September’s here, which in our industry means one thing: IBC – and those three letters are now emblazoned on about 80% of every message or email I send or receive.
But in all seriousness, next weekend promises to be a fantastic event in Amsterdam. We’ll be kicking things off with GV Forum on Thursday evening (6-8pm, Rosarium Amstelpark), before the doors open at the RAI and the conversations and demos move to the Grass Valley stand (9.A01). I’m looking forward to talking about what smaller enterprise teams can now do with production technology that used to rely on far bigger crews – a change that is becoming harder to ignore as the amount of enterprise video keeps growing.
We’re seeing financial institutions produce regular leadership communications alongside investor events, while global brands are running internal video alongside major launches and live events. When production becomes that frequent, the workflow has to hold up. A complicated setup that needs specialist intervention might be manageable for a larger annual event, but it makes a lot less sense when the same team needs to go live again a few days later.
For me, that’s where the idea of one-operator production becomes a lot more interesting. I wrote recently about what I call “the last 20 percent” – the work involved in taking a capable production platform and making it fit the organization that will actually use it. That thinking runs through a lot of what we’ll be showing at IBC; making workflows easier to return to and easier to scale when the job changes.
How Grass Valley is making production repeatable
One of the main Broadcast AV demonstrations we’ll be showing at IBC2026 is Event Producer X. Put simply, it is built for repeatability. It gives one operator a simpler environment for running the core production without needing to build a traditional control room around every event. Enterprise teams need to know they can come back to the same workflow for a town hall or leadership briefing – and just get on with it. If an event grows, the production environment should grow with it without forcing the team to start all over again.
We’ll also be showing Zoom ISOcloud in AMPP, bringing remote participants into the production as individual sources. For the operator, that means an executive joining from another office can become part of the same production environment rather than creating another workflow to manage alongside it. It sounds like a relatively small distinction on paper, but during a live event, removing those extra handoffs can make a real difference.
Thinking about the whole production
Contrary to how my diary currently looks for next week, there is a world beyond live events and it’s another consideration for enterprise production teams too. Most organizations have already invested time in bringing people together for an event, and there’s usually far more value in that content than the hour it happened to be live. A longer leadership session might become a 20 minute internal update, while a product event could feed regional marketing activity. The shelf life of the media can go well beyond the original production.
Framelight X is designed to connect that part of the workflow more directly to the live event, which means media can be managed centrally and edited in the browser. That allows teams to work with the material without extra rounds of file transfers or separate tools. I think that’s an important part of enterprise production now. The live event is one stage in a much longer content lifecycle, and that’s probably not a bad rule for trade show success either.
The same joined-up thinking applies at the other end of the workflow too: how the content is captured in the first place. Enterprise environments often need a mix of camera types. While a PTZ camera may make sense in a permanent meeting space, an LDX camera might be better for a higher-end studio or event production. Bringing those into the same production fabric gives teams more freedom to choose what fits the task in front of them.
See you in Amsterdam at #9.A01
The enterprise production space has reached a point where one person can take on far more of the workflow than would have been realistic even a few years ago. And when the job gets bigger, the technology underneath can now scale with it.
My message to IBC attendees – never underestimate what one operator can now produce! If you’re at IBC2026, come and find me and the Grass Valley team in Hall 9, stand 9.A01, and let’s talk about where smaller production teams can go next.
