At IBC 2025 with Akamai: My Reflections

This year I returned once again to the #IBC in Amsterdam, marking my tenth time attending the event. Over the years, the focus has shifted — with new technologies emerging, others fading, and priorities evolving — but the constant has always been the value of meeting people in person. Reconnecting with clients, partners, and colleagues, while taking the pulse of where the industry is heading, remains the most rewarding part of IBC.

Over the years, I have attended IBC with different perspectives. In the past, my focus was more on the application and service layer for sports, while in recent editions, being here with Akamai Technologies has shifted the conversations toward infrastructure, cloud, performance, and scale. This continuity makes it especially valuable to reconnect with clients and executives, comparing how priorities have changed and how solutions are evolving year after year.

Key Industry Themes at IBC 2025

Below are the top four themes I saw at this year's edition of the IBC:

1. Applying AI to Media Experiences

Artificial intelligence is already part of how media workflows are run today. At IBC 2025, many examples showed how AI is being applied to tasks that were once slow and complex, such as managing multiple versions of content, automating rights enforcement, and optimising global distribution. Beyond operations, AI is also driving personalization and customization, helping media companies deliver experiences that better match audience expectations. These applications are becoming a standard element of the industry, reducing cost and time while ensuring content reaches the right audiences with the right performance and compliance.

There was also discussion around AI agentic models, with the idea that digital experiences are increasingly shaped for AI agents as much as for humans — a shift that could redefine how media workflows and user experiences are designed.

2. Edge and Sovereign Cloud

Another important theme was the present and future of infrastructure. Edge computing is emerging as a key enabler for live production, sports, and immersive media, where every millisecond counts. Delivering content closer to users reduces latency and improves the overall experience. Alongside this, sovereign cloud models are becoming more relevant, as they allow companies to keep tighter control over where data is stored and how it is managed, ensuring both compliance and trust. Together, edge and sovereign cloud create a foundation that is faster, safer, and more adaptable.

3. Audience Engagement and Immersive Experiences

Audiences today expect to be part of the story rather than passive consumers. This is driving major investments in personalization, interactivity, and immersive formats where video and data converge. These approaches are designed to keep audiences engaged for longer, to make experiences more memorable, and to build loyalty over time across different devices and different times of the day. They also open the door to new creative possibilities, giving producers and creators more tools to surprise and delight their audiences.

4. Monetization Opportunities

All of these trends lead back to monetization. The innovations presented at IBC 2025 show a clear shift beyond traditional models like subscriptions and advertising. By combining AI-driven efficiency, real-time infrastructure, and immersive engagement, new ways to generate revenue are emerging, including betting. These range from premium content tiers and sponsorships to micropayments, interactive shopping experiences, and live-first services that depend on speed and immediacy. The message was clear: monetization is no longer a separate step but something that grows naturally from better technology and richer audience experiences.

Solutions Showcased by Akamai

This year, Akamai presented a set of solutions under the theme of building complete media workflows — from ingest, encoding, and transcoding to packaging, storage, and delivery — in a way that is reliable, scalable, and optimized for low latency

Highlights this year included Media Services Live 5 (MSL5) powered by Harmonic, the latest generation of Akamai’s live streaming workflow service, designed to handle demanding live and on-demand use cases with higher efficiency and scalability.

Another important piece was TrafficPeak, an observability platform that provides detailed visibility into performance and usage, combining logs, metrics, CMCD data, and QoE insights into dashboards that make troubleshooting faster and more transparent.

On the security side, Akamai showcased new anti-piracy measures, such as a Token Ban List designed to combat restreaming by instantly revoking compromised user sessions and tokens, even in multi-CDN environments. For playback, the introduction of Akamai Media Player 2 (AMP2) in partnership with Bitmovin aims to provide a modern, consistent experience across mobile, desktop, and TV devices, covering a wide range of streaming use cases. Monetization was also a clear focus, with partnerships such as Yospace enabling server-side ad insertion to support ad-funded or hybrid business models.

Finally, there was a strong emphasis on the developer experience. Akamai showcased developer-friendly tools such as WebAssembly functions running at the edge with Fermyon. These features are designed to give developers more flexibility and control, while achieving higher performance and lower latency compared to traditional hyperscalers.

The overall message was clear: the platform is designed to give developers more control and flexibility, while keeping performance, security, and monetization in mind.

Akamai at Netint Booth

At IBC 2025, one of the highlights was at the Netint booth, where Akamai showcased its innovation in offering VPUs (Video Processing Units) in the cloud through Accelerated Compute Instances. This represents a significant step in bringing hardware-level video encoding into a cloud environment, combining performance with efficiency.

The use of Quadra T1U VPUs was demonstrated for demanding workloads such as 8K streaming and multiple simultaneous live streams, showing throughput improvements and significant power savings compared to CPU-based processing. Offloading encoding to VPUs frees up CPU resources for other critical tasks, while live demos explored latency, format support, and workflow integration.

Also featured was Scalstrm, showcasing a transcoding solution integrated with Akamai Cloud and Netint VPUs. The focus was on processing content more efficiently, reducing storage requirements, and supporting multiple streaming formats for different delivery needs. The demo showed how a flexible approach to transcoding can simplify workflows and optimize costs, reinforcing the idea that hardware-accelerated, cloud-native media processing is ready for broader adoption.

OpenMOQ: Advancing the Media Transport Layer

Another theme that stood out at IBC 2025 was the growing attention around OpenMOQ, the open source initiative working on Media over QUIC as a new foundation for streaming and real-time data. The idea is to create a common transport layer that can adapt to different latency needs — from interactive and sub-second use cases to live and on-demand streaming — while scaling reliably to very large audiences. By building on modern protocols such as QUIC and WebTransport, OpenMOQ aims to bring efficiency, resilience, and openness to media delivery in a way that benefits the entire ecosystem.

More info here: https://openmoq.org/

On a personal note, I also had the pleasure of reconnecting with Will Law, who is actively involved in this project. Talking with him reinforced the sense that OpenMOQ is really an effort to solve real industry challenges with a collaborative, community-driven approach. It feels like a promising step toward making the media transport layer as open, flexible, and reliable as the applications built on top of it.

The Space at the Elicium

IBC is as much about the physical spaces as the technology. The third floor of the Elicium building stood out as a fantastic place to meet: airy, welcoming, and more conducive to focused discussions than the noisy show floor. It was the perfect setting for conversations with clients, partners, and executives. And the Espresso coffee from Lavazza was so good!

Looking Back

Having attended IBC for many years, I can now look back and see how discussions on Edge, Cloud, AI, and streaming at scale have evolved from theory to practical deployments. It also makes me appreciate the human side of the event even more. Technology is the trigger, but it’s the conversations — with executives, engineers, and clients — that make IBC meaningful year after year.

Now, it's time to go back home!