress in the industry.

Muki Kulhan, co-lead for the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme: The innovation trajectory goes up and up every year, and the IBC audience knows they learn something new when they come to Amsterdam - whether through the Accelerator Programme, a new hall, new demos, or an emerging vendor. Many are coming to IBC just to be in the middle of that hotbed.

What are some of the big innovations and technical trends you expect to see at IBC in 2025? Mark Smith MS: AI is still a big trend. But we're going to see a lot more practical, very specific integration of AI into different processes. It will be more about the actual specifics rather than some of the big-picture, more hyped AI stories we've seen.

MK: AI is everywhere but increasingly it's about how it's being used as a tool to help with automation and to collaborate better - whether that's in production, post-production, distribution, emerging media, or newer technologies.

PE: Clearly AI is a hot topic. Within technical papers, we have seen it expand from a niche metadata extraction tool to across the board: encoding, advertising, production. But last year, only a third of the papers were AI related, so there is still a very large proportion of innovation going beyond AI.

FR: Another area is IP-based production, where media facilities running on cloud platforms enable the continuing innovation we're seeing in remote, distributed and virtualised production across the content chain. HDR is another innovation becoming established as a high-quality staple across production, and mobile devices now account for an increasingly large share of content consumption - with private 5G networks and mobile edge compute potentially powering AR and VR experiences.

More than ever, sport appears to be a huge driver of the industry innovations we are seeing at IBC. Why? FR: The bottom line is that, as audiences continue to fragment across all other areas of consumption, live sport is the one linear area retaining viewership and driving revenues. The pandemic forced the sports industry into innovations that they weren't widely adopting before, moving beyond the traditional model of everyone going to venue and producing out of trucks. Connectivity and cloud have become key to new remote and distributed workflows, with SMPTE 2110 and SRT enabling ultra-low latency while reducing the need for equipment and personnel - and the carbon footprints as well

Paul Entwistle PE: Sport has always been at the heart of TV, particularly pay-TV - and competition for money drives innovation. It has led the way in areas such as HD, 4K, HDR, VR and more. Previous years' technical papers have shared the challenges of implementing HDR,

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