IBC 2026 is a wrap, and we're coming home with more than tired feet. Our work on Sony One LATAM picked up a TVBEurope Best of Show award, which was a brilliant way to finish four days in Amsterdam.

Between the stand in Hall 5 and our session on the Content Everywhere stage, we spoke to a lot of people about where the industry is heading. Some of it confirmed what we already suspected. Some of it has us rethinking the year ahead. Here's what we're bringing back.

AI is done being a talking point

Sessions this year weren't asking whether AI belongs in the workflow anymore. They were asking how to actually put it to work, from production through to distribution and newsroom operations. A few years ago, AI panels were mostly about potential. This year they were about deployment: what's actually running in production, what's failed, and what's still too risky to touch.

That matches what we're seeing with our own clients. Fewer people want a demo. More people want a plan, a timeline and a number attached to it. Curiosity has turned into procurement, and that changes the kind of partner they're looking for.

Sport is still the proving ground

Live sport came up again and again, and for good reason. Rights, data, fan engagement and real-time personalisation all collide in live production in a way that forces hard decisions fast. There's no room to get it wrong when millions of people are watching the same moment at once.

Audiences expect a personalised, on-demand experience even when they're watching something live. But a lot of live sport still runs on infrastructure that was built for a broadcast era, one screen, one feed, one experience for everyone. Closing that gap between what audiences expect and what the infrastructure can actually deliver is where a lot of the interesting work in the industry is happening right now, and it's a space we expect to be spending more time in.

Freely was the name on everyone's lips

We lost count of how many conversations turned to Freely. Broadcasters want to be on it, and the ones already there want to get more out of it, whether that means reaching new audiences or making their channels work harder commercially. For a platform that's still so young, it's already changing how UK broadcasters think about getting onto the big screen.

It's a space we know well. We already help channels launch and grow on Freely, with more on the way later this year to make that even easier. If Freely is on your roadmap, please feel free to reach out.  

Trust is becoming a feature, not a value statement

Provenance and authenticity in content had a real presence this year, and not as an ethics footnote tacked onto the end of an AI panel. As AI-generated material gets harder to spot, verifying what's real is turning into something platforms need to build for, the same way they'd build for scale or uptime. It's no longer just a policy line in a terms of service document. It's becoming a product requirement.

Speed is the differentiator clients actually care about

Our own moment on stage was sharing how we rebuilt GAA's D2C platform across eight apps in under ten weeks, work that led to GAA acquiring the platform outright this year. It's a project we're proud of, and it mirrors the wider mood at the show.

Platform owners aren't just asking for new features anymore. They're asking who can deliver them fast enough to matter, before the moment they're building for has already passed. Speed used to be a nice-to-have. Now it's often the first question in the room.

Where this leaves us

None of this is new to us. It's the roadmap for the conversations we'll be having with clients and partners over the next twelve months: faster delivery, smarter AI adoption, and platforms built to earn trust rather than assume it.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the stand, sat in on the panel, or grabbed us in the hallways over the four days.  

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