Ready for Action: IBC2026 puts sport at the winning end of media innovation

• ​​​​​​IBC2026 International Honour for Excellence recipient OBS stages its first-ever showcase at an industry trade event, with a compelling showcase in Future Tech
• Three IBC Accelerator Innovation projects spotlight the pioneering, real-world innovations reshaping sports production, delivery and fan engagement

London, 2 September 2026 – IBC2026 will put sport firmly at the centre of the global media and entertainment technology conversation with the strongest sports showing in the event’s history, bringing together the world’s leading sports organisations, broadcasters, rightsholders and technology providers at the RAI Amsterdam from 11–14 September.

From Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) showcasing technology from the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 for the first time at an industry trade event, to senior leaders from FIFA, UEFA, LaLiga, Liga Portugal, Women’s Super League, SailGP and DAZN tackling the rapidly changing economics of live sport and major shifts in production and distribution, IBC2026 will explore the developments redefining how sport is created, delivered, monetised and experienced.

Sport’s importance to media businesses continues to grow, driving viewership and revenues in an increasingly live and on-demand world across multiple screens. According to Nielsen, more than 90% of the most watched broadcasts on US television last year were live sports.  Research from Omdia showed that sports accounted for 24% of all new pay-TV subscriptions worldwide over a six-month period in the same year, while Ampere Analysis projects that global spending on sports media rights will grow from $64 billion in 2025 to over $78 billion by 2030. That growing value coincides with major changes in how sport is produced and delivered: remote and distributed workflows are becoming established at the world’s largest live sporting events, while an increasing number of rightsholders are developing their own production capabilities.

“This is our best-ever sports showing at IBC,” said Stephen Nuttall, Chair of IBC. “Sport has always been a major driver of technology adoption in media, because live production demands both innovation and absolute reliability. Today, we’re seeing fundamental shifts in how sport is produced and experienced, from the growing role of rightsholders in production to the proliferation of ways audiences can watch and engage. IBC brings the sports media industry together to see what’s possible and keep pace with rapid changes in production, delivery, audience engagement and business models.”

OBS brings Olympic innovation to Future Tech

A centrepiece of IBC2026’s sports programme will be a major showcase from OBS, recipient of this year’s IBC International Honour for Excellence, recognising decades of innovation in live sports production and its far-reaching influence on global broadcasting. OBS’s first dedicated showcase of its technology at an industry trade event will give visitors to Future Tech in Hall 14 a close-up look at innovations developed for Milano Cortina 2026, including solutions created with Worldwide Olympic Partners.

Highlights include technologies that enabled:

• Seeing the action from every angle: Real-Time 360° replay technology developed with Alibaba uses AI and cloud processing to create viewpoints never physically captured by camera, allowing replays to freeze competitors such as figure skaters and big-air snowboarders mid-twist or spin, and then move the viewpoint around them.
• Producing Olympic coverage on smartphones: OBS worked with Samsung to enable mobile production, including coverage of the Opening Ceremony captured entirely on smartphones – allowing camera operators to move among the athletes.
• Putting Olympic information at commentators’ fingertips: An Enhanced Commentator Information System developed with Deloitte uses AI to rapidly access Olympic data and content – for example, finding record-breaking performances from across the Winter Games to generate relevant clips.
• Connecting athletes with the people behind them: The Athlete Moment experience developed with TCL enabled competitors to connect face-to-face with family and friends, bringing the emotion around their Olympic performances into the coverage.
• Enriching coverage with data and graphics: New metadata and augmented-reality graphics capabilities developed with OMEGA demonstrate further ways of adding information and context to Olympic storytelling.

Global sports leaders tackle a rapidly changing media landscape

The IBC2026 Conference will bring senior figures from some of the world’s biggest sports organisations together to address the technology, economics and audience shifts reshaping sports media. Highlights include:

• ‘Live Sports at Scale: Redefining the art of the possible’: Oscar Sanchez, Head of Host Broadcast Production at FIFA, and Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of OBS, will explore breakthroughs from ultra-low-latency streaming and cloud production to interactive fan engagement and AI-driven personalisation.
• ‘The New Playbook for Sports: AI, data, fans and rights’: Francisco Antunez, Chief Content Officer, Liga Portugal, and Zarah Al-Kudcy, CRO, Women’s Super League, tackle the changing intersection of technology, fandom, media rights and economics.
• ‘Tech Leader Perspectives – how AI is reshaping the business of media?’: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris and Damian Cronan, CDIO at ABC discuss how AI and data are reshaping production, distribution and media business models.
• ‘UEFA: Unlocking growth through innovation’: Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA Executive Director of Marketing, looks at using innovation to drive growth and engage audiences while preserving tradition.
• ‘Security, Authenticity and Provenance: How can we trust the content we have now and in the future?’: Jose Ignacio Carrillo de Albornoz, Audiovisual Anti-fraud Manager at LaLiga, examines how to keep content secure, verified and traceable.
• ‘The Winners and Losers in the Creator Economy: Who will be the New Media Elite?’: Will Pithers, Strategic Partner Manager, Sport at Meta, and Tim Haubeil, Channel Director at Sidemen Entertainment, join a discussion on the changing dynamics of influence, monetisation and discovery.

Sportel partnership expands the conversation in Content Everywhere

Content Everywhere in Hall 5 will extend the sports conversation into multi-platform delivery, audience engagement and monetisation. Stage 1, sponsored by AWS, will feature four sports-focused sessions presented in association with Sportel. The sessions will be moderated by Sportel and will include speakers from the German Football Association (DFB), SailGP and France’s Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP). The sessions are:

• ‘The New D2C Era: Why sports organisations are becoming media companies’: exploring the growth of in-house media capabilities and direct audience relationships.
• ‘Beyond the Live Event: How Sports Content Is Expanding Fan Engagement’: looking at how sports organisations can build year-round fan relationships and new commercial opportunities.
• ‘Personalised Sports Streaming: Building the Next Viewer Experience’: examining how audience data and new features are shaping viewing experiences.
• ‘Where Sports Rights Go Next: Distribution, Discovery and Revenue’: protecting the value of premium live content in an increasingly complex market.

Elsewhere in Content Everywhere, Stats Perform will mark 30 years of its Opta data engine with a session on AI-powered sports content creation, while case studies will show how S.L. Benfica launched Portugal’s first football OTT platform, Benfica Play, and how Blue Billywig helped AZ Alkmaar build its own streaming platform.

Accelerators push the boundaries of live sports production and delivery

The IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme brings another dimension to the sports innovation story, demonstrating industry-first collaborative projects testing emerging technologies against some of the toughest real-world challenges in live production and delivery. Three sports-driven proofs of concept span AI orchestration, programmable 5G connectivity and the reinvention of live streaming.

Bringing together ITV and Astro Malaysia as Champions, with TCS, AWS, Dalet, Admongrel, Camb.ai and Shure as Participants, the AI Agents for Live Sports Production project is exploring how multiple AI agents and vendor technologies can be orchestrated to transform a live sports stream in real time. Its multi-agent framework coordinates processes and passes media and metadata between them, enabling live sports content to be adapted and delivered to different audiences in real time through applications spanning localisation, accessibility, content enhancement and monetisation – all while keeping latency low.

Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice brings together the BBC, EBU, DAZN, France Télévisions, GSMA, RAI Italy, RTL Germany, TV2 Denmark, Vodafone and Telefónica as Champions, with Neutral Wireless, Haivision, LiveU, SliceFinity and Vonage as Participants plus Academic Partner, University of Strathclyde to investigate how open network APIs can help applications with specialised requirements interact with standardised network capabilities designed to meet defined quality requirements, supporting reliable and business-critical media production workflows over 5G. The team is developing proofs of concept around major sports events in Germany and Spain for demonstration and discussion at IBC2026.

Delta Protocol: The Reinvention of Live Streaming, championed by DAZN, EBU, IET, SBA (Saudi Broadcast Authority), SMPTE and RAI, with Google, Eluvio, NeoViews and V-Nova as Participants, explores a radically different model for live media delivery. Rather than transmitting finished pixels, its long-term vision uses AI to describe an event through scene instructions that allow the viewing device itself to generate the experience – opening the door to hyper-personalisation while addressing delivery cost, complexity and content security.

ENDS

About IBC

Delivering innovation and empowering people, IBC is where the future of the global Media and Entertainment industry is defined and actioned. Energising the market, enabling content everywhere and inspiring new conversations, IBC brings the creative, technology and business communities together to collaborate, learn and unlock new opportunities.

At IBC2026, exhibitors and speakers from around the globe will showcase game-changing innovations and tackle the media sector’s most pressing trends and issues – changing perceptions and meeting the needs of the world-leading broadcasters, content owners, rightsholders, service providers and others attending the four-day conference and trade show. With a focus on inclusivity, IBC propels change – driving thought leadership, sparking discussion, shifting expectations, accelerating creativity and enabling real business outcomes.

IBC’s mission is to empower our 250,000-strong global community to explore new opportunities, build knowledge, and play an active role in the technological transformation and broader change sweeping the industry worldwide.

For further information, please visit: https://show.ibc.org/

Media Relations:

Platform Communications for IBC

Nick Field / Molly Cole

ibcprteam@platformcomms.com

+44 (0) 20 3832 3690