Igor Oreper, chief strategy officer, Bitmovin
For me, two industry trends defined 2025—the rapid maturity of ad-supported streaming and a shift from growth-at-all-costs to operational discipline. AVoD and live ad monetisation continued to expand, driven by audience price sensitivity and advertiser demand for premium, addressable inventory, yet the balancing act for providers between delivering at scale and maximising ad revenue remains.
At the same time, cost control has overtaken monetisation as the industry’s biggest concern. After years of experimentation, streaming businesses are being forced to prove sustainable economics. As for AI, this went from a novelty to normalisation during 2025. No longer just a future-facing talking point but now embedded in day-to-day workflows, from content understanding to operational decision-making. Together, these trends signal an industry moving from experimentation to optimisation.
Streaming platforms are becoming more selective about where they invest, focusing on technologies and workflows that deliver measurable returns. This has accelerated innovation in advertising workflows, particularly around contextual relevance, viewer experience and resiliency, as platforms recognise that poor quality or failed streams directly undermine monetisation.
There is a move toward greater automation, deeper observability and data-led decision-making, with AI having a greater impact with increasing use to extract more value from content libraries and live streams without proportionally increasing costs. The result is a more pragmatic, metrics-driven industry mindset.
In 2026, AVoD and live monetisation will continue to grow. Platforms that can combine personalisation, reliability and cost efficiency will pull ahead, while others may struggle to sustain margins. AI will move further upstream. Instead of asking ‘where can we apply AI?’, organisations will start assuming AI is present and focus on governance, integration and outcomes. I think 2026 will be less about headline-grabbing disruption and more about disciplined evolution, refining streaming models to be resilient, profitable and for long-term audience and advertiser expectations.
The new trend for 2026 will be the battle for profitable growth, retention and capturing market share. The industry is likely to enter a new phase defined by structural change rather than incremental optimisation. The theme of consolidation will continue to make its mark in 2026 with streaming services shifting how they build and operate their technology stack in favour of modular, interoperable workflows that can be adapted quickly. Anchored by a handful of core players, the industry will see further contraction in the year ahead, with only the most dominant able to withstand the takeover wars.
Another emerging trend will be the rise of context-aware monetisation as content understanding improves. Advertising will move beyond broad targeting toward real-time contextual alignment with live and on-demand programming. Performance in real-world conditions will be key in gaining much needed competitive advantage.
Ray Miklius, VP of Technology, GatesAir
The biggest talking point last year was definitely 5G broadcast. It’s still early days, but there’s real curiosity around how it could let viewers receive TV and media straight to the phones they already use. On the flip side, the traditional TV transmitter market in Europe has been fairly flat and mostly replacement work rather than expansion. Energy costs are also driving decisions, especially in places like the UK, so efficiency has become a major priority. Meanwhile, radio is moving full steam ahead, with DAB rollouts growing faster than TV activity and generating more new projects overall.
Energy pricing is pushing broadcasters to rethink their transmission strategies and look for ways to cut long-term power use. That’s kept the TV side conservative – most investments are about maintaining or replacing existing infrastructure rather than building out more. DAB radio, however, continues to grow, which is where we’re seeing most of the action and new services launch. Early 5G broadcast trials are also sparking industry conversations about how media could reach people more directly on mobile devices. It’s encouraging more collaboration among broadcasters, regulators, and vendors as everyone tries to understand what the business model could look like.
We expect 2026 to bring more clarity around 5G broadcast – who’s pushing for it, how governments handle spectrum, and when real deployments might begin. Ongoing tests across Europe, including planned work in Germany, should help move the discussion from “what if” to “what next.” As standards evolve and handset support slowly becomes more realistic, we think broadcasters will get a clearer roadmap for future rollout. Energy efficiency will stay important too, as TV operators continue searching for solutions that bring down electricity costs without compromising reliability or coverage.
If things keep moving, 2026 could be the year 5G broadcast starts shifting from trials into something more tangible, especially if handset makers and regulators get behind it. We may also see more interest in hybrid models that mix traditional broadcast with IP delivery to reach audiences wherever they are.
Steve Reynolds, CEO of Imagine Communications
Consolidation was one of the defining dynamics of 2025, as companies seek stability and efficiency amid shifting business models and evolving audience behaviour. We’re seeing industry consolidation driven by the need to build scale, a tried-and-tested way to manage volatility and rapid platform change, as well as operational consolidation across workflows and teams.
Total TV, a unified advertising approach that treats audience as inventory, formed another key theme last year. Unlike the US, Europe already has markets where Total TV is fully in motion, giving us real examples of audience-led models in practice. And unified origination has also taken hold over the past year, as the technology has finally caught up with the ambition.
2025 also saw AI move into the “this is delivering real business value” stage, especially in QC, monitoring, and planning. And the shift to IP just keeps accelerating as ST 2110 becomes the default mindset for new production and playout builds.
Across Europe, these trends are pushing the industry toward more integrated and efficient operations. Consolidation is driving media and entertainment companies to clean up fragmented workflows and reduce the amount of duplicated infrastructure they’ve been carrying for years. Total TV is highlighting just how limiting it is to treat linear and streaming as two separate businesses, and it’s nudging the market toward a more audience-first way of thinking. Unified origination is having a similar effect on the technical side – breaking down old broadcast/digital silos and eliminating the drag that comes from running parallel stacks. AI is helping teams manage a lot more complexity without adding a lot more resources, especially in QC and monitoring where volume and consistency matter. And IP adoption is opening the door to distributed, multisite, cloud-hybrid models that simply aren’t possible in SDI-only environments.
Looking ahead for this year, Europe is poised to push these trends even further. Consolidation will continue to reshape strategies as operators aim for deeper integration across playout, streaming, and advertising. Total TV won’t be a “big breakthrough” moment – Europe is already ahead – but we’ll see more operators adopt audience-first models as the norm rather than the exception.
Unified origination will gain momentum as more broadcasters retire their duplicate infrastructures and move toward unified staffing and orchestration. AI adoption will speed up because the business benefits are now concrete and proven. And IP migration will move from selective deployments to broader, more unified architectures as broadcasters look to bring production, playout, and contribution into a single, flexible, software-driven environment.
One new development I expect to see in 2026 is a shift in how operators approach the FAST ecosystem. We’ve already reached saturation in terms of channels and inventory, and that’s prompting a new response: rather than doubling down on FAST expansion, some major players are beginning to stand up thematic channels on their traditional playout architectures. It’s a smarter move that connects those channels to higher-value ad pipelines and brings greater control and consistency back into the model. As this approach takes shape, it’s likely to redefine how operators think about FAST’s role in their broader portfolio, focusing less on volume and more on creating inventory that actually performs.
Will McDonald, chief product officer, Miris
The biggest shift in 2025 that had me excited was how quickly Generative AI pushed beyond static NeRFs and traditional reconstruction into fast, view-consistent 3D generation. We’re now seeing content creators stitch together workflows using GenAI and world models to produce usable 3D content with an ever-smaller number of inputs. This collapses workflows that once required multi-view capture, retopology, or hand-authored LODs. The barrier to producing high-fidelity 3D is falling much faster than I initially expected.
Conversations with studios changed meaningfully last year. High-fidelity immersive 3D used to imply either expensive pixel streaming or deploying apps, both of which carried prohibitive GPU and distribution costs at scale, when it comes to web delivery. We’re now working with creators on what experiences become unlocked if you remove those barriers around cost, speed, fidelity, and scale. This shifts the framing from “what tradeoff do I need to make to reach consumers” to “what new experiences become viable when distribution and runtime cost are no longer the limiting factors.” With lightweight, streamable field representations replacing multi-GB downloads or per-user GPU rendering, companies can treat interactive 3D content as a practical medium at consumer internet scale rather than an R&D exercise.
I expect 2026 to be the first year we can reliably distribute interactive, high-quality 3D across a wide range of devices, including low-power ones, without resorting to pixel streaming. Better attribute compression, adaptive fidelity, and hardware-accelerated field decoding will make volumetric playback stable at consumer scale. The hard problems that remain are real-time editability, temporal coherence for dynamic scenes, and reducing end-to-end AI conditioning time. We’ll see clear progress on all three in 2026. That said, if 2025 taught me anything, it’s that AI timelines will keep outpacing my predictions.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” When video creation democratised, it reshaped distribution; YouTube, streaming platforms, and global CDNs emerged because millions of people could suddenly make content. We’re entering the same moment in 3D. My ten-year-old can generate 3D assets that would have required a skilled team not long ago. When billions of people can create 3D content, the current distribution models cannot hold. Storage footprints, bandwidth budgets, moderation, and engine tooling all break under that volume. 2026 is when those pressures become impossible to ignore and innovation in distribution once again follows fast behind the flood of new content.
Fabio Murra, SVP product and marketing, V-Nova
Three trends stood out to me in 2025. First, efficiency became a board-level metric. Rising energy costs, sustainability targets, and the expanding use of AI meant energy and cost per delivered hour shaped every decision. Broadcasters and service providers focused on reducing unnecessary processing and transport overhead, not just headline performance. Second, next-generation terrestrial initiatives, most visibly Brazil’s TV 3.0, addressed the gap between broadcast and streaming, from UHD and HDR, to personalisation. With fixed spectrum and mixed device bases, teams had to balance quality, coverage, robustness, and service count. We have been particularly engaged here, where MPEG-5 LCEVC fits this environment by improving bandwidth efficiency and supporting practical upgrades across new generations of devices. Third, AI moved from a nice-to-have into the live signal path. Real-time replays, tracking, and graphics exposed transport as a bottleneck, accelerating interest in AI-native solutions. An interesting solution was presented by swXtch.io, which paired IP multicast with hierarchical formats and ROI delivery defined in SMPTE ST 2117-1, so one stream can serve many AI models without multiplying bandwidth or latency.
The impact has been a reprioritisation across the value chain. Content and quality still matter, but cost, sustainability targets and device diversity increasingly shape how it is delivered. MPEG-5 LCEVC is mandated as part of the TV 3.0 standard, exactly because maximum efficiency and flexibility in delivery is what’s needed to compete with streaming services. In live and offline production, the usage and reliance on AI is increasing, while also exposing the limits of mezzanine data formats that were made for human-perception rather than machine consumption. They force full-frame transport and decode, only to discard most pixels causing network bottlenecks, compute waste and added latency that need to be addressed. As a very practical example, platforms such as swXtch.io demonstrate an alternative using AI-native data formats to multicast. There a single SMPTE VC-6 stream can serve multiple AI tasks, each subscribing only to the resolution or region of interest (RoI) it needs. In 1080p30 multicast tests, this approach reduced bandwidth from 1.3 Gb/s to 118 Mb/s and cut end-to-end AI latency to around 317 ms.
In 2026, these trends become operational and measurable, with cost and watts per delivered pixel tracked alongside end-to-end latency budgets for AI-in-the-loop production. For distribution, MPEG-5 LCEVC moves from “interesting” to a mainstream efficiency layer, from low latency live sports streaming to FAST channels. In TV 3.0, this shift is already mandated, giving broadcasters guaranteed headroom for UHD, HDR, and service robustness. In production, the network stops being passive. AI-native multicast fabrics layered into SMPTE ST 2110 environments let models pull only what they need, when they need it, using SMPTE VC-6 LoQ and ROI access rather than full frames. Expect fewer proxy chains and faster replay and graphics turnarounds. These technology layers will provide the foundations for differentiation in services, through better use of resources.
Three new trends are likely for 2026. Supported by a plethora of new consumer wearables, viewpoint media emerges as a practical extension of premium video, driven by long-form content becoming watchable without discomfort as XR hardware and formats mature. The key enabler is reuse: existing CGI and VFX assets can be repurposed into navigable, cinematic experiences, with formats like V-Nova PresenZ making free movement and sustained viewing commercially viable at scale. Second, codec agility accelerates. Services will tune their stacks per title, device, and session. MPEG-5 LCEVC supports this approach and as TV 3.0 services will demonstrate with their commercial launch this year. Third, AI-native live production workflows scale. Models will move from being monolithically integrated into being organic parts of the systems, dynamically request “the pixels” they need, at the exact quality and for the necessary region of interest. This will enable parallel detection, tracking, segmentation, and graphics from a single multicast source, making personalised viewports and near-instant replays commercially viable.
Einat Khana, VP of product management, Viaccess-Orca
Last year, we saw audiences take control of how they consume content. The old model of one-size-fits-all bundles is fading fast. Viewers want flexibility, and they’re building their own experiences with smaller packages that mix niche FAST channels, sports, and creator-led streams. That shift toward personalisation has been striking. Another big change was how engagement became part of the viewing experience. For younger audiences, watching without interaction feels incomplete, so features like polls and social layers are now integrated into the mainstream. Younger audiences love social features and watch parties with avatars that look like gaming lobbies. Meanwhile, sports fans of all ages are really engaging with live stats and betting options that help them analyse the game as they watch. AI also moved beyond pilots and is helping with localisation, highlights, and even ad verification. All of this points to a clear trend: video is no longer passive; it’s becoming something audiences shape for themselves.
These changes in how audiences consume and engage with content, and the shift in how AI is being deployed, are rewriting the playbook for media companies. Smaller, curated bundles and creator-led channels are challenging traditional distribution models. FAST platforms are finding new ways to monetise through tipping and virtual goods, which is a big shift from relying solely on ads. Interactivity has become a retention tool, especially for younger viewers who expect experiences that feel more like gaming. We’re also seeing success measured differently: Engagement depth matters more than raw reach. That’s a fundamental change in how the industry defines value. On the operational side, AI is streamlining processes: automating localisation, verifying ad placements, and improving speed to market. But with synthetic content on the rise, trust is now a major concern. Platforms need clear ways to prove authenticity.
We’re heading toward a world where streaming, gaming, and social interaction converge and engagement becomes as important as viewership. This year, expect these trends to go even deeper. Gamification will move from experimental to mainstream, with avatars and virtual spaces where friends can watch together. FAST channels won’t just be linear streams, they’ll feel like immersive environments with chat and interactive layers that borrow from gaming culture.
AI will take on more of the media lifecycle, from real-time brand safety to personalised content adaptation. And, as synthetic media becomes more common, authenticity tools will be essential to maintain trust. Creator-led channels will keep growing, and token-gated experiences will give audiences a sense of ownership.
New models will emerge that reshape both monetisation and trust. Token-gated content will turn subscribers into members with exclusive privileges, creating communities around content, while micro-transactions for live moments, tipping, and virtual goods will become standard revenue streams for broadcasters and creators. The product UX will need to evolve to include “one-tap” purchases and “digital wallets” as a standard part of the viewer profile, making buying a virtual jersey or tipping a creator as seamless as changing the channel. This transforms the viewer from a subscriber into an active participant in a virtual economy. AI-driven personalisation will advance, enabling real-time content adaptation and hyper-localised experiences. With synthetic media on the rise, authenticity standards will move to the foreground as platforms adopt verification tools to reassure audiences.
Robin Boldon, head of product at FriendMTS
Last year, piracy became more commercialised, automated and criminalised. Price rises, ad-tiers and complex bundles pushed ARPU higher and created a high-cost, high-friction environment which illegal, closed-IPTV piracy services run by organised crime groups have exploited. These illegal platforms offer broader content mix, good value, unified interfaces, and sometimes even superior technical performance. Live sport remained the primary target for pirates because of its high-value and huge real-time demand. At the same time, AI is changing how piracy works, moving from manual ripping to fully automated theft including scanning and probing CDNs for weak spots, dodging detection, and localising content instantly so it can be shared worldwide.
Piracy erodes margins and many viewers turn to illegal service because rising prices and fragmented access make legitimate options cumbersome. Broadcasters and streamers face heightened pressure around live sports,where even brief outages can push audiences toward illicit IPTV streams that offer instant availability and consolidated access without multiple subscriptions. The growth of “bulletproof hosting” where pirates use servers and data centres that are perceived to be beyond the reach of takedowns and legal enforcement, also further complicates enforcement. AI has democratised content theft. We are no longer dealing with hobbyists and outwitting teenagers in bedrooms; anti-piracy teams are now combatting automated agents built by organised criminal groups with strong cybersecurity backgrounds, using advanced computer-vision algorithms to scan the open web, social media, and illicit IPTV services 24/7.
In 2026, piracy will be more widely recognised as an arm of organised crime, prompting stronger law-enforcement attention and heightened awareness of the risks from viewers of illegal streams. Anti-piracy teams will continue deploying enhanced AI/RAG models that combine automated searching with intelligent analysis to identify threats up to 70 per cent faster, helping curb piracy of high-demand content such as live sports and major events. Coordinated multi-jurisdictional anti-piracy investigations will expand, supported by stronger legislative alignment as representatives from the broadcasting, content, and technology sectors collaborate more closely with local and international law enforcement agencies. More competent pirate groups are likely to shift to safe-haven hosting providers, while less sophisticated operators may exit the market. Based on various discussions on new bills in the US and new legislation in APAC supported by many countries, we expect regulators to adopt more dynamic blocking, moving beyond slower cease-and-desist models.
Despite this, the commercial incentive for criminals using closed IPTV services is likely to persist because these operations continue to generate high, low-risk revenue streams by undercutting legal platforms on price, bundling everything in one place, and exploiting consumer frustration with fragmentation and rising subscription costs. Another interesting development is the potential targeting of end users by rights holders, such as DAZN sending compensation demands to Italian viewers who had used illegal IPTV services, though it remains early to see how widely this takes hold.
A notable development this year will be addressing the price-gap problem between legal and illegal services, particularly as authorities identify the relatively small number of data centres enabling Europe’s piracy economy.
Beyond that, we’ll see more pirate groups shifting to enforcement-resistant bulletproof hosting; growing awareness of malware and cybercrime risks tied to illicit IPTV; wider adoption of dynamic IP blocking: and continued scaling of AI and computer-vision monitoring to keep pace with increasingly automated pirate tactics.
