I spent three days — September 10-12, 2026 — walking the aisles of IBC 2026 at the RAI Convention & Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam. With 14 exhibition halls, 1,300+ exhibitors, and 45,000 attendees from over 170 countries, IBC is the global meeting point where media and entertainment technology comes to life.
This is not a curated tour of the press room. This is what I actually saw on the floor — the booths, the demos, the hallway conversations, and the energy that makes IBC different from any conference I’ve been to this year.
Arriving and sizing up the floor
The IBC 2026 entrance at RAI Amsterdam. September 10, 2026.
The RAI is not a hotel ballroom with booths — it is a purpose-built convention complex spanning 14 halls. The moment you walk in, you are hit by the scale: ceiling heights that dwarf most trade shows, clear sightlines across the exhibition floor, and the kind of acoustics that make every conversation feel like it matters. The show floor is organized by vertical, and the density of exhibitors means you are constantly choosing between “walk left to see what’s next” and “talk to the person at this booth who has exactly the problem I’m facing.”
The Luminex booth: Converged AV networking
The Luminex booth — converged AV networking made easy. September 11, 2026.
The first booth that stopped me was Luminex, a Belgium-based professional AV networking company. Their booth wasn’t flashy — no LED walls, no VR headsets — it was focused on something far more substantive: converged AV-over-IP networking.
The rack setup tells the story at a glance: dual Matrox Converge DSH units, CAYMON-branded patch panels with XLR connectors for audio and fiber for data, and a Dell monitor running Luminex’s Gigacore software showing a live network topology. The thick yellow fiber bundles running through the rack aren’t decorative — they are carrying real media traffic.
What strikes me here is the practical convergence happening. Professional AV is moving from dedicated point-to-point cabling to IP-based infrastructure, and booths like Luminex’s are showing that the transition is not just theoretical — it is happening in production environments right now. The “Dante Spoken Here” sign on the secondary screen confirms that the standards layer (Audinate’s Dante protocol) is becoming the lingua franca of AV networking.
The Luminex equipment rack in detail — Matrox, CAYMON, and Gigacore integration.
Day 1: The exhibition hall comes alive
The main exhibition hall on Day 1. September 11, 2026.
By mid-morning, the halls were filling up rapidly. The conference pass holders were moving in waves — early arrivals, then the first wave of registered attendees, then the second wave from the evening networking events the day before.
Attendees during the morning sessions. The density of the floor is immediately apparent.
The key difference from other tech conferences I’ve attended: IBC is fundamentally a productivity show. You are not here to hear about the next five-year vision — you are here to solve real problems with real technology. Every conversation I had on the floor was grounded in a specific use case, a specific timeline, a specific budget. The “let’s grab coffee and talk shop” culture is pervasive and genuine.
A networking demo station at one of the major exhibitor booths.
The exhibition hall during peak morning traffic.
The Future Tech zone (Hall 14)
Future Tech demonstrations in Hall 14. September 11, 2026.
Hall 14 is Future Tech — the fastest-growing area of the show. Startups, research projects, and emerging companies are concentrated here, and the energy is different from the polished booths of the enterprise vendors. Here, the focus is on the next wave of media technology: real-time AI processing, edge compute for live production, and the intersection of broadcast and software-defined infrastructure.
Startup zone activity in the Future Tech hall.
The Accelerator Programme — backed this year by Google as Headline Sponsor and EIT Culture & Creativity as Innovation Partner — was running live demos throughout the day. The key themes I kept hearing from presenters:
- AI-driven content creation: Not just generative AI for static assets, but real-time AI for live production workflows — real-time captioning, automated highlight clipping, intelligent scene detection.
- Edge compute for live production: Moving processing closer to the camera rather than centralizing everything in a data center.
- Trust and provenance: With deepfakes becoming more sophisticated, the industry is investing heavily in content authenticity and media chain verification.
A conversation at the show floor about AI and media production.
Booth conversations that mattered
Afternoon light in the exhibition hall. September 11, 2026.
In the afternoon, the booth traffic shifted. The morning rush of scheduled meetings gave way to more casual conversations. This is when the real insights emerge — not from the prepared demos, but from the side conversations about what’s actually working and what isn’t.
One recurring theme: the gap between AI experimentation and production deployment. Every vendor booth had an AI story, but when you dig into implementation details, the conversation quickly turns to infrastructure requirements, data governance, and — most importantly — how to maintain quality while scaling. The media and entertainment industry has a zero-tolerance policy for “good enough” AI output, and that is forcing a more rigorous approach to deployment.
The exhibition hall during the networking hour. September 11, 2026.
Day 2: Deeper dives
Day 2 morning in the exhibition hall. September 12, 2026.
On the second day, the conversations get deeper. The initial “hello, what do you do?” exchanges from Day 1 evolve into “here’s the specific problem we’re trying to solve.” I spent the morning at booths focused on content distribution and delivery infrastructure — the less glamorous but absolutely critical layer of the media stack.
A booth preparing for the Day 2 rush. September 12, 2026.
Technical demonstration station on Day 2.
The booths showcasing content delivery networks, transcoding pipelines, and multi-cloud distribution strategies were seeing the most concentrated foot traffic. These are the vendors that solve the “we have 45,000 live streams and need 99.99% uptime” problem — not the kind of work that gets keynote applause, but absolutely essential for the industry to function.
Peak booth traffic on Day 2. September 12, 2026.
What I’m taking away
I left IBC 2026 with three clear takeaways:
AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure. The “look what this AI can do” demos are being replaced by “here is how this AI scales to millions of concurrent streams.” The operational maturity around AI in media production has jumped significantly.
The hybrid cloud conversation is here. Not the theoretical “multi-cloud strategy” decks, but the specific “we need this workload to run on-prem for latency and in the cloud for burst capacity” reality. Every vendor I spoke with has a concrete edge-to-cloud story.
Standards are consolidating. Whether it’s AV-over-IP at Luminex or Dante audio networking, the industry is converging on shared protocols. This is the kind of infrastructure work that makes everything else possible.
The exhibition hall on Day 2. September 12, 2026.
All photos in this post are from the IBC 2026 show floor at RAI Amsterdam, September 10-12, 2026. Video clips from the event are being processed and will be queued for publication — check back for upcoming video recaps.
IBC 2026 runs September 11-14, 2026 at the RAI Convention & Exhibition Centre, Amsterdam.
About the Author
I am Luca Berton, AI and Cloud Advisor. I work at the intersection of cloud security, platform engineering, and enterprise AI deployments. Book a consultation.
