Mark Mayne

Welcome to the IBC2025 Live Blog, getting under the skin of the global media, entertainment, and technology industries biggest and best trade show.

Channel 4 is riding high, not only enjoying success on YouTube with a digital-first strategy but also picking up awards in the bargain. Grace Boswood, Director of Technology and Distribution at Channel 4, attributes this success to a clear-eyed view on digital transformation and a well-honed strategy.

The broad and ultimate goal of the Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange project is to shift from current dedicated media exchange technologies to a software-based, native live media exchange. This will be able to harness HPC interconnect and compute resources asynchronously, a move that not only adds immense scalability, but also flexibility, cost savings and future-proofing into the bargain.

Content creation will be increasingly democratised by the transformative power of AI, but the potential to deliver new types of content and inspire a new generation of media creatives is arguably the greatest prize, according to experts at the IBC x Google Cloud Hackfest dry run.

The all-new IBC Incubator 2025: Changing the Game Again levels up in multiple different ways. The core concept is a wide-ranging extension of the 2024 Accelerator ‘AI Media Production Labs’, retaining several of the veteran Champions and Participants, but also widening industry engagement.

The Stamping Your Content (C2PA Provenance) project aims to provide open-source tools to enable media organisations and media consumers to verify the authenticity of content of all types.

The IBC x Google Cloud Hackfest Supported by Formula E kicked off in London Friday July 4 with a stellar cast of ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and RTE engineer teams, supported by Google coaches.

The inaugural South by Southwest London 2025 saw Shoreditch taken over by the US-founded creative festival brand, serving up a blend of business, tech and culture to an international audience, with delegates attending from 56 countries.

This groundbreaking IBC Accelerators 2024 project aims to develop a solution for delivering all data between venues, in sync, and by using 5G to unlock ultra-low latencies and enable synchronised and/or distributed performances between multiple locations - all connected by the public internet.

Three project streams explore the practicality of using AI in audience validation, creative storytelling, and live sports and event production. Mark Mayne reports.