The road to the RAI
Our IBC always starts weeks before the show. This year it started with a question we kept hearing from clients and partners: if AI tools keep multiplying but none of them remember what your library already knows, what are you actually gaining? We turned that into a Mate Talk, and the conversations from that session ended up shaping how we walked into several meetings at IBC. The problems people raised in August were the same ones sitting across the table from us in September.
A week later, we hosted a Tech Meetup with Unified Streaming on C2PA. Content authenticity had been part of our engineering work for over a year, and putting it in front of the community ahead of IBC was the perfect warmup for what was coming: that same work, running live on the EBU booth two weeks later.
IBC is research, preparation, community-building, and hundreds of small conversations that compound over time. The four days at the RAI are where it all comes together, but the work that makes those days count starts much earlier.
The excuse to get our community together
The night before IBC opened its doors, we hosted Summer Camp Drinks, Amsterdam Edition. Over 40 people in a typical Dutch pub. Familiar faces, new ones, and the kind of energy you only get when a community genuinely enjoys being together.
Summer Camp has become one of the things we're most proud of at Qualabs! There's something about getting people together and good energy that creates connections you can't plan for. Las Vegas was the first edition, Amsterdam the second, and the next one is already taking shape.
Summer Camp 2027 is happening February 1st to 6th in Montevideo, and this time we're changing the question. We're not asking what you'd like to build, we're asking what's the next big challenge in media and streaming. Not the problems you have today; the ones coming in three to five years, the ones that need runway. The whole event will be built around that single thread: summer projects, technical talks, the innovation weekend, all chapters of the same story.
Campers are already filling up. If you want to be part of it: Summer Camp 2027
What we showed on the floor
Walking the show floor and seeing our contributions running live on five different partner booths was one of those moments that's hard to put into words. Each one built together, each one something we could have never shown alone.
With MainConcept we tackled a blind spot that has bothered us for a long time: every delivery metric can read normal while a viewer's experience quietly degrades. We built a pipeline that carries a perceptual quality score from the encoder all the way to a live, per-session dashboard — using open standards, no proprietary probes, no extra network calls. You see what the viewer sees, the moment something drops. Full story · Explore our joint demo
With EZDRM we took it further: real-time C2PA signing inside a live MOQ stream, with DRM protection layered on top. Trust, low latency and content protection, all in the same pipeline. With Oracle OCI we showed what happens when you stop choosing between low latency and reaching everyone at scale.
With AWS Elemental we tackled one of those requests sports audiences have been making for years: follow my own events, in my own layout, without the channel deciding for me. AWS Elemental Dynamic Multiview composes the grid in the cloud and delivers it as one ordinary HLS stream. Qualabs built the half the audience actually touches: the player experience where a viewer chooses which events are on screen, which one they hear, and how the views sit inside the picture. Four live events, 148 reachable compositions across seven shapes, one player, one decoder. See how it works
With EBU we brought the full C2PA chain to life, end to end. Sony cameras capturing the content, Unified Streaming packaging it, our open-source player and validator checking authenticity segment by segment. ARD, WDR and CBC/Radio-Canada broadcast feeds, validated live. There's even a glitch simulator that deliberately tampers with the stream so you can watch the validation catch it. This was the demo closest to our heart, content credentials traveling inside a live stream and getting verified as they arrive, with every piece contributed by a different organization.
This was also Emil Santurio's first IBC, and it turned into one of the highlights of the week. He gave two talks back to back on the EBU stage: our contribution to c2pa-rs (the official Rust SDK) with full signing and validation support for live video, and C2PA in the Browser, where he showed the validation core we built into the SVTA Common Media Library with plugins for dash.js, hls.js and video.js — plus the attack proxy toolkit that deliberately tampers with a live stream in four different ways to prove the validation catches every one of them. The demo was running on the booth, the engineering behind it on the stage.
A quieter show, sharper conversations
We planned for a quieter IBC. The market is navigating a tough stretch, and we missed many familiar faces from the US and LATAM who couldn't make the trip this year.
What we found instead surprised us. Fewer but deeper conversations — the kind where both sides show up with something specific on the table. When the show is smaller, the people who do show up tend to mean it, and that made every meeting count. We came home with a list of next steps longer than anything we packed for the trip.
What comes next
IBC2026 was our most ambitious show yet, and the work that follows is even bigger. New partnerships to formalize, demos to evolve into engagements, and a community that keeps growing.
Summer Camp is officially in the air. We already started talking about the next edition at our Amsterdam drinks, and we have a feeling it's going to be better than ever. If any of it resonates with what your team is working on, reach out, we'd love to keep the conversation going.
Chau Amsterdam! See you at the next one 💚
