With the dust now settled on IBC2025, TVBEurope took the time to reflect on the biggest talking points and trends of the show in a special webinar.
The panel, Larissa Görner-Meeus, managing director at LaraMedia, Caretta Research co-founder Robert Ambrose, and Simon Hawkings, director of sales strategy and business acceleration at Ross Video, discussed multiple topics, including the Media eXchange Layer, cloud adoption, live production and the future of the industry.
One of the biggest talking points of the show was FinOps. “Finance has always been on the table when we were buying something. But now finance is a very central discussion that you have in any purchase or in any solution purchase,” explained Görner-Meeus.
“In this software-defined world that we’re moving so fast into, there are just new skills that we need and new disciplines that we need,” agreed Ambrose. “License management is one that comes up all the time in this world where we have all of this flexibility and floating licenses.”
This led the panel on to discussing the cloud, not a new talking point, but Ambrose told the audience he feels the industry is moving to a more pragmatic approach.
“There was a little while where everybody was cloud, cloud, cloud at all costs,” he explained. Now there’s much more focus on using the cloud where it makes sense. And, of course, it makes sense for lots of things. There’s a whole range of use cases where the cloud is superb. At the same time, there’s a lot of live production and broadcasting workflows, which are pretty constant workloads, and where that and cost and latency all make it much more sensible to just have it running on-prem on cheap servers. And I think, exactly what we’re seeing.”
“Maybe that’s another example of FinOps,” said Ambrose. “It’s understanding how to access the resources that you need and where’s the most economical place to have them.”
Hawkings agreed with Ambrose’s point, citing conversations at the show around the use of private cloud and customers building their own data centres in order to protect both costs and security.
“The move to software does not necessarily mean public cloud. It could end up looking in a way quite similar to how things are today, a room full of boxes with flashing lights doing things. But they’re running software. They’re not running FPGAs and hardware.”
The panel shared their overall thoughts from the show, with all three agreeing that they feel that in 2025, the pace of change in the industry is starting to increase. “It feels like we’ve got so much to talk about now in the way the industry is changing,” stated Ambrose.
“But we do always need to be careful, and this is always the danger of IBCs, that we can get caught up in the bubble. I think it’s always crucial to step back. We love new tech and love looking at the latest shiniest thing, but always step back and say, well, how is that going to change what we do for the better? How do we use it for real? Is this just a bubble, or is this something that is going make a change?
“That’s always a crucial question to ask after any of the big events.”
The full webinar is now available to watch on-demand here.
