After spending much of last year’s IBC Show discussing the emergence of the Media eXchange Layer, I arrived in Amsterdam expecting to hear how vendors are slowly beginning to roll out adoption.
What I found is that adoption is happening much faster than I, and I think many others, had expected. I saw a few vendors announcing integration at NAB Show in April, but that number has multiplied significantly over the summer. At times, it felt like MXL was everywhere with many demonstrations across the whole show floor.
In fact, IBC2026 turned out to be the show of the TLAs, aka Three Letter Acronyms (thanks to Techex’s David Edwards for coming up with the phrasing for me).
If I wasn’t talking about MXL, I was talking about DMF (Dynamic Media Facility). Not surprising, as the two are so closely related.
And when I wasn’t talking about MXL or DMF, my conversations were focused on SDB or software-defined broadcasting. As someone who spends much of her time talking and writing about all the different areas of technology within the media and entertainment industry, SDB has grown in prominence in the last 12-24 months.
MoQ was also on the agenda. I remember early discussions about Media over QUIC at IBC2025, and I would recommend David Davies’ article about the low-latency technology creating buzz from earlier this year if you want to find out more.
The newest TLA to enter my lexicon at IBC2026 was MCP, otherwise known as Model Context Protocol. It’s an IT term to explain an open-source standard that connects artificial intelligence applications to external data sources and tools, or as Geoff Stedman from SDVI told me: “It’s the way systems expose themselves to agents, and there’s a protocol for how models can read your system without having to talk through your API”.
As always, IBC was busy, tiring, but very inspiring. We’ll have more thoughts on the show in the forthcoming October issue of TVBEurope. Sign up for free here.
