What’s surprised you the most about the media technology industry in 2025?
The pace of change in underlying technology is running at a speed that it’s hard to keep up with. At the beginning of the year, technologies such as MXL were a slide on a PowerPoint and by the end we will have a functioning v1 in beta and plans to build out more layers of the hybrid production stack. This is down to a collaborative software engineering approach. Suppliers and end users are working together to create SDKs that can be used to drive interoperability. Previous work in this area has taken years to agree on open standards or specifications and the implementations sometimes do not meet expectations. The next stage is to see if the rate of adoption matches the rate of change.
What new ideas/technologies have caught your attention, and why?
The shift toward software-defined live production, particularly at the venue, has been one of the most compelling developments. The Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) and Media eXchange Layer (MXL) are moving from theory to reality, enabling synchronous video and asynchronous compute to interoperate cleanly across stadiums and remote hubs. This is transforming how media companies can build flexible, reliable and scalable workflows: containerised apps for contribution, protection, processing and monitoring can now be spun up and down per event, providing far greater observability and resilience. The recent JT-DMF meeting is really driving both the technology and also importantly, the business models that sit behind a hybrid workflow.
Alongside this, ultra-low-latency contribution, already proven in large-scale replay and VAR use cases, has moved from a niche requirement to become essential across sports and live production.
What would you say has been the biggest talking point of the year, and why?
The biggest talking point has been the convergence of identities: broadcasters becoming streamers, streamers adopting broadcast discipline, and rights holders evolving into full media companies. This shift has been especially visible in Europe, where federations and leagues now routinely insource production and manage multi-venue schedules using hybrid IP and cloud workflows. The democratisation of live production has been enabled by compact, low-power platforms, such as Appear’s X5, capable of high-quality encoding, secure transport, and integration with public cloud. Software-based production has moved from the aspirational to the practical but the demands on content creation and different outlets are growing and this presents new challenges that we need to address jointly as an industry.
As we come to the end of the year, are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the industry? Please explain why.
We’re firmly optimistic. European markets have reached a point at which hybrid production is now a scalable operating model. Facilities built on dense, power-efficient IP platforms are delivering flexibility and resilience with lower emissions. Meanwhile, the emergence of open, code-level participation in standards such as MXL and DMF is reducing integration risk for broadcasters and rights holders, helping them deploy best-of-breed workflows with confidence. With AI-assisted monitoring beginning to ease operational load at scale, the foundations for 2026 look stronger than ever.
What one word would you use to sum up the industry right now?
Hybrid. It captures the convergence of on-prem and cloud, hardware and software, synchronous and asynchronous workflows, and the cultural shift enabling broadcasters, streamers and rights holders to operate as unified video organisations.
What are you looking forward to in 2026?
The most important 2025 media trends were the shift to ad-funded / hybrid models and the rise of social and creator platforms as competition for traditional TV and SVoD. In our market sector, the convergence of identities has been an important trend, with broadcasters becoming streamers, streamers adopting broadcast discipline, and rights holders evolving into full media companies. In 2026, for Tier 2 and Tier 3 organisations, this trend will be accelerated by compact, low-power platforms capable of high-quality encoding, secure transport, and integration with public cloud.
