IBC 2026 Preview: Hybrid infrastructure settles in as the permanent model, not a stopgap

Production infrastructure continues to move beyond traditional hardware.

Cloud, hybrid and software-defined production will be the center of many conversations at IBC 2026, aimed at improving flexibility, scalability and operational resilience across broadcast and media organizations.

From experimentation to strategy

“The conversation has moved past whether facilities should adopt cloud-native monitoring and toward how to shift towards cloud without sacrificing reliability or introducing latency,” said Michael Demb, vice president of product strategy at TAG Video Systems. “What’s changed is that software-defined architectures are now holding up in real, multi-vendor environments, not just pilots. That shifts the buyer question from ‘can this work’ to ‘where does cloud make the most sense?'”

That maturity has come with a correction, according to Graham Sharp, vice president of sales and marketing at BCNexxt.

He said many applications were lifted and shifted into the cloud to accelerate migration, but without delivering the financial benefit, agility or flexibility of a cloud-native application, leading some early adopters to find their cloud-hosted systems less reliable and more expensive than what they replaced.

Sharp said buyers should confirm an application is genuinely cloud-native by asking whether it:

• Uses containerized microservices
• Can scale itself and its cloud resources to the task at hand
• Is maintained and enhanced through continuous development and deployment
• Is portable, meaning it does not rely on services unique to a single cloud vendor that could create lock-in

“Buyers should assess whether an architecture delivers redundancy, end-to-end visibility and operational continuity across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments, while allowing workloads to run where they make the most operational and economic sense,” said Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president of global business at Amagi. “The real value of software-defined infrastructure is its ability to help broadcasters launch new channels, regional variants and live-event workflows without a proportional increase in dedicated hardware, engineering effort or operational complexity.”

“Competitive advantage will come from deployment flexibility rather than infrastructure choices,” added Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing at Telestream.

Advertisement

Hybrid as the permanent model, not a bridge

Several executives said hybrid infrastructure should be treated as a long-term operating model rather than a step on the way to full cloud adoption.

“Hybrid stopped being a transition state some time ago; most broadcasters we work with will be running cloud and on-premises side by side for some time to come, and planning on that basis,” said Kristan Bullett, chief executive of Humans Not Robots. He said the practical problem is that visibility does not cross the boundary between environments: cloud providers deliver a detailed bill, on-premises systems offer little more than a power reading, and few organizations can compare the two for the same workload using the same method.

“The most useful question a buyer can ask a vendor at IBC this year is: Can I see what this costs and what it consumes in both environments, measured the same way?” Bullett said.

Larissa Görner-Meeus, chief product officer at Net Insight, said hybrid infrastructure is becoming the long-term operating model for live production, shifting the buying question from where a function runs to the cost and risk of operating a reliable live service across facility, edge and cloud.

“Buyers should examine the operational layer closely, because flexibility without consistent visibility, timing and control can simply create another set of silos,” Görner-Meeus said.

Miroslav Jeras, chief technology officer of Pebble, said the industry has spent too long discussing public cloud as a destination rather than one option among several.

“It is one option, and for many playout operations the sensible answer will be a mix of on-premises, private infrastructure and public cloud, chosen service by service,” Jeras said. “What matters is being able to adjust that mix without rebuilding the operation.”

Rick Capstraw, chief revenue officer at Signiant, said the useful question has shifted from cloud versus on-premises to how organizations operate consistently across both at once.

“The emerging pattern is an abstraction layer that lets teams find, govern and act on content across storage environments without first consolidating it, which turns a fragmented estate into something that behaves like one system,” Capstraw said. He said buyers should favor architectures that assume content will stay distributed, since approaches that still require centralizing everything tend to reintroduce the cost and rigidity hybrid was meant to remove.

Sovereignty enters the equation

Cristian Porumb, platform director at BCE, said European sovereign cloud is becoming a core consideration in media operations, alongside flexibility and cost.

“European sovereign cloud is becoming a key pillar of media operations, delivering freedom, scalability, resilience and cost efficiency,” Porumb said. “It enables organisations to retain control over media workflows, data and operations across local data centers and cloud platforms.” He said sovereignty is becoming a key factor in secure, high-performance, broadcast-ready media services as cloud-native and hybrid production continues to evolve.

Standards and protocols under the surface

As more of the production chain becomes software-defined, executives said the performance of underlying standards and protocols carries more weight than in the past.

Advertisement

Duncan Beattie, senior market development manager for enterprise at Tuxera, said organizations can invest heavily in new storage, networking and compute, only to find themselves limited by a file-sharing layer that was never designed for current demands.

“In 2026, I think we will see more teams evaluate protocol performance much earlier, as part of the infrastructure design rather than after a bottleneck appears,” Beattie said.

Christer Bohm, head of technology media at Net Insight, made a related point about interoperability standards, saying open standards such as NMOS and JPEG XS are becoming a risk-management decision rather than a checkbox as ST 2110 expands into software-defined, multi-vendor workflows. He said buyers should test interoperability at operational boundaries rather than confirming individual products carry the right standards logos.

Doing more with existing infrastructure

Budget pressure is shaping how some organizations approach cloud adoption.

“We are living through the sharpest divergence I have seen between production budgets falling and infrastructure costs rising,” said Serena Harris, senior director of sales at Pixitmedia. “Do more with less has stopped being a cliche and become the only way most media organizations get through the next two years, which makes sweating existing assets the normal operating model rather than a compromise.”

Harris said one of the company’s key achievements this year has been extending what a facility already owns, including storage purchased from other vendors, so teams can reach cloud capacity at peak demand without a rebuild or an added island of infrastructure.

Building one workflow from venue to cloud

Andy Rayner, chief technology officer at Appear, said customers preparing for IBC 2026 are converging on a common requirement: a single unified workflow spanning hardware, software and cloud infrastructure.

“Broadcasters, production companies, content owners and network operators need the resilience and efficiency of dedicated hardware alongside the flexibility of software, allowing production from venue to cloud in a single unified environment,” Rayner said. He said the focus going forward is on making hybrid production easier to deploy, whether that means simplifying ground-to-cloud connectivity, processing live media in software or distributing content across multiple platforms.

That bridging challenge is already playing out in the field. Ian Godfrey, chief technology officer at TSL, said the company is seeing continued adoption of SaaS and cloud-based media processing, including GV AMPP and Amagi playout, among major broadcasting clients in the U.S. and U.K, even as most customers keep established equipment such as cameras, routers and multiviewers in place. He said an interoperable control layer is what allows broadcasters to adopt newer processing technology while keeping mission-critical workflows intact.

Advertisement