Sport will take centre stage at IBC2026, with the show featuring its strongest ever line-up of broadcasters, rights holders and technology leaders in the field.
Reflecting the growing importance of sport to the industry, data from Omdia show sports accounted for more 24 per cent of all new pay-TV subscriptions over a six month period last year. Ampere Analysis has forecast global spending on sports media rights will increase from $64 billion in 2025 to over $78 billion by 2030 and Nielsen reported more than 90 per cent of the most watched broadcasts on US TV last year were live sports. With major changes in the production and delivery of live sports, an increasing number of rights holders are developing their own production capabilities. IBC2026 aims to explore industry developments that are redefining how sports content is created, delivered, monetised and experienced.
Future Tech to showcase OBS Olympic innovation
Awarded this year’s IBC International Honour for Excellence, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) will host its first dedicated showcase of technology at Future Tech in Hall 14, providing visitors with an insight into the technology created and used for Milano Cortina 2026.
Highlights will include:
- Real-Time 360° replay technology. Developed with Alibaba, the solution uses AI and cloud processing to create viewpoints not physically captured by camera. The innovation allows replays to freeze competitors amid the action and move the viewpoint around them.
- Producing Olympic coverage on smartphones. Together with Samsung, OBS enabled mobile production on smartphones, allowing camera operators to move among the athletes.
- An Enhanced `Commentator Information System developed with Deloitte used AI to access data and content, enabling rapid generation of relevant clips.
- The Athlete Moment, developed with TCL, allowed competitors to connect with family and friends.
- Metadata and augmented-reality graphics capabilities developed with OMEGA enable further ways of adding context and information to Olympic content.
The changing landscape
The IBC2026 Conference will feature leaders from some of the world’s biggest sports organisations to discuss the shifting media environment. Highlights include:
- Live Sports at Scale: Redefining the art of the possible: Oscar Sanchez, head of host broadcast production at FIFA, and Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of OBS, will explore breakthroughs from ultra-low-latency streaming and cloud production to interactive fan engagement and AI-driven personalisation.
- The New Playbook for Sports: AI, data, fans and rights: Francisco Antunez, chief content officer, Liga Portugal, and Zarah Al-Kudcy, CRO, Women’s Super League, tackle the changing intersection of technology, fandom, media rights and economics.
- Tech Leader Perspectives – how AI is reshaping the business of media: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris and Damian Cronan, CDIO at ABC discuss how AI and data are reshaping production, distribution and media business models.
- UEFA: Unlocking growth through innovation: Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA executive director of marketing, looks at using innovation to drive growth and engage audiences while preserving tradition.
- Security, Authenticity and Provenance: How can we trust the content we have now and in the future?’: Jose Ignacio Carrillo de Albornoz, audiovisual anti-fraud manager at LaLiga, examines how to keep content secure, verified and traceable.
- The Winners and Losers in the Creator Economy: Who will be the New Media Elite?: Will Pithers, strategic partner manager, sport at Meta, and Tim Haubeil, channel director at Sidemen Entertainment, discuss the changing dynamics of influence, monetisation and discovery.
Content Everywhere
Sportel partnership will develop the conversation in Content Everywhere, in Hall 5, exploring multi-platform delivery, audience engagement and monetisation. Sponsored by AWS, Stage 1 will include four sessions in association with Sportel, with speakers from the German Football Association (DFB), SailGP and France’s Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP). The sessions are:
- The New D2C Era: Why sports organisations are becoming media companies: exploring the growth of in-house media capabilities and direct audience relationships.
- Beyond the Live Event: How Sports Content Is Expanding Fan Engagement: looking at how sports organisations can build year-round fan relationships and new commercial opportunities.
- Personalised Sports Streaming: Building the Next Viewer Experience: examining how audience data and new features are shaping viewing experiences.
- Where Sports Rights Go Next: Distribution, Discovery and Revenue: protecting the value of premium live content in an increasingly complex market.
Elsewhere, Stats Perform will host a session on AI-powered content creation to mark 30 years of its Opta data engine. Case studies will demonstrate how S.L. Benfica launched Portugal’s first football OTT platform, Benfica Play, and how Blue Billywig helped AZ Alkmaar build its own streaming platform.
Accelerating change
Aiming to highlight industry-first collaborative projects, The IBC Accelerator Media Programme will feature emerging technologies designed to meet real-world production challenges. Three sports-driven proofs of concept span AI orchestration, programmable 5G connectivity and the reinvention of live streaming.
The AI Agents for Live Sports Production combines Champions ITV and Astro Malaysia with participants CS, AWS, Dalet, Admongrel, Camb.ai and Shure in a project to explore how orchestration of multiple AI agents and vendor technologies can transform a live sports stream in real time. Coordinating processes and passing media and metadata across a multi-agent framework enables adaption and delivery of content to multiple audiences through applications including accessibility, localisation and monetisation while ensuring latency remains low.
With the BBC, EBU, DAZN, France Télévisions, GSMA, RAI Italy, RTL Germany, TV2 Denmark, Vodafone and Telefónica as Champions, and Neutral Wireless, Haivision, LiveU, SliceFinity and Vonage as Participants plus Academic Partner, University of Strathclyde, Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice, investigates using open network APIs to help applications with specialised requirements interact with standardised network capabilities designed to meet defined quality requirements, supporting reliable and business-critical media production workflows over 5G. Proofs of concept are being developed around major German and Spanish sports events, and will be discussed.
Delta Protocol: The Reinvention of Live Streaming is championed by DAZN, EBU, IET, SBA (Saudi Broadcast Authority), SMPTE and RAI, with Google, Eluvio, NeoViews and V-Nova as Participants. The project’s long-term vision uses AI to describe an event through scene instructions that allow the device itself to demonstrate an experience, rather than transmitting finished pixels, aiming to enable hyper-personalisation while managing cost, complexity and security.
Stephen Nuttall, chair of IBC, commented,“This is our best-ever sports showing at IBC. Sport has always been a major driver of technology adoption in media, because live production demands both innovation and absolute reliability. Today, we’re seeing fundamental shifts in how sport is produced and experienced, from the growing role of rightsholders in production to the proliferation of ways audiences can watch and engage. IBC brings the sports media industry together to see what’s possible and keep pace with rapid changes in production, delivery, audience engagement and business models.”
