NAB 2026 technology round-up: “The biggest shifts in media are no longer theoretical”

What does it take to win a technological innovation award in Content Creation? Fergal Ringrose, Chair of Judges for the IBC Innovation Awards, assesses the top three projects in the running – revealing the key characteristics of each of the most competitive submissions.

As traditional broadcasters battle decreasing budgets and attention spans, brands have come to the fore as collaborators in an increasingly lucrative and creatively fertile strand of the media business.

Despite the availability of hundreds of generative AI tools, pre-production environments are still struggling to find a semantic archive search solution that is technically feasible and effective in the real world. Enter FRAMES.

Stepping beyond the screen, this IBC Accelerator project has set out to meld immersive technology and audience interaction into an entirely new form of audience engagement.

If IBC2025 was defined by conversations about artificial intelligence’s transformative potential, the past 12 months have been about proving where it can deliver tangible business value. CE exhibitors now describe a market that has become more pragmatic.