IBC 2026 Preview: Connected workflows aim to make location disappear

Modern media production depends on collaboration across creative, editorial and technical teams that are often spread across locations and time zones.

At IBC 2026, running Sept. 11-14 in Amsterdam, coverage of collaboration and connected workflows is expected to examine the platforms, workflows and operational strategies supporting distributed teams, shared resources and cross-functional production.

Building around where the work already happens

“Workflows find a way to get the job done regardless of technical limitations, and that is the part the supply side keeps underestimating,” said Orlando Richards, head of product at Pixitmedia. “Talent sits wherever it sits and the render happens in whichever cloud makes sense that week, so leaving the customer to puzzle their way through network rules, security requirements and multi-site design is no longer an acceptable answer.”

Richards said the company measures success by how little a workflow has to change, aiming for one view of the data wherever it sits and as few duplicate copies and transfers as a job allows.

That shift has been aided by advances in connectivity and standards, according to Sean Mulhern, chief technical innovation officer at Gravity Media. He said fiber, IP infrastructure, 5G and bonded cellular with low Earth orbit satellite have expanded connectivity options, while standards such as SMPTE ST 2110 have changed production workflows by enabling shared resources and collaboration across locations.

“This shift is increasingly supported by cloud-based platforms that centralise media assets, allowing distributed teams to work from a single source of truth and build more flexible, efficient production environments,” Mulhern said.

When departments don’t share the same picture

David Kaszycki, chief executive and co-founder of Beam Dynamics, said collaboration often breaks down not on set but in the back office, when engineering, production, procurement and finance hold different information about the same equipment or project.

“That is where collaboration starts to break down, as updates get missed and people spend too much time checking which version is correct,” Kaszycki said. He said connected workflows should allow operational information to move with the work, so every team can act on the same accurate picture.

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Building for change instead of lock-in

Rick Capstraw, chief revenue officer at Signiant, said the underlying technology stack changes too quickly for workflows to be built around any single vendor.

“The storage flavor of the day keeps changing; object storage displaced file systems, cloud tiers keep reshuffling, and the AI model that looked settled six months ago has already been leapfrogged,” Capstraw said. “Workflows cannot afford to be beholden to any one storage, tool, or model, because the moment your automations are wired to a specific one, replacing it becomes a re-platforming project instead of a swap.”

Capstraw said the software-defined architectures worth attention treat each component as interchangeable, allowing one storage system to be swapped for another without workflow automations noticing.

Consistency across locations and roles

Anthony Zuyderhoff, executive director of global sales at Riedel Communications, said effective collaboration now depends on delivering a consistent experience across locations, roles and devices as production teams become more distributed and specialized.

“The core challenge isn’t simply linking more tools but enabling teams to communicate and align without introducing operational friction,” Zuyderhoff said. “Ultimately, the best workflows will be those that make complex, multi-site collaboration feel entirely natural.”

That view was echoed by Pi Waller, senior vice president of solutions architecture at TMT Insights, who said organizations that treat collaboration as a business capability, rather than a collection of tools, are better positioned to reduce operational complexity and deliver content with more speed and consistency.

Making storage location invisible

Samer Kamal, head of content, brand communications and product marketing at LucidLink, said collaboration in media production increasingly depends on eliminating handoffs between locations rather than adding tools to bridge them, since teams need to open the same live file on-site or remote rather than sync copies between them.

He pointed to Sky as an example, where editors across multiple facilities and events work from LucidLink Filespace as a single, unified data set, giving on-site crews local-network speed against the same cloud storage without moving files into a separate collaboration platform.

“The operational lesson for IBC attendees is that the workflows scaling well are the ones where storage location becomes invisible to the creative team, not the ones layered with more coordination software,” Kamal said.