Fewer Buyers, More Builders, Misaligned Talent: The Year Since IBC

Every September, IBC gives our industry a fixed point to measure itself against. Set against last year's show, my conversations with broadcasters, vendors, founders and investors have changed noticeably. The pressures are not new, but three of them have hardened into something structural, and that changes what you do about them.

The Customer Base Has Changed Shape

Everyone talks about budget pressure, but the more interesting change is on the buy side, in who vendors are selling to.

Consolidation among broadcasters and media groups means there are fewer customers than two years ago, and each is larger. Decisions that used to sit with a technology team now run through central procurement, judged on total cost of ownership rather than capability, by people with no attachment to the category. Broadcasters are producing more content with fewer people, so every investment now has to carry an efficiency case, and it is that case which gets interrogated. Deals are bigger, slower and harder won.

The vertical diversification story also needs an update. Twelve months ago almost every vendor I spoke to had a plan to grow into adjacent markets, whether corporate, live events, government or AV. This year has exposed how much harder that is to execute than to describe. The buyers are different, and so are the channels, the sales motion and often the product itself. Strategy turned out to be the easy part.

AI Has Moved From the Story to the P&L

At the last IBC the question about AI was whether your story was real. That question has gone away, and what replaced it is harder to answer.

AI has moved from experimentation into operational deployment, and it now sits on the P&L in a way it did not a year ago. Consumption-based pricing makes it a real and rising cost to deliver, while customers expect the efficiency it brings to show up in the price they pay, not only in the pitch. It has also lowered the barrier to building. Broadcasters that used to buy a capability are increasingly weighing whether to build it themselves, and the make-or-buy calculation looks different from a year ago.

This is the real shift, and it is a commercial one. A vendor that stops listening to what its customers actually need no longer loses only to a direct competitor. It loses to the customer building in-house, or to a more nimble supplier who stayed closer to the problem. The businesses handling this well are making themselves harder to replicate than an internal team: closer to the workflow, quicker to move, and clear about which of their products AI strengthens and which it erodes.

The Talent Pool Is Misaligned

This has been the defining talent year, though the problem is not the one usually described. The industry is losing experience and failing to build new capability at the same time.

Restructuring and consolidation have released a wave of experienced people into the market. Engineers who understand legacy infrastructure are retiring faster than anyone is training replacements, and many who understand IP, cloud and software-defined workflows are choosing big tech and AI startups over our industry.

The commercial side is squeezed the same way: full of candidates shaped by the industry vendors used to be, and short of the crossover profiles the new strategies require.These are people who can sell into unfamiliar verticals, operate in procurement-led cycles, and apply AI with judgement rather than vocabulary.

So the pool is oversupplied and undersupplied at once. Wrong-shaped, not undersized. The companies that recognise this redesign roles around the people who actually exist, rather than spend twelve months chasing a candidate who was never out there.

Where This Leaves Us

None of this resolves by next September, and none of it rewards waiting for certainty. That is the honest read, and it is also where the opportunity sits.

The company that names the change first and acts on it takes disproportionate share while its competitors are still deciding whether the shift is real. That has been true of every transition this industry has absorbed, from SD to HD, hardware to software, on-prem to cloud. The advantage does not go to the largest business or the loudest AI story. It goes to the one that reads the market clearly and moves before the answer feels comfortable.

That is a good position to be in, and more of our clients are in it than the mood around the industry would suggest.

See you in Amsterdam.