What to actually see at IBC 2026: an engineer’s guide to the agent and DMF show

Kyle SuessSeptember 9, 2026

IBC opens Friday. If you are reading this on a plane, or at a desk with a badge already printed and no plan beyond "walk the halls," this is the short version of what is worth your time.

The story of IBC 2026 is two things happening at once. Every vendor is showing an AI agent, and the industry finally has to decide which ones actually do anything. Meanwhile the EBU's Dynamic Media Facility work gets its first real progress check, with multi-vendor demonstrations and a new MXL release landing at the show rather than in a press release afterward.

Everything else at IBC this year sits somewhere on those two trails.

How big is IBC 2026, actually?

The show runs Friday 11 to Monday 14 September at the RAI Amsterdam.

The official figure is 1,300 exhibitors and 45,000 attendees from more than 170 countries. IBC chief executive Michael Crimp gave a slightly more conservative number in pre-show interviews: over 1,200 exhibitors across 14 halls and more than 45,000 square metres, with 600-plus conference speakers and attendance expected between 43,000 and 45,000.

Both are pre-show estimates and the gap between them is normal. For context, 2025 finished at 43,858. That was down from 45,085 in 2024, and well below the 2017 record of 57,699. The show is stable rather than growing, which matters if you are trying to judge whether a quiet aisle means a quiet industry or just a Monday afternoon.

Google is the headline sponsor of the Accelerator programme this year, which tells you something about where the money in this cycle is pointed.

What is the AI story at IBC 2026?

Agents have to work now.

Last year the honest description of most AI demonstrations was that a model did something impressive to a clip in a controlled environment. This year the vendors making real claims are showing software that takes actions inside a workflow, and the interesting question on the floor is no longer whether the model is good. It is whether the thing is allowed to act, what happens when it is wrong, and who signs off.

The opening keynote sets the tone, for better or worse. "Disrupt, Innovate, Create: How to Embrace AI" features the AI actor Tilly Norwood alongside her creator Eline van der Velden of Particle 6. Expect it to be the most argued-about session of the show, and expect the argument to be about labour and authorship rather than technology.

On the exhibition floor, two vendor moves are worth seeing in person because they represent genuinely different bets. Avid is launching an agentic "Ready to Edit" capability with a Google Gemini panel inside the editor. Dalet is showing Dalia, which it describes as a media-aware agentic AI spanning its platforms. One is putting the agent inside the craft tool. The other is putting it above the workflow. Both are defensible and they will not converge.

The deeper substance is in the Accelerator programme. IBC announced nine projects for 2026 back on 24 March, involving the BBC, NBCUniversal, DAZN, ITV, Channel 4, the Associated Press, Sky and Al Jazeera. Two are worth going out of your way for:

Smart Stories: The Agentic Production Ecosystem. An incubator aiming at an open Story Object Model plus a reference architecture for reusable skills. Its problem statement is the best single sentence written about this whole category: producers spend more time re-entering context and correcting misunderstandings between tools than the tools save them. If you only see one Accelerator session, see this one, because it addresses the part of the agent problem that protocols alone do not solve.

AI for Live Sports and Beyond: Rewiring Live Media via Agentic AI Orchestration and meCast. Dalet with MBC and TCS, looking at orchestration across live sports production.

Worth knowing as background: last year's project, AI Agent Assistants for Live Production, involved the BBC, ITN and Channel 4 alongside Cuez, EVS, Moments Lab, Shure and Google Cloud. It went on to win Best AI Innovation for Workflow at the Broadcast Tech Innovation Awards 2025. The architecture used an orchestrator agent running on Gemini, connected to tools using Google's A2A protocol and the Model Context Protocol. That is the reference design most 2026 demonstrations are variations on, and it is useful to know before someone describes their agent as novel.

What is happening with DMF and MXL?

This is the standards story, and this year it comes with running code.

The EBU's Dynamic Media Facility describes a software-defined plant where media functions run as containers on shared compute. The Media eXchange Layer is the open-source data plane underneath it, letting those functions exchange uncompressed video and audio through shared memory instead of packetising everything onto the network. We wrote a full explainer on MXL and the Dynamic Media Facility if you want the architecture before you walk the floor.

Three things to catch:

MXL v1.1 with multi-server support is expected to be formally released at the show. Version 1.0 worked on a single host only, which was the honest limitation of the whole thing. Cross-host operation is what makes it interesting for real facilities, so this release is the one that determines whether MXL is a lab curiosity or infrastructure. MXL is also a finalist in the Content Creation category of the IBC 2026 Innovation Awards.

The Qvest DMF Showcase is the largest multi-vendor demonstration of the concept at the show, with Intel, Matrox, Ross Video, Riedel, Skyline, TAG, Telos, Techex, Telestream and Wavelet Beam participating. Multi-vendor is the entire point of DMF, so a demonstration with ten names on it carries more information than ten single-vendor booths saying they support the standard.

JT-DMF Ask Me Anything sessions at the EBU stand, 10.D21. The joint EBU and AMWA task force is running the working groups on synchronisation, compute resource management and flow connection. Those three unfinished pieces are what stand between MXL working in a demo and MXL running your plant. This is the stand where you can ask when they will be done and get a real answer rather than a roadmap slide.

Also on Sunday, the VSF and AIMS IP Showcase on the Water runs from Strandzuid, and the first two sessions are both on MXL and Dynamic Media Facilities, with speakers from AWS, Appear, Grass Valley, Imagine, Lawo, Matrox, NVIDIA, Ross Video and others. Two consecutive sessions on one topic, on a boat, with that many organisations on the list. It is the highest-density conversation on this subject anywhere at the show.

What should you ask an AI vendor on the floor?

Every booth will say agent. These five questions sort the software from the slideware, and they take about ninety seconds each.

1. Does it act, or does it only suggest? A model predicts. An assistant suggests. An agent takes an action without a human clicking first. Most things called agents at IBC are assistants, which is fine, but the difference determines your entire risk and approval conversation. If they cannot answer directly, it suggests.

2. What is the end-to-end latency on a live feed? Not inference time on a benchmark clip. The time from the thing happening in the video to the system doing something about it. For anything meant to catch a fault before a viewer notices, this is the only number that matters.

3. What does it sample, and how often? Nobody sends every frame of live video to a model, because the cost and bandwidth do not work. Everyone samples. Ask the rate and ask what happens between samples, because that interval is where the missed event lives.

4. Where does the inference run, and does the price change if I self-host? A vendor whose price rises when you move the workload onto your own hardware is charging you for their infrastructure rather than their software. Ask separately whether your content leaves the facility, and get that answer in the contract rather than the deck. For unaired news, pre-release drama or a rights-restricted pre-feed, this is not a preference.

5. What happens when it is wrong, and who approves? Ask for the failure mode, not the accuracy figure. Ask what the operator sees, what gets logged, and what the system does on its own versus what it escalates. An honest answer here is the strongest signal you will get all show.

If you want the longer version of the monitoring-specific checks, our post on what to test before you buy AI broadcast monitoring goes through the test methodology in more detail.

What do you need to know about Amsterdam?

The practical part, since half of IBC is logistics.

Getting there. The RAI is roughly 10 to 12 minutes by direct train from Schiphol. That is the fastest route and it beats a taxi in traffic every time.

Your badge is a transit pass. The IBC badge works as a GVB pass on Amsterdam trams, buses and the metro for the duration of the show. It does not cover the train from Schiphol, and the free airport shuttle that used to run no longer exists. Buy the airport train ticket separately and stop looking for the shuttle.

The fringe events are where the actual conversations happen. Most are free but need registration, and details move, so check before you turn up.

Thursday 10 September, before the show opens:

Grass Valley's GV Forum and networking event at the Rosarium, 18:00 to 20:00
DJs in the 'Dam at De Heeren van Aemstel, 19:00 to 23:30, tickets from around €15
Streaming Made Easy Live at Rode Hoed, organised by Marion Ranchet
SMPTE's Green Line rail journey from London St Pancras, for anyone travelling overland

Friday 11 September:

Rise networking drinks with Evertz on the show floor, stand 2.A47, 16:00 to 18:00
IBC Pride happy hour at The Traveller, 17:00 to 19:00

Saturday 12 September:

Adobe Color After Dark at De Hallen Studios, 18:00 to 21:00
IBC Colorist Mixer at Arti et Amicitiae
Evertz and SMPTE drinks, stand 2.A47, 16:00 to 18:00

Sunday 13 September:

The IP Showcase on the Water, departing Strandzuid, with the two MXL and DMF sessions
GALSNGEAR meetup at the Diversified cafe, Hall 3
DPP networking drinks at Grass Valley, Hall 9

One planning note. IBC moved to a Friday-to-Monday pattern, which means Saturday and Sunday are the busy days and Monday empties out fast. If you need booth time with a specific vendor engineer rather than a salesperson, Friday morning and Monday morning are when you will actually get it.

What to do before you fly

Pick your two trails and skip the rest. With 1,200-plus exhibitors across 14 halls, walking the floor without a plan means seeing a lot of screens and learning nothing. Choose either the agent trail or the DMF trail as your primary and treat the other as opportunistic.

Write your five vendor questions on your phone. The ones above, or your own. The value of a prepared question is that it survives a noisy hall and a booth staffer who wants to give you the tour instead.

Book the JT-DMF and Smart Stories sessions now. These are the two places where the unfinished parts of the story get discussed honestly, and they fill.

Decide what a good answer sounds like before you ask. For each vendor question, know in advance what would satisfy you and what would not. It is much harder to be talked around a specification when you wrote down the number you needed before you walked up.

We are in Hall 1 at booth 1.C37k for the run of the show. If you want to argue about whether any of this counts as an agent, come find us.

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