Across the show floor and sessions last week at IBC 2026, I couldn’t help noticing a shift in the industry’s priorities. The hype about what’s technologically possible has finally given way to a widespread focus on what truly matters: practical, easy-to-use solutions that deliver a measurable return on investment. Companies are looking beyond the buzz for technology that just works—the kind of technology Veritone has been creating all along.
Four trends stood out at IBC 2026:
Buyers need monetization
A glaring demand permeated the show: Companies want technology that directly drives revenue. These are the solutions that are selling.
This demand is especially visible in the push to monetize both live and archived content. Live programming continues to drive attention, but organizations are increasingly looking to do more with the content they already own. Broadcasters, leagues, studios, and rights holders are sitting on enormous archives; the challenge is finding, packaging, and distributing that content efficiently enough to create new value from it.
As a result, archive monetization is becoming a major growth opportunity. Existing footage can become new programming, short-form clips, social content, or targeted offerings for specific audiences. The easier those assets are to search and activate, the more value they can deliver.
This helps explain why streaming and monetization technology remain such high-demand categories. Consolidation across the industry—including major changes involving companies such as Fox and Warner Bros.—could lead to reduced or reallocated vendor spending among the largest media organizations. But it also creates opportunities elsewhere, as more companies are asked to do more with their content and technology investments.
The takeaway for rights holders? Every asset needs to work harder. That’s where solutions such as Veritone’s Digital Media Hub can make a difference, helping organizations organize, search, and activate their archives so they can distribute and monetize content more effectively.
Technology is becoming democratized
Another prominent development was making media technology easier for more people to use.
Skill gaps, budget pressure, and the emergence of new, nontechnical buyers are changing what organizations expect from their technology partners. Powerful features are no longer sufficient if a platform requires a team of specialists to deploy it; ease of use is now a major selling point.
That puts more attention on the orchestration layer where data, AI models, applications, and business processes are connected. With an AI operating system like Veritone’s aiWARE, organizations can bring different AI capabilities together in practical, repeatable workflows.
Agentic AI is accelerating that shift. Put simply, agentic AI combines data, a large language model, and software tools so AI can execute multi-step actions—not just generate a single response to a prompt. Over time, these systems can help operate and maintain complex workflows while reducing the amount of human oversight required.
The potential applications across media are broad:
- Ingestion: extracting metadata, generating captions, and checking content for compliance
- Content supply chain: supporting reversioning, graphics production, and repetitive editing
- Media buying: connecting multiple AI agents across fragmented advertising infrastructure to interpret briefs, query inventory, generate RFPs, and allocate spend in real time
- Localization: accelerating high-volume workflows for adapting content to different languages and markets
- Automated quality assurance: auditing broadcaster output for accessibility, logos, and regulatory requirements
Thanks to these developments, we’re seeing the rise of software that’s making complicated processes easier to run, more consistent and more scalable—even for teams without extensive technical resources.
Live sports production keeps raising the bar
Live sports remains one of the most demanding and innovative parts of the media industry, and its prominence at IBC reflected that. The conference featured speakers and sessions involving FIFA, Liga Portugal, Olympic Broadcasting Services, UEFA and the Women’s Super League.
What makes the field particularly challenging is that audience expectations keep getting higher—especially when it comes to speed. Fans want more personalized, seamless, and real-time experiences across screens and platforms; delivering on all of this demands a system that unites production, data, rights management, and distribution under one umbrella.
Simply put, sports organizations need to produce more content for more platforms, often on tighter timelines and with a greater focus on relevance than nearly any other kind of entertainment. AI and automation can help teams identify key moments, manage archives, support content creation and extend the value of an event well beyond the final whistle.
Veritone’s work with leading sports entities reflects this opportunity. For rights holders, the goal is to create more ways for audiences to engage with—and for organizations to monetize—the content surrounding the events they already care about.
The creator economy is moving to the center
Perhaps the most visible trend from IBC was the influence of creators, social platforms, and brands on the future of media.
In the session “The Creator Economy Rules,” Evan Shapiro moderated a panel featuring the likes of BBC Studios Digital Brands, Snap, Tubi, and Meta. The takeaway: Creators are becoming the new Hollywood, and traditional media organizations must adapt to their tactics or risk being left behind.
The economics are undeniable. According to Caretta Research, the top 10 creators generate approximately $1.5 billion—a figure solidly in the stratosphere of established global media companies—and around 150 channels earn more than $10 million per year. Audiences are spread across platforms, formats, and communities, while creators are building businesses that combine content, audience relationships, partnerships, and commerce.
What IBC 2026 made clear
Across these four themes—from archive monetization to live sports production and the emerging creator economy—the focus on efficiency and ROI came through with equal prominence. We’ve moved beyond the stage of hyping flashy features and entered the era of practical execution. Going forward, I expect these characteristics to become even more prized as forward-looking media entities capitalize on these trends.
