This Insights Corner takes us to Europe: BAI’s Executive Director Broadcast, Colocation & Government Relations Casey Whitehead, Head of Government Relations James Toole and Chief Technology Officer Stephen Farrugia travelled to Amsterdam for IBC 2026, the annual gathering that brings the global media, entertainment and technology community together at the RAI Amsterdam.
This year’s show welcomed over 41,000 attendees from 170 countries and more than 1,300 exhibitors across four days. 256 companies made their IBC debut, up 36 per cent on 2025. As IBC CEO Mike Crimp put it, “IBC’s superpower is the power to convene our industry.” From the Future Tech Ignite start up stage to the Accelerator Media Innovation Program’s real-world proof of concepts, that convening power was on full display.
For our team, three themes stood out.
AI is changing how content moves, not yet what content is
Across the exhibition and conference floor, AI use at IBC 2026 was overwhelmingly focused on workflow improvement and content distribution rather than content generation. Every application we saw was still built from trusted base content packages rather than AI generated material from scratch.
Looking further ahead, the expectation across the industry is that AI will eventually sit across the entire value chain, from content generation through to delivery and recommendation. One idea that came up repeatedly was of a future where a broadcaster’s AI is effectively “talking” to the AI on a viewer’s personal device to determine what content gets recommended and delivered. It’s a shift that will have real implications for how infrastructure, delivery and audience relationships are managed.
Trust remains broadcasting’s core asset
If there was one word that came up again and again on the conference stages, it was trust. As content becomes easier to generate and distribute at scale, broadcasters are doubling down on trust as their defining advantage over less regulated platforms and sources.
Closely linked to this was a growing conversation, particularly from a European perspective, about resilience. Recent extreme weather events have pushed network and infrastructure resilience further up the agenda, reinforcing that trusted content is only as valuable as the infrastructure that reliably delivers it. It’s a point that resonates just as strongly here in Australia, where free to air digital TV remains many households’ primary way to watch national sport and major cultural moments, making the platform’s resilience a matter of shared participation, not just technical uptime.
A practical fight over in car radios
On the regulatory side, radio broadcasters are lobbying for the European Union’s Digital Networks Act to explicitly require that new cars be fitted with radios, covering both FM and DAB. Current legislation only mandates that a radio, if fitted, must support both bands. The gap that’s emerged is that some vehicles are now being sold without a radio at all, which creates a dangerous precedent when radio is often the sole backbone of emergency communications.
What this means for BAI
These themes sit close to home for BAI. Trust and resilience are exactly what our broadcast infrastructure, colocation and network services are built around, and the conversations happening on the global stage at IBC only sharpen how we think about supporting our customers here in Australia.
“IBC continues to be one of the most important gatherings in our industry,” said Casey Whitehead, Executive Director Broadcast, Colocation & Government Relations at BAI. “The conversations this year reinforced what we already know at BAI: trust and resilience are not optional extras, they are the foundation broadcasters build everything else on. We came away with a clear sense of where the industry is heading and how BAI’s infrastructure and services need to keep evolving to support it.”
IBC will return to the RAI Amsterdam for its 60th anniversary from 10 to 13 September 2027.
