I arrived at IBC expecting to hear about AI. I did not expect those conversations to feel so practical and immediate.
AI was no longer just a demo or a show-floor talking point. Throughout the show, in conversations with broadcasters, sports organizations, enterprise media teams, and technology partners, AI kept coming up not as a passing mention but as a real ask. Customers described exactly what they wanted AI to do: manipulate content, automate repetitive work, enrich metadata, and create more versions for more destinations with less manual effort. More than once, my response was the same: "That's on our roadmap," or "That's really interesting. Let me take that back to the team. We're likely already working on something we can tweak to get there."
That matters because "content everywhere" has long been the industry's ambition, yet it has always created operational pressure. AI is starting to change that equation. It's making it easier to resize content, make smarter edits, generate captions and translations, and prepare content for different audiences and platforms.
The next step is even more interesting: conversational workflows that let an operator simply ask AI to find key moments, build highlight clips, add player names and captions, and create versions for Facebook, YouTube, and X. That may sound futuristic, but it feels much closer than it did a year ago, closer, in fact, than most people at the show seemed to realize. I left more convinced than ever that this is where we're heading, and it's a direction we've been actively exploring internally. Throughout the week, I didn't encounter a single solution on the market today that brings all these pieces together in one place. That gap is exactly where I think the next wave of value will be created.
Operating It Is the Harder Part
I also expected to hear about cloud migration, IP workflows, and the latest technological innovations, and there was plenty of that as well. But beneath nearly every one of those conversations was the same concern.
A few years ago, organizations focused on modernization: moving to the cloud, replacing legacy infrastructure, and launching streaming services. The primary challenge was getting there. Today, many have made that journey, but deploying the technology was only part of the challenge. Operating it may be the harder part.
One conversation stayed with me. A customer described an environment with strong vendors, modern workflows, and capable teams. The technology itself wasn't the problem. The challenge was everything in between: getting systems to work together, maintaining visibility across workflows, catching problems before they became outages, and scaling the operation without continually adding headcount.
Streaming can look deceptively simple to anyone not responsible for running it. Content comes in. Video goes out. How complicated can it be? Anyone running a modern streaming operation knows the reality is far more complex. Every workflow touches another. Every platform connects to another system. Every vendor integration introduces another dependency. Individually, none of these connections may seem overwhelming. Collectively, they create a level of complexity that many organizations underestimate.
I've lost count of how many times I've heard the same conclusion: "Moving to the cloud wasn't the hard part. Making everything work together was."
Streaming Has Grown Up
It's not just individual workflows that are changing. The industry's underlying structure is shifting too. It's not happening overnight, but it's happening. The broadcast-to-streaming transformation, long discussed as a future state, is now an active project.
We're in the middle of one right now: a large-scale migration built with BroadView, Grass Valley, and Zixi, already spanning more than 1,000 distribution points and adding more. It's early, but we believe it's a real blueprint for where the industry is headed. We recorded a podcast conversation about it at IBC, and we're looking forward to sharing more at NAB NY in October.
People and Process Still Matter
Technology matters. Great products matter. But there is still tremendous value in experienced people who understand live operations, know where failures tend to occur, and can address problems before they affect viewers. Technology alone cannot solve operational problems. People and processes matter just as much.
Looking back on my conversations throughout the week, the organizations making the most progress shared something important. They weren't focused on acquiring more technology. They were focused on extracting more value from the technology they already had. They prioritized reliability, visibility, and operational efficiency. They examined how their teams support these systems day to day. Most importantly, they recognized that video isn't simply a collection of products. It is an operation, and operations require discipline.
If there is one lesson I took away from IBC, it is this: the industry spent the last decade modernizing its technology. The next phase will focus on modernizing its operations, and smart AI is the fastest path to get there.
The companies that succeed won't necessarily be those with the most tools or the longest feature lists. They will be the ones that can operate consistently, efficiently, and confidently at scale, using AI to get there faster than a growing headcount ever could. That was the theme I heard throughout IBC, and I believe it will define the industry's next chapter.