IBC 23: Appetite for disruption

Posted: 20/09/2023

By Ian McDonough, CEO, Blackbird.

Hot on the heels of our Special Events in London to introduce elevate.io several of us attended IBC in Amsterdam. 

Atmospherically IBC 23 was noticeably more energetic and optimistic than the post Covid 2022 show. 

Cloud was still a discussion point, and it was much more through the pervasive lens of AI (or co-piloting as I heard it called many times). This is undoubtedly being looked on by most people at IBC as an enhancer not a replacement of humankind in the media workplace. Certainly, this was bringing a huge amount of interest to our partner, Microsoft’s booth. Whether it is reimagining content creation or distribution, enhancing customer experience or improving monetisation, Microsoft has a co-pilot opportunity ready and waiting.

Generative Ai is unquestionably the Genie out of the bottle but use cases are still limited.  However, watch this space, this space is only going to grow. 

Feeding into the potential of AI is of course the need for data. The future will indeed be data driven and the need and benefits of knowing everything about the customer, end user and the environments they are operating in will be key. Something the team developing elevate.io are very well aware of.

The media cartographer, Evan Shapiro shook things up when he observed shrewdly that media and mediatech companies are sleepwalking into a new user centric era, akin to dinosaurs still working on outdated business models with short term thinking. Longer term moon-shots were in shorter supply than he would like and the innovators dilemma where bigger companies were creaming off short term profits was much in evidence. 

Blackmagic’s success as the main sponsor of IBC with a larger stand than Adobe and Avid is a powerful demonstration of the continued consumerisation of audio-video technology for creators and professionals.

Our partner in IPD VIA Create, EVS, had an incredibly busy stand as well as showcasing the video editing platform developed together with Blackbird they were also introducing Extra Motion, their first foray into AI.

In conclusion it was heartening to see the industry excited and ambitious about the future and enough changemakers in the midst to drive innovation and find new ways of thinking outside the existing ecosystem.