IBC2026 Recap: Camera to Fiber, Live in Amsterdam

Trade shows have a way of turning into a blur of product walls. You walk the hall, you see a great camera on one stand, a great encoder on another, and a great fiber extender three halls away — and you're left to imagine how they'd actually work together in your facility.

This year at IBC2026, we tried to skip that part.

From September 11–14 at RAI Amsterdam, BZBGEAR ran a complete broadcast signal chain on Hall 11, Stand 11.A26. Not a row of products on plinths, but one connected system: acquire, produce, encode, and transport, running end to end for all four days. Here's a look back at what we showed, what the show looked like from the floor, and what's next.

The Show at a Glance

IBC2026 drew 41,225 attendees from 170 countries, with more than 1,300 exhibitors and 256 first-time exhibiting companies. Attendance was down about 6% from 2025, but the room felt focused. The people who made the trip came with projects, not just curiosity.

That lines up with the themes that ran through the show. IBC's Accelerator program took on challenges like agentic AI, private 5G, content provenance, and live-event streaming. On the floor, the conversation kept circling back to a more practical question: how do you move video over IP and fiber without rebuilding everything you already own?

That's exactly the question our stand was built to answer.

Why We Brought a Chain, Not a Catalog

Think of a broadcast signal path like a relay race. It doesn't matter how fast your best runner is if the handoff drops the baton. Cameras, switchers, encoders, and transport links are the same way — the weak point is usually between the boxes, not inside them.

So instead of showing one link at a time, we wired four together.

Acquire. Our award-winning ADAMO auto-tracking PTZ cameras were on the stand in both IP flavors a broadcast facility is most likely to spec: NDI|HX 3 and Dante AV-H. The BG-ADAMO-4K series outputs up to 4K@60Hz over HDMI 2.0 and 12G-SDI, alongside USB and IP, while the BG-ADAMO-JR series covered 1080p@60Hz over HDMI and 3G-SDI with the same control workflow. A 4K hero angle, HD coverage for the rest of the room, and one control surface across both.

Produce. The BG-Commander-UltraX handled the cut — an all-in-one production switcher and PTZ joystick controller with onboard recording. Four HDMI inputs that accept sources up to 4K@30Hz, a 7-inch touchscreen, a T-bar, and a USB-C webcam output that drops the 1080p program feed straight into your streaming or conferencing software as a virtual camera. It's what a flypack looks like when it fits in one case.

Encode. Then the signal hit the network. More on that below.

Transport. Finally, the BG-IPGEAR-XTREME-F carried the signal across single-mode fiber — up to 10 kilometers (6.25 miles) at zero-frame latency, with support up to 8K@60Hz 4:4:4 using DSC. RS-232, IR, CEC, Ethernet, and USB KVM all ride the same fiber, too.

Seeing all four running together makes it easy to spot where your own system would bend. That was the whole point.

BZBGEAR Highlight: The BG-STREAM-DE

If there's one piece of the chain that deserves a closer look, it's the encoder — because it's the step where a lot of facilities are stuck right now.

An encoder takes a baseband video signal (like SDI or HDMI) and compresses it so it can travel over a network. The trick is that "the network" can mean a lot of things: a streaming platform, a remote contribution link, or an in-house AV-over-IP system.

The BG-STREAM-DE is a one-channel SDI/HDMI encoder, decoder, and recorder that covers most of those bases from one box. It encodes H.265 or H.264 at up to 1080p@60Hz and supports SRT, RTMP, HLS, RTSP, and TS over UDP, with NDI and Dante AV-H available under separate license. SDI and HDMI loop-through keep your local feed alive while you contribute, and USB 3.0 recording gives you a safety copy without racking a second device.

In other words, it's a practical bridge between the SDI plant you already have and the IP workflows you're moving toward. It's really that easy.

Looking Ahead

IBC returns to RAI Amsterdam September 10–13, 2027, for the show's 60th anniversary. 

In the meantime, you don't have to wait a year to see the chain. Whether you're planning a campus-wide fiber backbone, adding PTZ coverage to a studio, or finally getting video onto the same network as your audio, our team is happy to walk through it with you.

If you missed us in Amsterdam — or you stopped by and want to pick the conversation back up — reach out! Visit bzbgear.com, chat with us live, or call 1(888)499-9906, Monday through Friday, 6:00AM–5:00PM PST. Bring your drawings. We'll bring the engineers.