IBC 2026: The Network Under the Stream, a More Pragmatic Industry, and What We Took Away From Amsterdam

Last September I walked the halls of IBC as a visitor with Greg Wallace and Mark de Jong. This year we came back to Amsterdam at IBC 2026 as exhibitors, with a kiosk and demo station inside the NETINT Technologies booth, a slate of sponsored events, three product launches and a new global partnership with Quortex. We also brought a bigger team, with last year’s crew plus Mark Price, Craig Jackson, Brandon Wick, Drew Hastings, Chris Hesselrode, and Sandy Bhargavi. Yes, “Tri-Mark” were together again, and yes, the NETINT team started counting several more Marks in the booth!

Over four days we held over 60 meetings with customers, partners and prospects. Our theme for the show was The Network Under the Stream which describes how NetActuate supports the Media and Broadcast ecosystem and is where the industry's conversation is moving. 

The Numbers and What They Indicate

IBC 2026 drew 41,225 attendees from 170 countries and more than 1,300 exhibitors, which was down from 43,858 visitors in 2025. At the same time, 256 companies exhibited for the first time, up 36% from 2025. TV Technology, SVG Europe

Conversations at the show were focused and almost every meeting we had came with a specific workload, a specific cost problem, or a specific deadline attached.

Five Trends that Surfaced During IBC 2026

1. Unit economics replacing flexibility as the headline. For a decade, the industry has been proving that production and delivery could run anywhere. This year the question was what that flexibility actually costs per stream, per channel, and per workflow. Vendors pitching cost and efficiency far outnumbered those pitching new revenue. This is exactly why we built VPU-as-a-Service. Teams get purpose-built video silicon attached directly to their own VM or Kubernetes node, keep the encoding pipeline they already trust, and pay a fraction of what general-purpose cloud compute costs.

2. AI moved into the workflow. AI was on every banner again, but this year, more of it was built into existing products rather than sold as a separate AI line. That matches what we said after NAB. It also changes the infrastructure question: AI features increasingly run alongside encoding, packaging and monitoring, so where those workloads run matters. Several of the AI-enabled tools on the floor are now just one click away in our Media Marketplace, a catalog of over 110 software appliances deployed over NetActuate’s global infrastructure. 

3. Control is back on the agenda. Sovereignty, dependency, and cost predictability came up across the show, especially from European broadcasters looking at alternatives to hyperscalers. Our view is simple: the network you run on should be one you can see, route, and control. The Media Substrate runs on our own anycast network across 50 locations, giving broadcasters and platforms a distribution layer they control rather than rent by the gigabyte.

4. Live, low-latency IP delivery went mainstream. Media over QUIC has moved from standards meetings to the show floor, with multi-vendor demos from Broadpeak and others. Sports production was again the proving ground for distributed, IP-first architectures. Satellite replacement was a lively conversation in Amsterdam, showing it’s not just a US trend. The Media Substrate, MOQ Relay, and C-Band Transition Acceleration service were built for this moment.

5. Interoperability became a requirement. The EBU's Dynamic Media Facility work and a long list of cross-vendor integrations pointed the same way: nobody wants a single-vendor stack anymore. The Media Marketplace is our answer for simple, global, media deployments. It offers media appliances from companies like Norsk, NETINT, Quortex, Unified Streaming and others, deployable across a global anycast edge. We know our lane at the infrastructure layer, while our partners bring the application layer.

Quortex: CDN, Caching and Live Distribution on One Network

Just before the show, Quortex and NetActuate announced a global agreement that works on two levels.

For streamers, the Quortex Edge CDN control plane now runs inside NetActuate's network, so content owners can spin up private CDN, multi-CDN and elastic caching capacity across any of our 50 locations in minutes. That is well suited to live events and peak traffic, without the high commits of a general-purpose public CDN.

For broadcasters, Quortex Edge, PowerVu, and vDCM are now integrated with the Media Substrate. Together they create a media-aware, IP-based alternative to satellite C-band distribution for North American broadcasters facing the transition deadline.

We spent a good part of the week with the Quortex team, and the conversations went well beyond the announcement. Broadcasters now have a genuine alternative to hyperscaler infrastructure and the demos and meetings in Amsterdam backed that up.

Broadpeak: Multiview Now Available as a Service

Before the show, Broadpeak announced that their Multiview solution was now available as a service for multi-feed live sport experiences thanks to NetActuate’s VPU-as-a-Service.

Adding channels and layouts stays cost-effective because the heavy lifting runs on purpose-built silicon. Broadpeak directed interested parties to the NetActuate booth for more information, and we enjoyed meeting with Yann Begassat and Olivier Karra to discuss next steps in the integration.

Inside the NETINT booth, and our Place in the VPU Ecosystem

Our home base for the week was NETINT's booth in Hall 1. Our message at the booth showed how NetActuate is “The Network Under the Stream” with the Media Marketplace, Media Substrate, Multi-Layer Resiliency, and and VPU-as-a-Service.

A question we heard often about VPUs at the kiosk was some version of "Can I use VPUs without servers?" The answer is yes. We offer no-charge evaluation deployments for qualified teams as part of the NETINT VPU Pilot Program.

Another question was “What’s the process for getting into the NetActuate Media Marketplace?” The answer is we do it for you. Bring your own licence and send us an image or docker container and we build your environment. Browse our catalog and book a call to learn more.

Check out this 3D Hologram played at the booth for visitors to get an idea how NetActuate brings speed to the industry.

Off the Show Floor

HIVE Group: Navigating the Distribution Transition

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We opened Friday as a sponsor of HIVE Group's breakfast, the European edition of the session we attended at NAB. What we learned is that the transition away from satellite and C-band is not just happening in the United States; Europe is making similar moves before the end of this decade. There is no single replacement for C-band and partnerships for end-to-end transport will be key. A Big thank you to Lisa Collins and Clare Plaisted for hosting.

The 5K Shakeout Run and Beer Hour

At NAB we promised an IBC run club, and we delivered. Saturday started with the 5K Shakeout Run, and the Amstel route beat the Vegas Strip easily! Saturday afternoon's Beer Hour at Troost was well attended with demand exceeding room capacity! Big Kudos to our fellow sponsors and organizers: Lighthouse Growth, Bunny.net, EZDRM, and GalsNGear.

SundAI Breakfast

Sunday morning's SundAI Breakfast brought the media and broadcasting industry together in the only dedicated discussion forum on the impact and direction of AI. The Media League unveiled a new initiative called the AI² Platform, the industry’s first M&E trained multi-agent platform for providing real-time insights to guide AI market strategies. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. A big shout out to our host Fernando Amendola and co-sponsors Evergent, Bitmovin, and OKE Poland.

Decompression Party

We closed Sunday co-hosting the Decompression Party organized by Chris Parry at The Media Collective. The crowd included engineers, founders and more than a few people with strong opinions about MOQ, which is our favorite kind of crowd. There was even a rowdy guest and arrest made which made for some unplanned entertainment! Big Kudos to the amazing jazz band (with Norsk's Dom Robinson on bass), and our co-sponsors Norsk, Red5, G&L Systemhaus, and CaptionHub. We’ll be back next year!

Our Take on IBC 2026

The industry has spent years multiplying options: more clouds, more formats, more vendors, more endpoints. IBC 2026 felt like the start of a different phase, focused on connecting those pieces, simplifying them and paying less to run them. That's the layer we build, and it's the conversation we'll keep having.

‍Next Stop: NAB Show New York

We'll be at NAB Show New York at the Javits Center, October 21-22. If you're working on C-band transition planning, live distribution, VPU-based encoding or bringing your application to the Media Marketplace, book a meeting with our team.

Thank you to everyone who made time for us in Amsterdam, to Anita Flejter, Mark Donnigan, and Patty Lorin, at NETINT for hosting us, and to our partners for a great week.

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