After a strong rebound in attendance for IBC 2023 following a two-year disruption from COVID-19 and a cautious return to a four-day show in 2022, IBC organizers and technology vendors are expecting more modest growth for this year’s edition, which runs Sept. 13-16 in Amsterdam.
IBC 2023 had 43,065 attendees from 170 countries, a 16% jump from 2022, and some 1,250 exhibitors compared to just over 1,000 in 2022. At press time, IBC 2024 had just over 1,200 exhibitors signed up for space at the RAI convention hall, which has expanded with a new pavilion, Hall 14, being built at its front. IBC CEO Mike Crimp expects attendance to be around 45,000 and perhaps a few thousand more.
“It’s still a little early to predict the final attendance, but it will be healthy, it will be up on last year,” Crimp says. “It’s looking good.”
Show organizers revamped the IBC Conference program in 2023, splitting it into two days of peer-reviewed technical sessions for paid registrants and two days of free conference sessions, along with a new “premium” pass that gave access to smaller networking events. Based on attendee feedback, IBC has rejiggered the conference format again this year, turning into a three-day paid “VIP” event full of peer-reviewed sessions along with smaller networking events and a commensurate higher pricing level.
Crimp emphasizes that the free “Content Everywhere,” “Showcase Theatre” and “Innovation Stage” venues on the show floor will be returning, along with a new talent program focused on industry mentoring on the fourth day.
“There’s so much other good content on the show floor anyway, people who are just looking for education content across the board can find that for free,” he says.
Also free this year is a new “AI TechZone” curated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and featuring hands-on AI demonstrations from more than 50 companies including big players like AWS, Nvidia and IBM. Sessions on the AI Tech Zone Stage will address AI advances in a number of areas including content authenticity, intelligent media storage, accessibility, mixed reality and creativity in production while also discussing regulation and policy developments.
“They’re all sessions that will be contributed to against those things, so people can understand how AI is being developed and how it’s going to be applied in the real world as products,” Crimp says. “It seems that the timing for IBC has been pretty good for that.”
IBC’s annual “Accelerator” projects bring together leading broadcasters and vendors over a period of months to solve new technology challenges, and one of this year’s projects, “Design Your Weapons in The Fight Against Disinformation,” tackles problems caused by AI tools that can easily create deep fakes and other misleading content. Championed by the BBC and Paramount Global/ CBS News with participation from AP, CBC, Eluvio and NAGRA, among others, the goal of the project is to develop tools and collaboration frameworks for broadcasters to be able to assess information for its authenticity.
“Occasionally you’ll see a theme that runs through everything, and I think this year it has a lot to do with countering disinformation in the news,” Crimp observes. “That seems to be a hot topic we’ve hit on.”
Some vendors have complained about Amsterdam as a venue for IBC, particularly after staffing shortages at Schiphol Airport caused a travel nightmare on the last day of the show in 2022. By all accounts, the Schiphol problems were solved for IBC 2023. IBC regularly benchmarks Amsterdam against other European cities for criteria like hotel and taxi prices and doesn’t see any compelling financial reasons to make a move.
“I think people coming out from the pandemic are very happy to be back with something they’re familiar with, rather than going through another period of change,” Crimp says. “We’re not feeling any reason or pressure or need to move away from Amsterdam, but we are always making sure we’re driving the best deal for everyone.”
Question Time For Customers
Globecast, which has been transitioning its business in recent years from a teleport operator and capacity reseller to an IP-focused managed services provider, will bring around 40 people to IBC from its Paris headquarters as well as various international offices. While providing satellite and fiber capacity is “still a big chunk of our activity,” says Globecast CMO Jean-Christophe Perier, the company is delivering more and more content over terrestrial IP links.
Globecast is finding traction in providing OTT infrastructure, remote production and other cloud-based services. It is currently replacing its Culver City, Calif., teleport, which had 26 satellite antennas, with a new facility in nearby Westlake that has only two satellite dishes and will serve as a “cloud media hub” that merges IP, fiber and satellite delivery under a common control interface.
Recent deals for Globecast include providing cloud-based production and workflow management for Euronews’ 14 channels, and the renewal of a long-standing agreement with satellite operator Arabsat to supply a hybrid solution of satellite and SRT technology for worldwide content delivery.
Perier, an industry veteran who joined Globecast in 2023, was pleasantly surprised by IBC 2023 after attending many times previously when working with different IPTV and software vendors. He says he had “a lot of meetings with customers from all over the world,” though not as many U.S. and South American customers, and they were usually lengthy discussions with three-to-five person teams.
“It was a big question time for customers,” Perier says. “It was a good IBC for us, we had significant return on investment. This year looks even more promising because there were a lot of decisions that were under question last year, because the market was starting to shake a lot, and this year it is accelerating. From the appointments we have already, and from the discussions we have with prospects, it’s likely that we’ll have even more decisions taken and discussed during IBC.”
Perier says that customers are interested in hearing about hybrid solutions that can merge their existing on-premise infrastructure with additional capabilities in the cloud. And he adds that several large broadcasters have approached Globecast in recent months to explore the possibility of outsourcing all of their technical operations so that they can focus simply on content creation.
“At least seven came to us in the last few months,” Perier says. “We feel this is a big trend.”
Weighing TCO
IP transport specialist Zixi also enjoyed a successful IBC 2023, with more separate meetings with companies than it ever had at a previous NAB or IBC (until this NAB 2024, which topped it).
“It was hugely successful. It felt like an NAB scale,” CEO Gordon Brooks says.
The company, which was acquired by private equity firm Clearhaven Partners in June, is looking forward to IBC 2024 and will bring some 26 staffers. Zixi will again have a large booth with a “partner village” featuring demonstrations from companies that have integrated Zixi’s technology including Blackbird, Encompass, Red5, Streann Media and Wowza.
Bookings for customer meetings are looking strong with all of Zixi’s big European customers attending as well as more people coming from the U.S. and North America, Brooks says (though he doesn’t expect to see many attendees from Paramount Global due to staffing cuts there).
Zixi’s big technology theme at IBC will be examining the total cost of ownership (TCO) in using its proprietary protocol and video platform for large-scale video transport compared to using standard protocols like SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) or RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol). It is trying to refute the notion that its platform is more expensive.
“The reality is those free things are super expensive,” Brooks says. “For example, if you use RTMP or SRT you still need to buy a platform, you still need to build one and all the other features and functions that we do. But just given the protocol, when you carry a stream, say it’s a 10 Mbps stream, we compress null packets so it’s a lossless compression.
“It’s technology we own, that we only have,” he says. “So, a 10 Mbps stream might turn into a 5 Mbps stream. And if you’re egressing out of the cloud your number one cost is egress cost, so you just cut your egress cost in half. Whereas sometimes SRT adds 20% overhead. We’re saving 30 to 70% on egress costs, which is more than what our software costs.”
Zixi will also be demonstrating a new networking technology called DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), which Brooks says delivers significant improvements in throughput efficiency while using less processing power.
Zixi has traditionally participated in the IBC Conference as well as the Devoncroft Summit hosted by research firm Devoncroft Partners in Amsterdam the day before the show. This year will be no different, as the company is the title sponsor of the Devoncroft event on Sept. 12 with both Brooks and SVP John Wastcoast speaking. Then on Sunday Sept. 15 at the IBC Showcase Theatre, Brooks will join top executives from the NHL and Verizon to discuss how Zixi and Verizon are working together to deliver NHL content over 5G networks while utilizing cloud-based remote production workflows.
Brooks is hoping for a better turnout than the IBC panel he did last year with top executives from Sky, TelevisaUnivision and Paramount Global, which he said only had about a dozen people in the audience. Other speaking engagements by Zixi executives were also thinly attended.
“We didn’t really get any value out of that,” Brooks says.
Quality Over Quantity
Lawo had an “excellent show” at IBC 2023 is and is looking forward to this year’s edition, says Lawo Deputy CEO Jamie Dunn, though he doesn’t expect attendance figures to improve dramatically over last year given tightened travel budgets across the media industry. Dunn doesn’t mind the post-COVID trend toward smaller trade shows and is focusing on the quality of visitors over quantity, as he did at NAB last spring.
“The people who are actually turning up at these exhibitions are good quality as far as we’re concerned,” Dunn says. “The people who turn up are people who seriously need to be there and talk seriously about the state of the industry or have projects to discuss.”
Rastatt, Germany-based Lawo, which made its name in high-end audio mixing consoles but has successfully branched into control software for IP routing, will bring 60 to 70 staffers to the show. Like many vendors Lawo is now releasing software updates to its products throughout the year instead of confining product introductions to NAB and IBC. But the big shows are still important for both meeting with existing customers and generating tangible leads on new business.
“We treat it very seriously, it’s a very important part of the calendar,” Dunn says. “We used to say, when it wasn’t there in COVID times, we don’t need it. But the face-to-face opportunity … as an industry in general, speaking as a vendor, it’s not necessarily just about the clients. It’s also trying to understand the landscape of what’s going on in the industry, and who’s talking about what. Also, the competitive side of things — where is everybody in these things, and are we aligned in what we’re talking about? This is also important.”
From a strategic point of view, Lawo is investing in control, management and orchestration software, including its VSM and Home products; physical I/O conversion technology that can bring audio and video into an IP network, such as audio and video stage boxes with built-in processing; and a broader effort to move its processing technology from proprietary hardware into an app-oriented platform running on standard IT technology with CPU and GPU processing.
“Which basically is extracting the software from hardware and allowing us to stand on the shoulders of the IT giants, who are driving so hard on speed and power into the processing side and the networking side,” Dunn says.
IBC will mark the official launch of Lawo’s ultra-low-latency HOME mc² DSP app, a cloud-native audio processing system that can be used together with mc² mixing consoles or as a headless mixing system providing server-based audio processing. Dunn says the HOME mc² DSP app represents the first time a large-scale audio mixing platform processing engine is able to sit on the same platform that can be used for high-quality video processing.
“This trend is about utilization of assets,” Dunn says. “When you invest into a thing like a processing server, it’s multipurpose, it can do multiple things. You can spin things up on it and spin them down and use that processor for something else. From my point of view, that’s where this whole second wave of IP is driving toward. It was never just about scalability and agnostic formats. It was about this agility and flexibility, which then allows our clients to maximize the utilization of assets they invest into.”
FAST Times At The RAI
After several years of rapid growth due to the explosion in FAST channels among U.S. broadcasters, cloud software vendor Amagi is pursuing new FAST business in Europe and elsewhere. The company had over 200 meetings at IBC 2023, with many of them being European broadcasters looking to learn more about FAST’s potential. Amagi is bringing about 40 staffers to IBC 2024, where it will have a slightly bigger booth than last year in order to facilitate more private, in-depth meetings.
“Apart from FAST, which continues to grow, we see a lot more interest in cloud broadcasting,” says Amagi co-founder and CRO Srini KA. “We’re starting to see cloud playout, cloud broadcasting maturing significantly faster than we thought it would. We thought it would be a 5-to-10-year journey, but we’re seeing a lot more action.”
In that vein, Amagi will doing a live show in its booth this year, creating a 24/7 Amagi live channel that includes customer interviews and behind-the-scenes looks at its technology.
“We’re essentially showcasing how you do live production on the cloud with remote operators and then originate a 24/7 channel out of that,” KA says. “[We’re] showing an end-to-end, glass-to-glass solution using our own content.”
While FAST channels are popular among viewers, some U.S. broadcasters have complained that back-end infrastructure costs are high, and monetization has been slow. KA acknowledges those financial challenges and says Amagi is addressing them on several fronts.
One of the biggest FAST costs for stations is on CDN (content delivery network) costs, KA says, which are directly proportional to the viewership. As Amagi has scaled its business, it has been able to negotiate better CDN rates and pass on some of those benefits to customers. The same goes for the price of cloud instances in AWS, where Amagi is providing more cost efficiency and has optimized usage, such are requiring less memory for running playout.
But the biggest problem plaguing local stations getting into FAST is not being able to monetize it effectively through advertising, KA says. Amagi has a service called Ads Plus aimed at helping solve that problem, which offers several different models.
“We have one model we’ve done for a couple customers where they have zero cost, and we take all of the risk,” KA says. “We take a share of inventory, and we monetize it. We’re trying to innovate for our customers where we take out the cost for them.”
That zero-cost model has been attractive to several U.S. station groups who were unsure how well they could monetize FAST at launch, KA says. Another group of customers has preferred to take on the burden of infrastructure costs and selling their own programmatic advertising, but partners with Ads Plus to use it as an additional demand source.
“There’s a second set of customers that say, hey, I know I can monetize this, but the cost has to be lower,” KA says. “For them, we bring on cost efficiencies and Ads Plus is an add-on layer for them to monetize, where we can play a hand.”
Amagi has also worked with set manufacturer Vizio to create a new technology called “Zero Slate” aimed at eliminating the static slates that are used to fill unsold ad breaks in FAST programming. By eliminating slates, FAST channels can reduce churn and meaningfully increase viewership, KA says. This is particularly impactful for 24/7 FAST news channels, which sometimes might only sell 30 seconds out of a three or four-minute ad break.
“The ad breaks, you might have 30% to 60% fill, and that means the remaining 40% of the ad break you’re seeing a slate — you’re just sitting there looking at a slate with a countdown timer,” KA says. “That’s absolutely crazy when you think about the consumer experience.”
Zero Slate removes the slate and pulls up the next program segment in the stream, thus compressing the ad rate if there aren’t any ads to show. If a linear FAST show ends ahead of schedule because multiple slates have been removed, Amagi can fill the gap with additional content, such as weather programming, or simply start the next program early.
“Users are spending more time, and we’re seeing monetization go up among our customers by 20% to 40% with just this technology alone, no other change,” KA says. “All else being equal, you’re seeing more videos, a third more.”
Better Leveraging Rights With Technology
FAST is also one focus for LTN, which is closely following the growth of FAST channels in the EMEA region and will be showcasing its cloud-based digital linear creation solution enabling management of live sports, news and major events programming.
“Following the launch of our brand new facility in Cologne, Germany this year we are seeing an explosion of opportunities in the EMEA region,” says Rick Young, SVP, head of global products at LTN. “IBC is the place to have really critical conversations with sports federations and channel creators of all types. Those organizations need to leverage existing sports rights and primary channels and deliver customized versions of all content to the ever-expanding number of platforms.”
Young says LTN is using the show to demo Lift, its digital linear creation solution.
“In terms of conversations with customers, we expect to discuss their need to efficiently leverage existing sports rights and do new and unique deals with a wider variety of takers and partners,” he says. “For existing rights deals, we are talking about ways we can help them customize the experience to bring more value by targeting ads and unique content experiences for the region, country or specific platform.”
Given the downward economic pressure on many broadcasters, Young says LTN’s focus is straightforward in terms of helping them navigate choppy waters. “Media and sports organizations are looking for ways to respond to limitless possibilities across regions and platforms,” he says. “They need to do it in a much more simplified way compared to legacy technology and workflows. And, of course, live sports, news and major events are proving to be differentiators in a crowded market.”
Visibility Into The Cloud
IP transmission vendor TVU Networks is expecting a busy IBC after significant customer wins in Europe. That included creating a cloud-based workflow for France Télévisions’ streaming Olympic channel on france.tv that made use of 5G and Starlink connectivity and supporting 369 simultaneous live feeds for the BBC’s UK general election coverage.
“Last IBC we saw a significant recovery of visitors, and we had a lot of leads generated,” says TVU CEO Paul Shen. “This year we project way more, because we’ve had a lot of success in Europe.”
TVU will bring around 25 people and have a bigger booth than last year, affording it space for a demonstration of a network operations center (NOC) that gives new visibility into the cloud-based operations supported by its TVU One video transmitter. The demonstration will cover the entire workflow from contribution to production to distribution, including the PCR (production control room) and MCR (master control room).
“We are introducing the concept of how we can create visibility into the entire cloud-based workflow,” Shen says. “Because in the past one of the big challenges of cloud services to our customers is it’s a black box, they have no visibility. We’re adding a lot of instruments and data in that workflow, so the customer at a glance can look into any stage of the workflow, see the health of the signal and can even react to it.”
Mixed Signals
Robotics supplier MRMC had reduced visitors to its IBC ’23 booth as well as lower quality compared to pre-COVID days, says Paddy Taylor, head of broadcast systems for MRMC.
“Certainly, IBC I don’t think delivered the value that we expected, the return on investment we were looking for, in terms of last year,” he says. “I am intrigued to see what happens this year.”
Some of the drop in visitors could be attributed to broadcasters sending smaller delegations given the high costs of visiting Amsterdam. MRMC had also seen smaller groups at NAB in recent years until this past spring.
“The year before we were getting two or three, but this year we were getting those groups of five to six people,” Taylor says. “It will be interesting to see if European broadcasters, and others further afield, are sending larger groups again.”
A positive note is that MRMC’s year-end analysis found that its per-head costs to exhibit at IBC 2023, including meals and travel, were actually about 9% lower than in 2022. And Taylor said that advance bookings for IBC meetings are “looking amazing,” despite a general sense that the broadcast technology market is experience slow sales.
MRMC will have a bigger booth for its broadcast products this year to afford more space to parent company Nikon and its new corporate sibling, digital cinema camera supplier RED, while a second MRMC booth will focus on motion control systems for cinematography. New broadcast products include a compact robotic system aimed at news studios, the StudioBot LT, and a low-cost, quick-setup camera slider system targeted at ENG applications, the Orion Slider.
Returning To The Floor
Encoding, security and OTT software vendor Synamedia is returning as a full exhibitor after only securing meeting rooms for IBC 2023, which it found to be too small for its traffic.
“We were in the alleys, one floor up,” says Synamedia VP of Product Management Elke Hungenaert. “We had a good view on how attendance was in the hall, and it was really busy and really crowded. We wanted to do something with more space this year if we’re going to get at least the same amount of traction as last year.”
Another vendor returning to the floor after sitting out IBC 2023 is switcher and infrastructure supplier FOR-A, which will bring about 30 people including executives from all its international offices as well as its Tokyo headquarters.
FOR-A Europe sales manager Fabio Varolo expected to be fully booked for the four days of the show. But he said Amsterdam’s high costs mean customers are sending reduced staffs, with managers making the trip but not the engineers making final technical decisions. That means additional follow-up for FOR-A.
“We see the attendance of the customer is there, but with less and less people, even from the big groups,” Varolo says. “The big groups might come with 10 to 15 people, now they’re sending three to five.”
Varolo, who is based in Milan, says “everywhere” in Europe is a more attractive location than Amsterdam. He suggested Milan, Barcelona and Frankfurt as possible alternatives, in having both big exhibition spaces and enticing locales.
Like many traditional hardware manufacturers, FOR-A is now transitioning its technology into software-based products. As it does so, it is keeping its foot in both the high-end uncompressed IP domain and the lower-cost compressed world with products that work with ST 2110 routing architectures as well as the NDI networking and SRT streaming protocols.
“It is mixed together with the legacy SDI, which we don’t believe you can throw away,” Varolo says. “There are very few facilities in Europe which can throw away everything and move to another standard like that. The focus is to provide the path for a transition, to do it in a smart way.”
Reporting contributed by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp
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