IBC has a way of making the invisible visible. This year will be no different. On the show floor in Amsterdam, dozens of vendors will promise AI acceleration, real-time insights, and automated compliance. Scratch the surface and most of those pitches come down to one thing: how the data is structured.
For decades, the industry treated data as exhaust that was stored, analyzed, and argued over long after the fact. In a world where AI is operational, those defaults in data design decide more than architecture. They decide which workflows scale, which rights can be enforced, and which creative choices survive the pipeline.
This deep cut maps the shift from silos to lakes to fabrics, and why IBC is the perfect backdrop. What we’ll see in the demos is less about flashy interfaces and more about whether data can travel across the media lifecycle in real time, with lineage and governance intact.
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