AMD at IBC 2025: Industry Collaboration, ISV Partnerships Change the Game

The International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) is a comprehensive event attended by many of the largest names in media, entertainment, and broadcast technology. The 2025 show kicked off on September 12 at RAI Amsterdam and ran through September 15. Its exhibitions, Accelerator Programme, Special Incubator Project, and keynotes all foster innovation and collectively cover the gamut of the M&E market.

Everyone from satellite launch services to software developers and individual creators attends to talk shop, plan for the future, and see what’s new on the edge of innovation. If you want to take the pulse of the global media and entertainment industry at a single convention, IBC is the place to do it.

In previous years, there was wild enthusiasm for AI, but not much tangibility. In 2025, we saw more pragmatic and deliberate implementations of AI at IBC, highlighting how this emerging technology can be leveraged in the real world. 

AMD was an associate co-sponsor of the event alongside HP and many of the show’s exhibitors featured solutions built around AMD hardware, from embedded FPGAs and Adaptive SoCs to Instinct™ accelerators, Threadripper™ PRO workstations, Ryzen™ AI Max PRO processors, and EPYC™ servers. We also collaborated with HP to advance some of the top-flight announcements and breakthroughs detailed at the show, as discussed below.

Incubating Excellence, Accelerating Innovation:

One unique feature of IBC is its support for practical, results-driven research initiatives. Every year, on what IBC calls ‘Kickstart Day’, 12 teams pitch their ideas to a panel of industry executives. Each team consists of “champions” who might potentially implement, benefit from, or purchase the proposed technological advance and “participants” -- vendors who provide the underlying platforms and services that a given initiative requires.

Of the 12 proposals evaluated, eight are chosen for the Accelerator Programme, with results presented at IBC’s fall event. IBC-affiliated executives also choose a single project for dedicated follow-up, known as the Special Incubator Project.

Here’s the difference between the two: Accelerator projects connect champion-defined challenges with teams of innovators and engineers who can solve them, emphasizing a tight scope and quick turnaround. The Special Incubator Project gives an already-successful Accelerator team the chance to continue their research and explore further ideas for improving initial results. I helped present our “Changing the Game… Again” idea for consideration in February 2025, and the judges saw enough value in the concept to flag it for further development as a Special Incubator Project. It’s been exciting to see the coordinated collaboration between champions and participants as we collectively developed our ideas and brought them to this year’s show. I’d like to tip my metaphorical hat to Barbara Marshall at HP, who worked with AMD extensively and provided essential coordination and support, from initial pitches to successful deployment.

The goal of “Changing the Game… Again” was to demonstrate a proof-of-concept system that could redefine the idea of a personalized sports feed, with game highlights and real-time data curated to the preferences of each individual fan. The summary states:                                                        

For 2025, this year’s iteration will push the boundaries of real-time personalization, refining the experience with enhanced features such as custom overlays, localized content, tailored voice and tone, adjustable latency, contextual updates, and dynamic camera angles. Viewers and fans will have the opportunity to engage with a virtual sports companion, providing a more immersive and interactive way to consume live sports content.

Over the last two years, AMD has also made significant contributions to Accelerator Programme initiatives. The “Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports” Accelerator in 2024 attempted to lower live event stream latency to social media levels via the adoption of low-latency video encoders, newer video codecs like MV-HEVC, and the transport protocol QUIC as a replacement for TCP. This experiment emphasized the creation of an open, non-proprietary, scalable solution that would allow its backers, such as Comcast, to “vastly improve on something that the champions are already providing.” This exercise reduced added glass-to-glass latency to ~1.8s and cut average tune-in and zap times by ~1s.

Another Accelerator initiative showcased at IBC 2025, titled “A Framework for Generative AI” focused on creating a generative AI scaffold that would allow broadcasters to “input prompts, data, and assets, generating high-quality, customized content in minutes.” The goal was to streamline the integration of AI into video and media production, while simultaneously exploring the capabilities and limitations of generative AI today.

AMD and HP provided Z6 G5A desktop workstations based on AMD Threadripper PRO processors, as well as Z2 Mini G1a workstations, and ZBook Ultra G1a laptops based around AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO Series processors. These small form factor and mobile workstations feature a unified memory architecture, a discrete-class integrated GPU, up to 128GB of memory, and the option to dedicate up to 96GB of system RAM to graphics and AI processing.

While the projects discussed above cover AMD contributions as a formal participant, they aren’t the only initiatives where AMD provided critical capabilities. AMD Zynq™ UltraScale+™ RFSoCs and AMD Ryzen processors were key to the “Conquering the Air (Waves): Private 5G from Land to Sea to Sky” Accelerator effort. This was a joint undertaking between an array of champions, including the BBC, RAI, France Televisions, the University of Strathclyde, and Orange, paired up with participants such as Haivision, Neutral Wireless, Open Broadcast Systems, Shure, D&B Solutions, and Intelsat.

This endeavor explored how private 5G network cells mounted on light aircraft  could “supplement and improve existing production workflows, supporting high-quality, low-latency video and audio streaming in challenging environments,” with a long-term goal of transitioning to unmanned drone aircraft as technology improves. At their best, the Accelerator Programme and Special Incubator Project connect geographically far-flung R&D efforts with global and local companies with unique needs particular to their own field(s) of expertise, geographical location, and existing audience. This results-oriented deployment of known networking technology in novel environments and use cases is exactly the type of collaboration IBC is designed to foster.

AMD @ IBC 2025:

Co-sponsoring the event with HP and participating in acceleration and incubation initiatives are just two ways AMD underwrote innovation at IBC this year. Visitors who walked the exhibition floor also saw a variety of AMD products and solutions deployed across the media and entertainment landscape.

Google brought its Google Distributed Cloud cluster to Hall 14, demonstrating video routing, media encoding, and media packaging running simultaneously on Google C4D instances powered by 5^th Gen EPYC™ processors. Xansr Media tapped AMD Instinct accelerators to demonstrate how generative AI dovetails with the existing gaming, sports, media, and entertainment industries to provide real-time personalized experiences. Google hosted dozens of Accelerator Participants and Champions on its Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) platform, and provided more than 22,000 hours of AMD CPU time to the companies and technology companies showcased at the event.

Companies like Pluxbox collaborated with HP and AMD to showcase its unique no-code (noco) unified platform for comprehensive media management regardless of modality or content type. Pluxbox offers media professionals a means of connecting disparate services and capabilities in a single, easily-understood interface. The company is working to incorporate generative AI support directly in the application to make customization and modification even easier. 

Pluxbox’s demos illustrated how mobile and small form factor workstations (HP’s ZBook Ultra G1a and the Z2 Mini G1a) built around the AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO processor are powerful enough to handle both the AI and non-AI portions of such tasks. Collectively, these exhibitions emphasized the breadth of AMD solutions and our ability to support our customers regardless of their computing needs.

“Pluxbox develops a no-code platform that turns complex integrations into simple workflows, said Caspar Adriani, the Chief Technology Officer at Pluxbox. “Our solutions combine service connectivity with powerful AI capabilities, unlocking the full potential of high-performance hardware such as AMD CPUs and GPUs for real-world business and broadcasting applications.”

Out of all the international events across the media and entertainment industries, IBC is unique for its focuses on the value of collaboration between corporate champions and research institutions. Bringing together so many disparate partners from every corner of the ecosystem creates a platform to explore innovations and insights in many different areas, as further discussed in a recent LinkedIn post by TV 2 Competency Leader Niels Borg.

IBC is an unparalleled opportunity to see how AMD and its partners olve problems and catalyze revenue opportunities across the entire media and entertainment industry.

I’m already looking forward to the proposals we’ll pitch in February and the achievements we’ll talk about around this time next year. Here’s hoping I’ll see you at the show in 2026.