IBC 2026 exhibition targets 45,000 attendees with expanded AI focus

The projected growth in attendance and the 30% expansion of the Future Tech hall indicate a significant industry pivot toward integrating AI and cloud-native workflows into standard production stacks. By centralizing OTT and monetization technologies in a dedicated hub, the event reflects the market's urgent need to solve fragmentation and profitability challenges through technical interoperability. This shift forces traditional broadcasters and pure-play streamers to compete on the same technological playing field, particularly in live sports and ad-supported delivery. Watch for the results of the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme to see which collaborative AI production projects move from experimental stages to commercial deployment.

The IBC 2026 exhibition arrives amid an intensifying race among vendors to embed agentic AI directly into broadcast and streaming infrastructure. In June 2026, Ericsson launched its AI in RAN commercial software subscription claiming up to 20% higher downlink throughput across more than 15 live deployments, while Nokia announced its third agentic AI product in four weeks, an agentic framework for IP network operations within its Network Services Platform. These moves signal that the same AI-driven automation philosophy now permeating telecom networks is being adapted for media and broadcast workflows, a theme IBC 2026 is explicitly foregrounding in its conference program.

Nokia's broader strategy illustrates how vendors are assembling full-stack AI platforms that could reshape the OSS and BSS layers underpinning streaming services. Nokia announced partnerships with AWS and Databricks to build a unified data and control layer for autonomous networks at DTW Ignite, positioning its Autonomous Network Fabric as an operating system spanning radio, core, transport, and service domains. The company claims operators using its autonomous networks portfolio are already achieving automation rates above 90%, service delivery times under four hours, and up to 85% reduction in slice rollout time. For streaming infrastructure buyers attending IBC, these figures establish a benchmark for what AI-orchestrated operations can deliver at scale.

The competitive divergence between Nokia and Ericsson on AI architecture carries direct implications for the broadcast technology ecosystem that IBC convenes. Light Reading reported that Nokia's RAN strategy is now built entirely on its Nvidia partnership, with Nvidia investing $1 billion in the Finnish company, while Ericsson pursues incremental RAN intelligence on existing baseband silicon. Nokia is also deploying AI agents directly into its mobile core, reducing call setup times from roughly 10 seconds to one or two seconds in certain use cases, according to Nokia executive De. This split between GPU-accelerated shared compute and embedded model inference mirrors the architectural choices facing streaming platforms deciding between cloud-native AI services and edge-deployed models, a decision that will be debated across IBC's expanded Future Tech hall.