I’m a freelance consultant and the “audio person” on the IET Media Executive Committee. I attended the International Broadcast Convention in Amsterdam, the IET are one of the organisers and we hold the John Logie Baird lecture there.

Two of my clients had stands at IBC in Hall 8, with the result that I didn’t get chance to see anything outside that hall! But I did notice an interesting trend. Companies have been advertising their partnerships on their stands for a decade or more, and this is good news for the industry. If Company A partner with Company B to integrate their products, we all have a wider range of tools available to us from which to assemble the complete workflow we need.

Partnerships are still a growing trend, but this year I saw more companies offering open APIs to their products, so that you, the purchaser, (or your system integrator) can integrate products from companies A and B, or C, D, E….

One company I spoke to said there were several drivers for publishing a completely open API. Firstly, to date they have used Ember+ to provide integration, but it lacks any form of security. Their API may be open, in that it is published, but access to it on their products is secured through use of certificates and / or tokens. Secondly, if all their products have an open API, it is much easier for them to integrate their own products with each other!

Finally, of course, demonstrating your products deeply integrated with those from another company, perhaps one more widely known, is a good way of getting noticed.

I really hope at IBC2025 to find companies have created user communities to share useful integrations users have built with the open APIs.

Are you aware of any communities which have been set up to share interfaces they have built using open APIs?