IBC 2026 Preview: Live control rooms shift from hardware racks to software-defined systems

Control rooms continue to evolve to support broadcast, streaming and live-event production simultaneously.

At IBC 2026, running Sept. 11-14 in Amsterdam, coverage of live production systems is expected to focus on switching, monitoring, graphics, replay, automation and the operational systems behind modern control rooms.

The monitor wall as a decision-making tool

“In a modern control room, the monitor wall is more than a passive display,” said Gary Litwin, national sales director at Boland Communications. “It is the visual reference operators rely on to make immediate decisions across broadcast, streaming and remote-production feeds.”

Litwin said consistency between screens, including calibration, brightness, color space and latency, matters as much as resolution as HDR and multiplatform delivery expand, since even small mismatches can undermine confidence during a live production. He said buyers should evaluate the complete operating environment, including long-term stability, serviceability and performance under mobile or high-use conditions.

Bridging IP and baseband

Control rooms increasingly need to combine traditional video signals with IP streams from different source equipment, according to Nick Ma, chief executive and chief technology officer of Magewell.

“Control rooms must be able to fluidly combine traditional video signals and modern IP streams from different source equipment to screens, software and systems in a hybrid, intuitive, modern workflow,” Ma said. He said removing friction between IP formats and traditional baseband signals allows technical crews and creatives to focus on producing live content across broadcast, streaming and in-venue audiences rather than managing infrastructure.

TSL has approached that same problem from the control layer. Ian Godfrey, chief technology officer at TSL, said flexibility needs to be balanced against familiar, efficient operational workflows.

“The addition of Dante and NDI control in the TSL Hummingbird X-Connect application allows hybrid SDI/SMPTE ST 2110/NDI/Dante environments to coexist within the live production chain, giving operators a single human machine interface to control transport of different signal types,” Godfrey said.

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Keeping control simple for the operator

Adding more systems to a control room does not change how many hands an operator has, said Ole-Andreas Løvland, chief executive of Bitfocus.

“Control rooms have accumulated more systems, but the operator still has the same two hands and the same pressure when something changes on air,” Løvland said. “The priority should be bringing switching, graphics, audio, routing and monitoring into workflows that make sense to the person using them, so operators can focus on the production rather than another layer of controls.”

Ivy Li, marketing director at Telycam, made a related point, saying modern control rooms are being designed around flexibility, scalability and interoperability so systems can adapt as production needs evolve, whether supporting traditional broadcast, live events or hybrid workflows.

Toward a unified control layer

Godfrey said the shift toward Digital Media Facility architectures is increasing demand for flexible control of tally, machine control and GPIO alongside signal routing, functions he said need to work across traditional, SaaS and hybrid environments without adding operational complexity.

“The focus will increasingly be on providing a consistent control layer that allows broadcasters to introduce new technologies, while preserving efficient, operator-centric workflows,” Godfrey said.

Costa Nikols, strategy advisor for media and entertainment at Telos Alliance, pointed to the same shift, describing the European Broadcasting Union’s Digital Media Facility concept as the next major evolution in live production architecture.

“DMF provides the blueprint that enables innovations like MXL, where applications share media with microsecond-level latency and without repeated I/O hops,” Nikols said. He said the approach allows control rooms to combine traditional production tools with cloud-native processing, intelligent monitoring and automated workflows, and that as facilities adopt DMF-aligned architectures, they gain the ability to compose production pipelines dynamically and integrate new capabilities more quickly.

Smaller teams, software-defined rooms

“The control room is being reimagined. It is no longer defined by racks of hardware and large production crews,” said Claudia Barbiero, director of global marketing at PTZOptics. “Today’s live production environments are increasingly software-defined, IP-connected and built for smaller teams that need to produce more content with greater speed and flexibility.”

Barbiero said broadcast-quality production is no longer limited to broadcasters, pointing to schools, corporations, houses of worship and sports organizations building media operations designed to be intuitive to operate and remotely managed. She said the next evolution is intelligent production, in which control systems go beyond switching sources to understand what is happening, automate routine tasks and assist operators in real time while leaving creative decisions to people.