What four days in Amsterdam told us about AI, lower barriers to entry and why knowing your audience still matters.
By Matthew Wilkinson, CCO, Leyra
IBC was a useful snapshot of where the media and entertainment industry thinks the next opportunity lies. This year, perhaps unsurprisingly, AI was difficult to avoid.
Across the show floor there were new AI capabilities, AI-native products and established technologies being accelerated or reimagined through AI. More broadly, there was simply more choice: more products, more specialist services and more ways to build and operate a direct-to-consumer streaming business.
The technical barrier to entry keeps falling
Launching a streaming service used to require significant technical investment before you could even begin testing whether the proposition worked, but cloud infrastructure, mature OTT platforms, established technology ecosystems and now AI-assisted development and operations have changed that considerably.
New entrants can come to market without having to build every part of the technology stack themselves, while established services can develop and test new ideas far more quickly. That opens the market to more services and more experimentation, with the potential for better experiences for viewers too.
As access to capable technology becomes easier, however, simply having the tools becomes less of a differentiator. When more competitors can access broadly the same technology, the advantage increasingly comes down to how well they use it and whether the service itself gives viewers a compelling reason to choose it.
That still requires every service to answer some decidedly non-technical questions. Who is this for? Why will they choose it? What will make them come back? What are they prepared to pay for? And what can you offer that they aren't already getting elsewhere?
Technology can increasingly help teams act on those answers, but it cannot determine what the answers should be.
AI can accelerate a strategy. It can't replace one
There is an obvious temptation at the moment to ask what more AI can do and, judging by IBC, the answer is a lot.
There are useful applications emerging across content workflows, operations, personalisation, advertising, discovery and the viewer experience, which matters for streaming teams under pressure to achieve more without continually increasing headcount or operating costs.
AI can generate a go-to-market plan in seconds. It can accelerate development, analyse more data and produce more variations of a campaign than would previously have been practical. None of that guarantees, however, that you have chosen the right audience, proposition or priority.
Speed lets a team test more ideas, but it doesn't tell them which idea is worth testing in the first place. As execution becomes easier and the cost of experimentation falls, there are more opportunities to move quickly, which arguably makes the quality of the thinking behind those decisions even more important.
That starts with knowing the audience and understanding what genuinely differentiates the service. If those assumptions are wrong, the consequences often become clearer later, when a pricing model fails to land, a proposition doesn't resonate or acquisition spend has already been committed against the wrong message.
Innovation has to earn its place
IBC exists to showcase innovation, and there was plenty of it to see this year. What matters to operators, though, is whether that innovation translates into something useful for the business or its viewers.
A new feature may be technically impressive, but the more useful question is what it actually changes. Does it help increase revenue or improve retention? Can it reduce operational cost or make the service easier to evolve?
That distinction matters for an OTT provider because customers are rarely looking for innovation in isolation. They are trying to acquire and retain viewers, monetise content, run their service efficiently and keep adapting as audience behaviour and commercial priorities change.
The value of the technology sits in how well it supports those objectives, whether that means getting a service to market faster, making it easier to test a new pricing or packaging approach, or removing operational friction so teams have more time to focus on the decisions affecting their audience.
What changes is how quickly you can respond
The advances we saw at IBC matter partly because of what they are doing to the speed at which streaming businesses can now execute and iterate.
Ideas that once required lengthy development cycles can increasingly be tested sooner, operational work can be automated and data can become available more quickly. Together, those changes give teams more scope to adapt their service without rebuilding large parts of it every time priorities shift.
That also changes what operators should expect from their technology. Getting to market quickly remains important, but so does what happens afterwards and whether the service can continue changing once real viewer behaviour starts testing the assumptions behind it.
The first version of a strategy will never tell you everything. Once people begin watching, new questions emerge. Are the viewers you expected actually signing up? Are they still there in month two? Does the proposition work as well in practice as it did in the plan?
Some assumptions will inevitably need revisiting as viewing behaviour changes, commercial priorities move and new devices, formats and business models emerge. Being able to respond without turning every adjustment into another expensive technology project is where flexibility becomes particularly valuable.
Where that leaves us at Leyra
That is an important consideration for us as we continue to build Leyra.
Reducing the technical and operational work involved in launching, running and evolving a streaming service is part of that, as is giving teams an end-to-end platform where it makes sense while retaining the flexibility to integrate specialist technologies where they add more value.
There is also more to the Leyra proposition than the platform itself. Bringing together Magine Pro and Accedo One brought together teams with years of experience working with streaming services at different stages, from getting to market in the first place through to evolving products, operating services and responding to changing audience and commercial needs.
That experience becomes particularly relevant after launch, when the questions start to change. Which capabilities are worth prioritising next? Where is complexity slowing the team down? What belongs in the core platform, and where might a specialist technology make more sense? How quickly can the service respond when viewer behaviour or business priorities shift?
Alongside providing the technology, we can use that experience to support customers as they work through those decisions and make it easier to act on what the market is telling them without turning every change into another major platform project.
That was one of the clearest takeaways for us from IBC 2026. As the technology available to streaming businesses becomes more capable, and AI continues to accelerate what teams can build and operate, deciding what actually matters for a particular service, audience and business remains a much more human challenge.
For Leyra, that is where we see the combination of a flexible platform and practical streaming experience becoming increasingly valuable.
