Caretta Research Shares Top Trends to Watch at IBC 2026

Broadcast industry analysts will be gathering plenty of insights at the 2026 IBC Show this weekend in Amsterdam, but Caretta Research has offered up some thoughts as to what their team believes will be the top trends.

And while the theme of their expectations may seem negative, navigating a shrinking industry, Caretta Research Business Development Lead Rebecca Jackson says the good news is there is a simple road map for manufacturers and vendors to find success.

Essentially the tech needs to either make money or save money, says Jackson. And that's where we're seeing a lot of investment into monetization technology.

Jackson says Caretta Research has definitely seen that media tech buying cycles are longer as buyers stretch out the amortization of existing gear, and media tech as a general in terms of like overall market size is slowing down.

The majority of the vendors we are tracking have generated revenue growth since 2024, even if - in some cases - that revenue growth is minimal, she says. The overall market decline, she explained, is being driven disproportionately by large, hardware-heavy manufacturers while smaller, software-focused companies are posting healthier growth.

Jackson pointed to two areas of genuine opportunity heading into the show: streaming monetization broadly, and sports specifically. Sports, sports, sports, she says, along with non-traditional corporate and enterprise which is entering the streaming space although she does see the scale of those efforts to be limited. Sports, by contrast, remains the closest to kind of traditional media and entertainment that we're still seeing healthy growth within.

There are other areas of growth as well. FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) playout is expanding well beyond its U.S. roots and that offers a lot of opportunity to monetize content, especially on connected TV devices.

Virtual ad insertion is booming too, particularly in sports, where operators can digitally swap pitch-side and court-side signage for different markets.

That's new revenue generation, Jackson adds. That's an opportunity along with highlights clipping technology which is very, very healthy because it lets rights holders monetize across multiple platforms and capture viewership from new areas.

Cloud and IP connectivity for distribution is also climbing, accelerated by the looming C-band satellite spectrum turnoff. But Jackson flagged an uncomfortable arithmetic underneath that growth: the technology is replacing a market many times its size. The IP and connectivity market is going to be hundreds of millions, but the satellite market was billions, she adds. That is part of the reason why the broader distribution category keeps shrinking even as its cloud-based successor thrives.

The second major theme Jackson identified is cost discipline. Broadcasters facing revenue pressure are cutting wherever they can internally and leaning more on managed service providers.

A managed service means you can control costs and outsource [costs and staffing] to someone else. This is also growing because there are more and more content creators who are not traditional studio or broadcast facilities and they often don't have the staff, let alone facilities, to meet their content creation needs.

That same cost pressure drives the third trend: consolidation, first among buyers and now spreading to vendors. Jackson pointed to the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal, RTL Group's purchase of Sky Deutschland, Canal+ and MultiChoice, and DAZN's acquisition of Foxtel in Australia as recent buyer-side examples, alongside vendor deals like MediaKind acquiring Harmonic and DAZN's purchase of ViewLift.

Often consolidation happens in declining and stagnating markets, she says. That's no surprise that this is happening at the moment. And what's quick to follow buyer consolidation is vendor consolidation.

The AI reality check

And then there is the hottest buzz topic out there AI. Jackson sees one key problem as the industry tries to figure out where AI fits into its workflows and services: it is lagging behind the telecom industry in terms of deployment and also still relies heavily on more human intervention than other segments. And just as important? Customers are really looking for real solutions, not just hype.

They don't want to hear about an AI chatbot they want to see real big use cases tied to the business side as business decision makers become more important in workflow decision making.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/09/08/caretta-research-shares-top-tre...
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