IBC2024: What to look out for on Day One

For Delegate badge holders, sustainability, the AI revolution and the IBC Technical Papers are in store. On the showfloor, 1200 exhibitors will showcase state-of-the-art products whilst visitors can explore the brand new AI Tech Zone, check out the IBC Accelerator Innovation Programme sessions, learn successful business modelling in the Showcase Theatre, and delve into the future of content on the Content Everywhere stage.

IBC Conference
Starting at 10:30 in Conference Room 1 as part of the IBC Conference is behavioural expert Thimon de Jong in the Keynote session: “Navigating a changing media landscape: AI and Everything Else.” Founder of Whetston, de Jong will explore how businesses can navigate the so-called ‘polycrisis’: multiple crises affecting the world simultaneously and the possible dangers of the AI revolution on leadership and mental health. His talk will challenge audiences to consider how they will accelerate innovation in an ethical way between humans and machines.

At 13:45 in Conference Room 1, speaker Jonathan Thompson, CEO at Everyone TV will discuss “Freely – collaboration for the streaming age.” Discover how a landmark collaboration between the UK’s leading public service broadcasters puts the viewer first in the streaming age, with insights from working with Everyone TV’s shareholders – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – as Freely launched in the UK earlier this year.

At 14:00 in Conference Room 1, “Where next? Innovating broadcast operating business models” will feature a panel of speakers including David Salmon, EVP and Managing Director, International at Tubi. Salmon will explore how audiences and subscribers are on the move and how new opportunities in content delivery which now enable the disruption of established linear business models in broadcast and PayTV.

At 14:45 in Conference Room 1, Orange’s Chem Assayag, Senior VP Home Services Innovation will be quizzed, “Who owns the customer? Winning the battle for control of the TV experience,” as the broadcast media industry finds itself on the precipice of transformation. This fireside chat offer insights on making business models work to capture the customer in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace.

Finally don’t miss “MovieLabs 2030 – A Step Closer to the Vision” as Movielabs’ Richard Berger and Leon Silverman, and key technology leaders from the Hollywood Studios, cloud providers, and software service providers discuss their plans for the next phase of industry engagement to realise the MovieLabs 2030 Vision. This session will highlight progress, commitment, and the work that lies ahead as the key stakeholders across the media creation industry increasingly work to adopt and implement the 2030 Vision. With a host of speakers from Marvel Studios, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures and MovieLabs.

IBC Technical Papers
Starting at 11:00 in Conference Room 2, exclusively for Delegate badge holders, the session “Sustainability – energy efficiency, spanning devices to delivery systems” will look beyond the consumer device to assess the complete energy cost of delivering a streaming service, considering the implications of new UHD features, with another paper advocating a measure and adapt approach based on delivery channel and end device capabilities.

At the next session at 14:00, “AI in Production – training and targeting,” Viaccess-Orca, European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) will discuss their work on the application of AI to media production, covering facial recognition machine learning systems, a solution to the over-training problem when applying machine learning to multi-label indexing of news items, and a future where Generative AI is used to adapt advertising based on characteristics / beliefs that have been gleaned of the target.

Then at 16:00 in Conference Room 2 the “Audio Description plays an indispensable role in making media accessible to visually impaired individuals” session explores how high production costs and significant time demands are a challenge that limits their availability and timeliness. By using AI, Globo has built a system to automatically narrate and audio mix a script created by an expert, reducing the need for a professional narrator and audio mixing team. Then the second paper from the BBC presents details of a trial, held at Eurovision, implementing ADM (the open standard Audio Definition Model) for representing Next Generation Audio in an encoder agnostic way.

Innovation Stage
Starting at 11:15 on the Innovation Stage in Hall 3, the “Connect and Produce Anywhere, Phase II follows the build of of an all IP, Edge-first, multi-cloud, multi software test bed environment in the CAPA Accelerator 2023. This is followed by “VFX At The Edge: Adapting to the unpredictable challenges of modern production featuring Framestore” at 12:30, delving into today’s dynamic world of media production.

At 14:00, two key streams of development – the “Evolution of the Control Room, leveraging XR, Voice, AI and HTML Based Graphic Solutions” will explore the evolution of live production workflows in this afternoon session.

The final Accelerator session of the day will be at 16:45, which tackles the environmental impact of media consumption by developing consolidated metrics for energy, in the unmissable session, “ECOFLOW: Energy-Conserving Optimization for Future-ready, Low-impact Online Workflows.”

Content Everywhere
The Content Everywhere stage is jam-packed with insights on the future of content, for the full programme click here. Highlights include…

On Stage 1, a panel discussion at 12:45 explores “Content strategies for FAST in Europe,” with speakers from OKAST, Ai-Media and Whip Media.

With another panel at 15:30 discussing “Engaging audiences with new formats and experiences” with NativeWaves GmbH, Dizplai and nanocosmos. Using three use cases, this session will highlight how the IP, online world is the catalyst for new experiences and formats that take audience engagement to new heights.

On Stage 2, Mux explores how do we encode and stream video in a way that’s optimised for short-form video, in the 11:15 session: Short-form video is eating the world… So how do you optimise for it? Whilst a panel of speakers from Eosos, ioMoVo Corp and Cut It Training discuss “Streamlining content management processes” at 13:30.

Showcase Theatre
In the free-to-attend Showcase Theatre in Hall 8, four days of sessions will unravel the industry’s biggest challenges, successful business models and real-world solutions. The full agenda can be found here.

Kicking off at 12:00, Google Cloud, Paramount and Evergent Technologies Inc. discuss the behind-the-0scenes of D2C business models in the panel discussion “Under the Hood of D2C Business Model Transformation: The Role of Hybrid Monetisation, the Cloud and Generative AI.”

Followed later by Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro and the RTS’ Theresa Wise mapping out the new UK TV Ecosystem in the session “The UK Television Universe in The User Centric Era: Evan Shapiro and Theresa Wise talk business!”

AI Tech Zone
Brand new for 2024 and powered by EBU, the biggest visionaries and developers come together to pick apart everything AI.

Starting at 11:00 with the critical question: “Can AI be regulated? What public policy can(‘t) do to address AI risks?” EBU and SMPTE explore the risks created by the rapid development of AI and ask what can be done about it.

Followed by CP2A, BBC R&D, Fraunhofer FOKUS and EPFL will be putting their minds together in a panel discussion: “Content Tracing & Provenance” at 11:20.

Other topics dissected include AI dubbing at 12:15, How AI adoption acceleration is game changing in future proof M&E enterprises at 15:30, and Transform Your Media: Create and Share XR content with AI-Powered Tools at 16:15.

IBC esports zone
The expanded esports zone is where you’ll find everything from the world of this phenomenon that has taken the tech and broadcast world by storm. Across the four days there will be experts in the field ready to dish out knowledge and answer curious questions. The full agenda can be found here.

Exhibition floor
Out on the Exhibition floor, you can expect the usual hive of activity with stands from the biggest names in the industry and those new start-ups breaking the mould, all demonstrating their cutting edge tech. IBC’s 1,200 exhibitors this year include industry leaders such as Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), ARRI, Avid, Blackmagic Design, Canon, Dell Technologies, EVS, Fraunhofer, Google, Grass Valley, LTN, Mediakind, Microsoft, NEP Group, Ross Video, Sony, Telstra and many, many more. IBC