IBC was its usual, large, busy self, with an extensive variety of exhibitors and a huge number of visitors from all over the world.  As someone who has attended the majority of IBCs over the last 25 years, it is impressive how much the badge collection facilities have improved!  Although there was a very long queue when I arrived on Friday morning, it moved very quickly and I soon found myself waiting for the exhibition to open.

 

From my own observations, both before and during the exhibition, and my discussions at IBC, it seems clear that this is a time of consolidation, and that perhaps the rate of technological change has slowed slightly.  The emphasis now is on trying to move some of the new concepts, such as IP working and delivery, ultra HD (whether in the 4k first phase, or subsequently as 8k) and High Dynamic Range, and the use of cloud storage and cloud-based features from the laboratory into the realm of products that can be offered for use in the studio, playout centre and home.  There are many challenges, exemplified by issues such as potentially incompatible coding standards and the difficulty of offering consumer hardware to support what may be a moving target.

 

It was interesting, too, to see Apple’s pre-IBC pre-emptive strike with the launch of the new Apple TV and their comments about television now being an app.  In truth this is not news to the industry, for a long while operators and broadcasters have been concerned with how they could offer truly effective recommendation engines, which would help to break the link with linear channel programming much as Apple is now proposing.  Indeed, at IBC one of the ‘From EPG to PPG’ panellists said that the growing availability of non-linear content meant that the EPG was “broken”.  With Apple’s involvement in this area we are now likely to see a renewed push from the incumbents to improve the viewer’s content discovery experience and hence to protect their own subscriber numbers and revenue.

 

Graham Turner