Broadcast Tech Vendors Focus On Opportunities, Not Anxieties, At IBC
IP, cloud and AI dominated vendors’ conversations once again, but worries for the industry’s future at large were never far from the surface.
AMSTERDAM — Autumn set in early for this year’s IBC conference here, a chill riding on the back of blustery winds buffeting the RAI convention center.
Inside, broadcast technology vendors were contending with their own winds of change. The industry’s turbulence has only deepened since the industry’s last major convocation at Las Vegas’ NAB Show in April, when U.S. tariffs put an already-jittery market into something more convulsive. At IBC, vendors summoned their composure in public conversations, while in private many confessed their worries persisted, if not grew.
That made 2025’s conference one of mixed narratives. Some vendors voiced measures of concern on multiple fronts — persistent economic uncertainty, stalled projects and, in the U.S., looming consolidation and the uncertain sunsetting prospect of the ATSC 1.0 standard among them. Others touted rising year-over-year revenues, expanding penetration into adjacent industries and stabilizing leverage across global markets.
It wasn’t the best nor the worst of times, but it was among the most cautious. The industry’s IP transition was continuing forward, but cloud adoption wasn’t reaching nearly the heights anticipated back in the late 2010s. The newly developed media exchange layer (MXL) technology was among the conference’s buzziest ideas, dangling a thrilling hope to expedite change. AI graduated from buzzword into beacon of promise for broadcasters’ much-needed efficiencies.
Prospects of better personalization and CTV monetization surfaced. The creator economy began looking like more fertile territory for vendors to explore. Some took a jaundiced view of broadcast’s longer-term prospects. Others repeated mantras that the industry’s deepest challenges unearthed opportunities, if you knew where to look.
ROI Insistence, Project Pace Slowdown
Operative’s Avi Yampolsky, VP of international accounts, stressed that for broadcasters, the luxury of time on ROIs had run out. “Anything needs to demonstrate immediate savings and efficiencies,” Yampolsky said. “Everyone is looking for a very short ROI, and we’re talking weeks. There’s just growing pressure on bringing in results.”
Still, many projects and investments were being slow walked. Elodie Levrel, communications director for Broadpeak, said that even though the company’s revenues were up 26% in the first half of the year, “customers are taking time before launching new projects,” an observation shared by numerous vendors across the conference.
For U.S. broadcasters, that pause is partly down to tariff impacts that have yet to be felt this year. Erling Hedkvist, who heads sales and business development for Arkona, said manufacturing takes place in the company’s native Germany with components from all over the world. “For this year, pricing was all set in Germany but as of next year we will have a U.S. dollar price that will be higher,” he said.
“There’s an urgency in anything [broadcasters] can do to save on costs,” observed ENCO President Ken Frommert. He added that ENCO has seen revenue growth this year, particularly on the strength of its AI products; “a healthy 10%, which is good growth for us,” he said.