Three things from IBC2026 that change how your production works

By Ryan Hughes, Director of Product Marketing, News & Sport, Avid

IBC2026 is over. Here are the three things from our stand that change how production works, and the argument that connects them.

Every significant shift in this industry has followed the same shape. Something changes what's technically possible, production teams reorganize around it, and a few years later, nobody can remember doing it the old way. Non-linear editing. Shared storage. Asset management. The digital newsroom. Avid helped shape each one from the start, and now the next transformation has begun. It's called agentic media production.

The term “agentic” has a specific meaning, despite being increasingly used as a buzzword. The short version is this: In an agentic workflow, an agent works out its own steps using its understanding of the production context it’s working within. That’s why everything we showed at IBC starts with connection and context. I've written a separate blog that explains agentic workflows in greater detail.

1. Stories that carry context

In most newsrooms, a story exists in five places at once. The plan in one system, the rundown in another, the media somewhere else, rights in a spreadsheet, approvals in email. Each handoff quietly erodes your efficiency and introduces a chance for mistakes to happen, which typically cluster at exactly the moment you can least afford them.

At IBC we showed what happens when that stops. A story is planned once in Content Core Planning, with its assignments, resources, feeds, and publishing destinations against it. When it goes live, it all moves into Content Core Rundown. Context is carried with the story, so nobody rebuilds it. Several people can work in one story at once, the familiar behaviors are there including floating stories, rehearsal timings, and playout, and it works alongside iNEWS. Watch Content Core Rundown on the show floor, and read the Content Core IBC press announcement for more info.

The same idea showed up in post production. Media Composer in a browser shares a composition model with the desktop version, so the sequence, project, and bins are the same thing, connected across both rather than an export away from each other. A Content Core panel inside Media Composer lets editors reach assets across the whole media estate without leaving the timeline, which benefits from the same powerful semantic search powered by Google without having to leave the editor. And our exciting new partnership with FilmLight  reimagines the color pipeline for post and brings greater Baselight-powered tooling natively into Media Composer. Color decisions can now stay connected from dailies through editorial and delivery instead of being rebuilt or losing context at each handoff.

Underneath it all, Content Core now manages assets natively, and Content Core Site Engine brings Avid media services to wherever your media already lives rather than making you migrate it. That foundation is what TVBEurope recognized when it named Content Core a Best of Show winner. It's also the reason the next two things are possible at all.

2. AI that does real work, under your control

Every stand at IBC had an AI story, but most of it is working blind. It sees a file, but doesn't know which story the clip belongs to, who approved it, or what rights are attached. Everything it produces gets checked by a human, and the time it saved goes back into checking it.

Avid Assist has that context that everyone else is missing. Ask it for footage against a brief and it searches with your permissions, not its own. Ask it to gather material into a collection and it builds one. Ask it to do something it can't, and it stops, names the tool it's about to use, and waits. Agents inherit the permissions of the person running them. Irreversible actions pause by default, by design, rather than by how carefully somebody worded a prompt. And every request is checked independently, so an agent can't be talked into overstepping.

Ready to Edit refines this further into workflows that are built for the needs of post production to get edit teams started faster by automating the heavy lifting that usually happens before the creative work can begin. Too often, the first day of a production is not an edit day at all. It is syncing media, transcribing dialogue, matching scripts to footage, organizing bins, and preparing the project before anyone can start shaping the story. Ready to Edit changes that. From a prompt or predefined tasks, it can sync media, transcribe and align dialogue, connect scripts and production documents to source media, and organize the project so the editor can start cutting sooner. Capabilities like ScriptSync and PhraseFind become tools the agent can use on the editor’s behalf, rather than manual steps the editor has to drive. The point is simple: Make day one an edit day, not a prep day.

The same idea on a smaller scale is already shipping in Media Composer 2026.8, which launched just before the show and took TVTech's Best of Show. PhraseFindAI Multicam Auto Cut drives multicam selection by who's speaking and places cuts on speech boundaries. A job that used to take an afternoon now just happens in the background.

The Google Gemini panel was a tech preview at NAB2026. At IBC, it came back as a complete integration that can generate footage, edit existing media, and produce sound design. You can swap glasses of wine for glasses of beer without reshooting or leaving the timeline. Or generate sound, so a scene that needs ambience or an effect can get one on the spot. It runs on Gemini Enterprise using your own account, so you’re fully in control of costs. Watch it in action on the show floor here.

Avid’s audio post solutions also featured tech previews. The first was Pro Tools Stem Separator that uses local AI processing to isolate individual elements of a mixed track and then lets you preview results, drag stems back into the session, or write them as new tracks from the insertion point. Pro Tools Stem Separator uses the new Pro Tools Extension format that enables processes that can be applied across multiple tracks or even entire sessions, and Extensions by development partners Pro Sound Effects and Soundly were also demoed at the show. The second audio tech preview was EUCON MeterView—a standalone application (MacOS or Windows) that mirrors either the Avid S4/S6 Master Meters or PECDIR meter screens and display the meters anywhere in the facility.

3. What a story cost, and what it earned

This is the question nobody in our industry has been able to answer properly because the data has always lived in five separate systems that never spoke. Once the production is connected, it can be.

Content Core Insights, which we demonstrated for the first time at IBC, connects planning, production, delivery, and consumption data so you can see what a story cost to make and what it returned. Due for release early next year, it’s currently running with a large broadcaster and providing real, actionable insights.

The first thing it shows you is the past: What each story cost in people and time, how long it took from assignment to publish, how often a piece of content got reused across platforms, and which formats earned their keep. Those are the numbers a champion can take to a CFO. And for a news organization under revenue pressure, it's the difference between hoping and knowing.

But an autopsy isn't the only point. Because the same data connects assignments, people, and output, Insights can look forward as well as back. How many freelancers will you need next month, given what's already planned? Which desks are carrying more than their share? Where does the margin really sit? Those are planning questions, and until now they've been answered on instinct because the information to answer them properly was scattered across systems that never met.

Three things, one argument

Context is what makes the AI safe to use. An agent that knows which story a clip belongs to can act on it without a human checking every step. And the same connected data that gives the agent its context is what makes cost visible, because you can only price a story when planning, production, and publishing are recorded in one place. Take any one away and the other two stop working.

That's what agentic media production means in practice. Software that does real work, inside a production that knows what it's doing, at a cost you can see. That's the shift we think the industry will be reorganizing around a few years from now in the same way it diwith non-linear editing and the digital newsroom.

Recognition at the show

In addition to the two Best of Show Awards, Kenna Hilburn, our Chief Product Officer, won the 2026 IAMT MediaTech Leader Award. And just before the show, Avid received its twentieth Engineering, Science, and Technology Emmy®, this one for Avid DNx. DNx is what the pattern looks like twenty years on; something that was once an innovation is now simply how television is made, and nobody thinks about it.

And that’s where we’re heading.

Find out more

We explored these ideas in detail on our post-IBC webinars on the 24th September, and if you missed them live, you can watch them on demand!