IBC 2026 Preview: Media supply chains shift from siloed tools to shared metadata

Media organizations are connecting production, post-production, asset management and distribution through increasingly automated workflows.

At IBC 2026, the buzz around connected media supply chains is expected to focus on orchestration, metadata, automation, and system integration to reduce operational complexity.

Defining the connected supply chain

“Connected Media Supply Chain is about creating a seamless, data-driven workflow that connects content creation, management, processing, distribution, and monetization across the entire media value chain,” said Frédéric Fiévez, chief operating officer at BCE.

Fiévez said BCE combines media operations, platforms and system integration with FinOps insights and real-time SLA monitoring to give organizations end-to-end visibility into operational performance and cost. He said the approach allows broadcasters, streamers and media companies to reduce complexity, control costs and consistently meet service commitments.

Metadata as shared infrastructure

Several executives said progress on connecting the supply chain depends less on individual tools than on treating metadata as shared infrastructure rather than a byproduct of each one.

“Connecting the media supply chain in a meaningful way starts with treating metadata and project structure as shared infrastructure, not just a byproduct of individual tools,” said Derek Barrilleaux, chief executive of Projective. “When post-production, asset management and distribution share a common framework, you can automate handoffs, enforce consistent security policies and reduce the number of times humans have to re-enter the same information.”

Barrilleaux said the largest gains for many organizations have come from federating previously isolated post facilities and archives, so a clip prepared for one market can be discovered, adapted and reused in another without starting over.

That same logic extends downstream to how errors surface, according to Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer at SDVI. He said a missing or inconsistent metadata field rarely causes a visible problem where it originates, and instead tends to surface two or three systems later as a quiet omission rather than an obvious error.

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“The connected supply chains that scale well are the ones where system integration and metadata handling are designed together from the start, so automation can make good decisions rather than just move work faster,” Stedman said.

Aaron Kroger, director of product marketing at Dalet, made a related point, saying the bigger opportunity for media organizations now lies in removing friction between existing tools rather than adding standalone ones.

Orchestration and unified visibility

“The next step in connecting the media supply chain isn’t just adding more automation but making every stage function as one coherent workflow,” said Anthony Zuyderhoff, executive director of global sales at Riedel Communications. He said he expects the focus at IBC to shift from individual tools toward how effectively the entire end-to-end production chain can be coordinated.

At Interra Systems, that shift is showing up in quality control. Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management, said QC, captioning and monitoring are beginning to share validation instead of repeating it at each handoff between production, post-production and distribution.

“A caption track validated once for accuracy and timing now carries that validation into localization and every downstream delivery format — such as SCC, WebVTT, TTML — without a separate QC pass at each destination,” Anantharaman said. She said the company’s ORION Central Manager correlates alerts from ingest, encoding and delivery into a single diagnostic view, routing incidents directly into systems such as PagerDuty to cut the time between detection and response.

Media operations today are spread across specialized systems that each handle one task well but rarely offer a complete operational picture, said Denise Soto, vice president of product at TMT Insights. She said the next stage of progress is not replacing those systems but connecting them, and that attendees at IBC should judge solutions by how well they connect data, workflows and teams rather than by individual features.

Trust and the case for a semantic layer

As automation extends further into decision-making, the harder problem is no longer getting AI to act but trusting that it acted correctly, according to Ivan Verbesselt, chief strategy officer at Mediagenix.

“Trust comes from the quality of the decision,” Verbesselt said. “AI can only make reliable operational decisions when it’s grounded in a semantic layer that understands how content, rights, scheduling and business rules relate to one another, and when every recommendation is governed, explainable and accountable.”

Organizations that treat AI as a standalone project, without building that semantic foundation, will lack a trusted basis for relying on its decisions, Verbesselt said.

Rethinking asset management and interoperability

Traditional media asset management has generally relied on centralizing content in a single repository, an approach Craig Wilson, principal enterprise specialist for broadcast at Avid, said is increasingly impractical as content spreads across multiple cloud environments, on-premises storage and archives.

“This is one of the reasons why we are moving beyond traditional asset management with an approach that will allow customers to manage media natively and connect to content wherever it resides, enabling organisations to search, access and use assets across different locations while avoiding the cost and disruption of moving entire libraries,” Wilson said.

Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing at Telestream, said the connected supply chain is now defined less by individual systems than by how well those systems work together, with metadata and open integration allowing organizations to modernize without replacing infrastructure outright.

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Samer Kamal, head of content, brand communications and product marketing at LucidLink, said that shift is showing up in interoperability layers, such as the company’s LucidLink Connect, that let existing tools work from the same underlying asset without separate exports or syncs. He cited tools including Frame.io, review and approval systems, and editing software such as Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve as examples.

“Standards efforts like TAMS reflect this same direction, with the industry converging on shared, addressable access to media rather than moving files between siloed systems,” Kamal said. He said the practical question for buyers at IBC is how many manual handoffs a proposed workflow actually removes, not how many new integrations it adds to the stack.

Cloud migration as the enabler

Continued migration to cloud and IP-based workflows is enabling further automation across the media supply chain, said Jean-Christophe Perier, chief marketing officer at Globecast.

“These technologies enable more streamlined, automated orchestration of production, post-production, asset management, and distribution, reducing operational complexity,” Perier said. He said the shift led Globecast to develop its Managed Orchestration and Operations for Media platform, which the company plans to showcase at IBC 2026, offering an orchestration layer for content acquisition, asset management, playout and distribution alongside a client interface.