Nokia demos VVC, XR audio, and 3D splat streaming at IBC2026

Nokia is tying together immersive media, video compression, and AI-enhanced quality in a single IBC2026 showcase, which makes the announcement relevant to broadcasters and streaming vendors evaluating practical deployment paths. The focus on standards such as VVC and MPEG-I also fits the broader IBC ecosystem, where interoperability and scalable delivery are central themes. The key signal to watch is whether Nokia’s demos translate into partner deployments or standardized workflows beyond the show floor, especially for volumetric video and 6DoF audio.

Nokia’s IBC push sits in a broader standards-driven pipeline, not a standalone demo. Its public multimedia research pages now frame Gaussian splatting, VVC, and immersive audio as part of one interoperable toolchain, which matters because broadcasters usually adopt these formats only when they can fit existing contribution, playout, and device workflows. That same logic is showing up in the rest of the market, where IBC’s own program still places VVC and immersive audio alongside real-time streaming and low-latency delivery tracks, which keeps Nokia’s booth work aligned with the event’s most practical codec conversations. IBC’s 2026 agenda also highlights real-time video delivery and Media over QUIC sessions, so Nokia is entering a show floor where transport efficiency is already a central buying criterion.

For Nokia, the business case is as important as the technical one. The company says its public software work is built around a standards-aligned workflow for AI-enhanced video, which points to a monetization strategy that depends on interoperability rather than proprietary lock-in. That is consistent with how codec and immersive-media vendors have been positioning VVC and related tools to broadcasters, where deployment often hinges on royalty risk, hardware support, and whether the workflow can be staged incrementally instead of as a full platform replacement.

The technical benchmarks behind Nokia’s demos also help explain why the company is surfacing them at IBC. Its research claims Gaussian-splat compression can shrink scenes from gigabytes to roughly 10 MB while preserving high visual quality, which is the kind of number that makes 3D scene delivery thinkable for live or near-live workflows. On the audio side, Nokia’s immersive voice materials describe MPEG-I immersive audio as a six-degrees-of-freedom standard for XR rendering, so the real test at IBC is less novelty than whether these formats can travel cleanly from lab demos into production-grade authoring, packaging, and playback.