IBC 2025 Highlights
Amsterdam greeted us with rain this year, some of us even arrived at the RAI with soaked shoes. Luckily, the weather improved as the days went by, and so did the energy around the show.
IBC 2025 brought together 43,858 visitors, 1,300 exhibitors, and 600 speakers. That’s slightly fewer attendees than last year’s 45,085, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the atmosphere at Broadpeak’s booth. The space was constantly buzzing with conversations, meetings, and demos, to the point where some visitors, like Jean-Pierre Tabart, Analyst at TPICAP, noted that it looked undersized compared to the flow of people we welcomed:
We noticed a significant flow of visitors to the company’s stand at various times during our visits, with the stand even giving the impression of being undersized given the flow of visitors — in contrast to other spaces that were oversized relative to their attendance. […]
That observation reflects how we felt too: this was one of the most dynamic editions of IBC in recent years with strong activity at the booth, meaningful conversations, and most encouraging : the sense that the streaming industry may be moving into a new phase of growth.
IBC 2025: 15 Years at the Heart of Streaming
This year also carried a special meaning for us: Broadpeak celebrated its 15th anniversary at IBC. What began in 2010 as a Technicolor spin-off with a small team of six has grown into a global company helping more than 250 million viewers stream content across 50 countries. Over the years, we’ve aimed to stay ahead of the curve: from pioneering multicast ABR in 2012 to being early in offering SaaS-based workflows with broadpeak.io, and now introducing EdgePeak™ in 2025 to support the next generation of streaming.
Milestones matter, but what really made this anniversary special was sharing it with the people who made it possible. We welcomed friends, customers, colleagues, and partners to our booth for a toast to 15 years of collaboration and innovation. It was a simple moment, good conversations, good drinks, and many familiar faces, but it captured exactly what drives our work: building solutions and relationships that last.
Trends We Saw at IBC 2025: What’s Defining the Industry Now
At this year’s IBC, one theme kept surfacing in keynotes, panels, and conversations: we are now in a User-Centric Era. As Evan Shapiro puts it, this is no longer about handing power down to audiences, they already have it. The real challenge is recognizing this reality and adjusting strategies to match how users choose what they want, when they want it, and what kind of experience they expect.
Personalization is moving beyond recommendations into packaging, with the ‘bundle you pick, experience you control’ model accelerating. Viewer fatigue is real, pushing platforms to explore new ad tiers, lifestyle bundles, and real-time metrics that measure satisfaction and engagement, not just views.
For us at Broadpeak, this reinforces the path we’re already on: investing in analytics, better control tools, and personalization — a keyword for broadpeak.io’s offering. It’s about “streaming at scale”; and streaming well at scale, for all users.
Sustainability was a weaker theme at this year’s IBC, unfortunately. Beyond a handful of high-profile sessions, it was largely absent, too often still treated as an afterthought.
There were, however, some bright spots. The launch of the Media Climate Accord (MCA) by MTSS stood out, offering a unifying framework to measure, report, and take action. With goals such as a 40% reduction in energy per streaming hour by 2030 (baseline 2025) and net-zero emissions by 2040, the initiative is both ambitious and necessary.
Broadpeak was proud to be part of Better Broadcast by Design: Real Wins, Smaller Footprint, a MTSS-hosted session that brought industry leaders together to discuss meaningful progress.
We are now actively working on signing the Accord to align our efforts with this shared path to net zero.
Why does this matter? Because users increasingly expect environmental responsibility. Because energy costs, regulation, and carbon accounting will only grow in importance. And because sustainability isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s part of performance, efficiency, long-term viability and can also often bring costs savings
The 5 Trends at IBC 2025
1. Security: New Ways to Protect Revenue
While last year’s conversations centered on cutting costs, this year the spotlight shifted to security, specifically, new ways to protect revenue. Piracy is growing fast. According to MUSO, unlicensed streaming accounted for 96% of TV and film piracy in 2023, with visits to piracy sites rising from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion in 2024. In Sweden alone, 25% of people admitted to pirating in 2024, driven largely by younger audiences.
Why? Because subscription prices keep rising, services are fragmenting, content libraries are shrinking, and regional restrictions frustrate viewers, as reported recently in The Guardian. All of these factors are driving audiences back to piracy. What was once a fading threat is now a structural risk, with Parks Associates projecting over $113 billion in losses for U.S. providers by 2027.
Yet despite the scale of the problem, too many operators and broadcasters still lack the tools or urgency to respond. Protecting content is no longer optional; if piracy isn’t addressed, the rest of the business model is at risk.
Security has now moved into the delivery layer: the CDN now plays an active role in securing access to the content and taming piracy.
At IBC 2025, Broadpeak introduced a new CDN security and anti-piracy solution, purpose-built for video streaming. Unlike generic CDN defenses or DIY systems, it provides multi-layered protection, token validation, scalable DDoS mitigation, anti-token-sharing, and system-level intelligence, designed to secure millions of streams during peak live events like sports. Integrated into Broadpeak’s CDN or available via CDNaaS, it scales seamlessly and can be delivered as a managed service, backed 24/7 by our video experts.
2. Sports Streaming: Scale Still the Challenge
Sports continues to dominate the streaming conversation. Few days before IBC we saw the announcement of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer launch and FOX One, underlining how premium sports rights are moving deeper into streaming. But despite the momentum, one fundamental issue remains: scalability. Delivering live sports to millions simultaneously, without hiccups, is still one of the hardest challenges in streaming technology.
Sports streaming is advancing quickly, but the challenge of scale remains just as pressing. Viewers won’t tolerate buffering or outages during a World Cup final or the Super Bowl. For Broadpeak, this validates our long-term focus on multicast ABR and edge delivery because the industry needs solutions that let sports streaming grow without collapsing under its own weight. You can learn more about how Broadpeak has been helping deliver smooth sports streaming HERE.
3. The Creator Economy Is Becoming the Future of TV
The rise of creators is no longer a side story, it’s shaping the next phase of television. In 2024, 51,800 YouTube channels surpassed 1 million subscribers, up from 41,900 the year before. That growth shows the sheer scale of audiences built around individual creators. If even a small fraction of them launches their own standalone subscription services, it could reshape the business of streaming in new ways media can’t ignore.
It shows that the future is also about community. Creators who capture attention will play a central role in how audiences experience video.
4. AI: Beyond the Buzzword
AI is no longer just hype. Last year, we mostly saw ideas and prototypes. This year, we saw agentic AI applied in practice: from process automation and quality control to customer engagement and orchestration on Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, which are quickly becoming a must-have. The focus is shifting from “AI as a buzzword” to AI as infrastructure, integrated into products, workflows, and network management.
One area with real momentum is agentic AI–based monetization. By making ad workflows faster, simpler, and more cost-effective, it’s a potential game changer for the entire industry, especially for SMBs and SMEs looking to scale without heavy infrastructure.
At Broadpeak, we see AI as a way to make video delivery smarter: predicting bottlenecks before they happen, automating traffic routing, and enabling more precise monetization. The next few years will be less about headlines and more about invisible, AI-driven improvements to performance, efficiency, and revenue.
5. From Hype to Real-World Value
A theme running through IBC 2025 was the shift from innovation for its own sake to practical implementation. Across all technologies, from AI to delivery infrastructure, the conversations focused less on flashy promises and more on real use cases ready for deployment.
The industry is maturing: the question is no longer what’s possible, but what creates value. The focus now is on applications that improve efficiency, scale, and monetization, leaving behind the fluff that never makes it out of the lab.
What It All Adds Up To
Beyond the trends pointing to an industry that is more user-centric, digital, and dynamic than ever, we also heard clearly about the challenges customers face.
Ad monetization remains difficult, some struggle to sell inventory, others to increase fill rates, and solving this in a fragmented ad tech landscape requires greater interoperability and smarter tools.
Our biggest takeaway from IBC is that collaboration is key. Local actors need to work together to innovate and compete with global streamers like Netflix and Prime.
At Broadpeak, we see our role as helping customers thrive delivering streaming that is scalable, monetizable, and ready for the next 15 years and beyond.
Missed us at IBC? Reach out and we’ll walk you through the highlights.
