IBC 2026: nobody wants to talk about the hard topics

At IBC 2026, the author argues that industry attention to ubiquitous AI features and dramatic latency reductions overshadowed the operational infrastructure required to deliver major live events reliably. While AI demonstrations largely focused on captioning, metadata, reframing, and synthetic talent, and low-latency streaming showed promise in controlled settings, real deployments remain constrained by advertising, content protection, last-mile delivery, synchronization, authentication, failover, caching, and real-time monitoring. Looking toward 2027, the author expects “AI-powered” to lose value as a marketing label while media consolidation reduces the number of major buyers and increases the stakes for vendors and content owners. The resulting challenge will be deciding what to build internally versus outsource, particularly as AI-generated software may increase technical debt and token-related operating costs, making scalable infrastructure a central competitive concern.

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