IBC 2026 Preview: Sports production scales up without a bigger budget

Sports continues to drive innovation across live production. At IBC 2026, running Sept. 11-14 in Amsterdam, coverage of the topic is expected to examine the technologies, workflows and operational strategies broadcasters and production companies are using to deliver immersive, data-driven, multi-platform sports coverage.

Doing more with the same resources

“Broadcasters are under pressure to cover more events on tighter budgets, moving away from expensive satellite trucks and dedicated venue fiber. To make field operations cost-effective, teams deploy compact hardware at the venue to bond cellular and satellite connections into a single path. This setup distributes traffic across active networks, delivering the ultra-low latency and frame sync needed for live sports directing over unmanaged internet,” said Peder Boberg, product owner at Intinor.

Jamie Hindhaugh, regional chief executive of Gravity Media, said budget pressure remains a real constraint, but growing confidence in remote production is helping teams work within it.

“While budget pressure remains a challenge, growing confidence in remote production, IP workflows and specialist camera technologies is helping production teams deliver high-quality coverage more efficiently. The focus is on adopting proven production strategies that enhance coverage while maintaining the reliability audiences expect from major sporting events,” Hindhaugh said.

Andy Rayner, chief technology officer at Appear, said the same pressure is pushing broadcasters toward infrastructure that can flex across very different scales of event.

“Live sport continues to drive investment in broadcast technology as broadcasters, rights holders and production companies look for ways to produce more events across more venues without increasing operational resources. Remote production remains central to this shift, allowing organizations to centralize production while supporting everything from niche small events to major international tournaments with the same contribution infrastructure,” Rayner said.

David Kaszycki, chief executive and co-founder of Beam Dynamics, said that pressure extends to how organizations manage the equipment they already own.

“Sports production is under significant cost pressure, and with the advent of new technologies and dynamic licensing models from the manufacturers it has never been more important to ensure you are getting the most out of what you own and that nothing slips through the cracks. Event logistics need to be tight, kit needs to be managed to remove gaps in service, repairs handled quickly and efficiently, and utilization closely monitored,” Kaszycki said.

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Chris Brandrick, global commercial lead for RF and specialist cameras at Gravity Media, said the same pressure is being compounded by how audiences are now consuming sport.

“The growth of direct-to-consumer streaming is reshaping the commercial landscape of sports production. As audiences consume live sport across more platforms, broadcasters are looking for production workflows that deliver greater flexibility and more immersive viewing experiences. This shift is driving demand for more flexible production models, specialist camera technologies and multi-platform content strategies that enhance coverage while maintaining operational efficiency,” Brandrick said.

One event, a dozen outputs

Rights holders are no longer producing a single broadcast from a live event, according to several executives, but a growing set of concurrent feeds, formats and platforms from the same underlying production.

“Sports production has shifted from delivering one primary broadcast to orchestrating multiple live experiences from the same event. Rights holders now need concurrent live feeds, languages, alternate presentations, highlights and social assets delivered reliably across markets and platforms. In one recent large-scale deployment, cloud-based operations supported up to 108 concurrent live events and 27 feed variants per match, demonstrating the scale and complexity now required for global sports coverage,” said Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president of global business at Amagi.

Nina Walsh, global leader of business development for media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS, described a similar multiplication happening from a single ingest pipeline.

“One match now generates a broadcast cut, OTT stream, near-real-time highlights for social platforms, interactive overlays with real-time stats, and fan engagement experiences—all from a single ingest pipeline. Amazon Nova and AI models on Bedrock detect key moments in near real-time, AWS Elemental Inference generates AI-powered vertical video in parallel, AWS Elemental MediaConvert packages for cross-platform distribution, and human editors validate AI-proposed highlight compilations before publishing,” Walsh said.

Yang Cai, chief executive and president of VisualOn, said handling that volume of output without inflating backend cost is pushing distribution architecture toward the viewer’s device itself.

“Modern sports coverage requires delivering immersive, ultra-low-latency, and data-rich experiences across a multitude of digital platforms simultaneously. To achieve this without skyrocketing backend overhead, workflows are shifting toward modular distribution where the media player dynamically assembles video, audio, and graphical statistics on the viewer’s device,” Cai said.

Dimitri Tarassenko, senior vice president of product management at LTN, said that shift is changing the economics of live production, as organizations move toward supporting multiple production versions of the same event rather than building a separate workflow for each one.

“Many organizations are moving towards production models that can support multiple production versions of the same event. This changes the economics of live production. Instead of investing in separate workflows and operational work, broadcasters are asking for tools that extend the value of one event across more destinations, while keeping teams focused on delivering a consistent experience and maximum value for sponsors and advertisers,” Tarassenko said.

Bartell Cope, vice president of go-to-market at Lingopal, said language is becoming one more output variant broadcasters need to plan for.

“Broadcasters, sports leagues and streaming platforms are increasingly investing in workflows that allow them to reach more viewers in more languages, unlocking new subscriber growth and amplifying value for sponsors and unlocking new revenue for advertisers. Delivering multilingual experiences with broadcast-grade quality, low latency and natural-sounding audio is becoming just as important as the primary feed itself, helping make live sports more accessible for fans everywhere,” Cope said.

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Content that keeps working after the final whistle

That same push to extend one event’s value across more destinations is changing how organizations think about their footage once the live broadcast ends, according to Henry Alexander, sales director at BCE.

“Sports organisations increasingly see their media assets as long-term business value rather than content produced for a single broadcast. Every live event now feeds multiple audiences, partners, sponsors and digital services, making efficient media management a strategic capability rather than simply a production function. The ability to move content quickly and reliably between production, archive and distribution has become a competitive advantage,” Alexander said.

Zero room for failure at that scale

Producing that many simultaneous outputs raises the cost of any single failure, according to several executives, making reliability and monitoring central to how the workflows get built.

“Live sports has zero tolerance for failure. A dropped frame is a moment fans never get back, which is why hitless recovery, built to SMPTE 2022-7 compliance across protocols including JPEG XS at high bitrates, has become foundational rather than optional for IP-based sports transport,” said Marc Aldrich, chief executive of Zixi. He said multi-platform coverage now depends on metadata moving in lockstep with video, so a stat, angle or replay lands simultaneously across the broadcast feed, second screens and highlights platforms, and that none of it is achievable without continuous, network-wide telemetry rather than periodic checks.

Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management at Interra Systems, said that same pressure is changing how quality gets monitored at the signal level.

“Sports pushes QoS and QoE harder than any other content type: a single live event now goes out as a linear feed, several OTT renditions, and regional variants simultaneously, meaning a one-second caption dropout or a malformed SCTE cue can become a compliance or revenue failure. That’s pushing teams from eyes-on-glass to policy-based monitoring that measures every output against defined thresholds — such as loudness aligned to ATSC A/85 or EBU R128, SCTE marker structure and timing — at the frame and packet level, catching anomalies faster than an operator watching multiple feeds can respond,” Anantharaman said.

Gary Litwin, national sales director at Boland Communications, said that same demand for consistency applies to what operators actually see on screen.

“Sports productions are being asked to create more coverage for more platforms while operating under tighter schedules and with little or no opportunity to correct problems after the event. That makes dependable monitoring especially important, as crews need consistent, accurately calibrated images across the control room or mobile unit so they can make immediate decisions about exposure, color and HDR,” Litwin said.

Andy Bellamy, EMEA technical director at AJA Video Systems, said that same demand for consistency is showing up in how broadcasters manage color across venues.

“With a continued focus on HDR, we expect color management and conversion to drive conversation at IBC, especially as more sports broadcasters, production teams, and venues look to color match cameras and ensure color appears consistent and accurate across in-venue displays,” Bellamy said.

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David Edwards, product manager at Techex, said broadcasters no longer have to trade quality for the cost benefits of moving sports contribution into the cloud.

“Sport remains the toughest proving ground for live production because it demands scale, speed and reliability simultaneously, which is why it’s often the first place new architectures get properly stress tested. The shift we’re seeing is broadcasters moving high value sports contribution into the cloud without accepting the quality compromises that once came with that move: full bandwidth JPEG XS contribution over SRT, for example, now makes uncompromised, low latency production genuinely achievable at scale,” Edwards said.

The resolution nobody’s asking about

Not every executive framed the sports quality conversation around bandwidth and reliability.

Dani Megrelishvili, chief product officer of Beamr, raised a different question: whether the picture itself actually holds up to what viewers expect.

“Viewers own 4K screens and judge every feed against the best picture they’ve ever seen. And yet at this summer’s World Cup, many viewers watched 4K upscaled from a 1080p feed. The real question for broadcasters isn’t how to capture everything in 4K; it’s what to do with the resolution they already have,” Megrelishvili said.