IBC 2026: an era of software abundance

I’ve been to IBC around ten times, but this year was the first time I’ve had a stand there. We were in Future Tech Ignite in Hall 14, alongside the tech innovation companies, which is exactly where an exciting tech startup like ours should be. Having a stand is a completely different experience to walking the show floor. It’s far more intense, and you speak to far more people.

We were there to launch EngineLab AI. We built it because we listened to our customers, the VFX and animation studios we work with every day, who were all struggling to manage generative AI in production. We had no idea how wide the opportunity would turn out to be.

What we saw on the floor

The show felt busier than it has in years, and there was a whole hall dedicated to new technology. That says a lot about how many people are setting out on new technical ventures right now.

What struck me most was the speed. We saw impressive applications that had been built in very little time, and AI is clearly a big part of why. By contrast, there was very little new hardware in our section. There were a couple of things, but not many. I think that comes down to cost. The silicon needed to build new hardware is getting more expensive and harder to get hold of, and wars and tariffs are only compounding the problem. So the energy has shifted to software.

I think we’re entering an era of software abundance. Building an application is more accessible than it’s ever been. Tellingly, no single product stopped me in my tracks, because when everyone can build, standing out gets harder.

But building an app and running it in production are different things. Making AI work for a studio means getting the infrastructure, security, workflows and costs right. That takes deep experience you can’t just throw together. It’s where we’ve spent our careers, and it’s what sits underneath EngineLab AI.

Who came to the stand

Studios came to the stand and the conversations were great, but they weren’t the half of it. Alongside VFX and animation studios we met creative agencies, brands, broadcasters, a major talent agency, a US news network, sports production teams and production companies, from the UK and Ireland to France, Egypt and Japan.

Almost everyone wanted to know the same thing: can this solve problems in my industry? Far more often than we expected, the answer was yes, and it often answered questions they hadn’t thought to ask yet. Everyone can see the opportunity to create more content, faster, but nobody wants to lose control while they do it. EngineLab AI brings the models together in one platform, with approved models per project, every output in one place and a full record of how each shot was made. Storyboarding is coming soon.

The challenge we heard about most was budget. CFOs are understandably nervous about AI. They hear about token bills and worry about losing control of what every generation costs. That’s where EngineLab AI is different. Inference runs on AWS in the customer’s own account, so with open-source models you pay only for the instances while they’re running, and you can generate as much as you like without spending a single token. When a project does call for a frontier model or an external API, artists reach it from inside the platform, within a budget you set. It’s a story of control.

Live in the AWS Loft, and new partners

EngineLab is an AWS Advanced Tier Media & Entertainment Specialist Partner, and that’s why AWS invited us to demo EngineLab AI in the AWS Loft. Matt Herman, our co-founder and CTO, took the audience through the whole platform live, running real workflows in real time.

We presented alongside fal, and that turned out to be one of the best things to come out of the week. We got talking, found a lot of synergies, and we’re now partnering so customers on our platform can use fal for inference. We also had great conversations with TwelveLabs. Our customers keep telling us they want repeatability and a real understanding of the content they’re creating, from search to tagging, and TwelveLabs could help us deliver exactly that.

We also met Studio Babelsberg, one of the biggest and most prestigious studios in the world, and talked about how they can get more out of cloud technology. And we met MTH (MediaTech Hub Potsdam), the incubation hub for new technology that operates from Studio Babelsberg, which is exactly the kind of venture we’re built to support. We wouldn’t have met either otherwise, and just a couple of weeks later we were back at Studio Babelsberg running a workshop for MTH: a room full of ComfyUI artists, led by a ComfyUI expert and powered entirely by EngineLab AI on AWS.

That’s the side of IBC I hadn’t expected. It was the best place to find partners as well as customers, and being in the same room means real progress in days rather than months.

We ran demos on the stand all week too. EngineLab AI runs in the customer’s own AWS account, managed by us, and it’s fully compatible with ComfyUI, so artists keep the tools they know.

The stand

We put a lot of thought into our first stand, including me dragging Matt round Ikea for anything that would make it stand out. The plant we came back with is now in every photo. But what really made it was the people. So many visitors sought us out rather than just wandering past, and the stand became a working space all week, full of live demos and conversations.

It’s a small thing, but it’s how we approach everything. Take the benchmark, then make it better every time.

Thank you

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, whether you came for a demo, a conversation or a photo with the plant, and to everyone who enjoyed the Tony’s Chocolonely that kept pulling people in. And a big thank you to the EngineLab team who made it happen.

What’s next

We’re back on the road in November, with two events in London on consecutive days.

On 11 November we’re silver sponsors of the AI Creative Summit at BFI Southbank. At 12:25, Matt, Sarah Woollen (our Head of Operations, chairing) and I will be joined by Andy Hayes from AWS’s Visual Computing team for “Private AI, in Production: Trusting AI with a Client’s IP”.

The following morning, 12 November, we’re hosting an invite-only CTO breakfast with the AWS Visual Computing team at the Madison Hotel. If you’d like to join us, request an invite here.