Back in April, our NAB 2025 review highlighted a turning point. We saw early signs that hybrid workflows, predictable pricing, and practical automation were becoming strategic priorities.
Fast-forward five months to IBC 2025, and those signals became unmistakable. This wasn’t just another trade show for us — it was the busiest, most energised event in Capella’s history. The stand was packed from the first hour to the last, with record footfall, nonstop demos, and more serious buying conversations than we’ve ever seen.
And what changed since NAB? The market caught up with the message.
From Curiosity to Commitment
At NAB, the dominant question was “Can this work for us?” At IBC, it was “How quickly can we deploy?” That single shift sums up where the industry is heading. Broadcasters, streamers, and media service providers aren’t exploring anymore — they’re executing. And the conversations we had at IBC reflected that.
Many were deep technical dives about scalability, integration and deployment models. Several turned into immediate proof-of-concept requests. It’s clear that hybrid, cloud, and cost-predictable workflows have moved from “interesting” to “expected.”
Cost Efficiency Becomes the Deciding Factor
One topic dominated almost every conversation: cost. Not just reducing it, but making it predictable and manageable. That’s why our CloudBurst pricing model drew such strong reactions. Instead of the unpredictable “per-output” billing models common elsewhere, CloudBurst charges a simple per-source-hour rate — with unlimited outputs included.
That structure removes complexity and gives customers clarity. They can plan budgets, forecast growth, and scale without worrying about unpredictable bills. As content volumes continue to explode, that simplicity is rapidly becoming a differentiator.
Hybrid, Without the Dogma
The on-prem vs cloud debate isn’t “over”; it’s context-dependent. What we heard at IBC was pragmatic: some teams remain on-prem for cost, control, or compliance; some are cloud-first for speed; many are building hybrid capability even if day-one deployment is on a single plane. The common thread is optionality — burst when needed, anchor where it makes sense.
Where Capella fits: Both Cambria FTC and Cambria Stream run on-prem, in the cloud, or across hybrid topologies with the same presets, logs, and operational model. We automate capacity across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle — and, for streaming, integrate with Akamai Accelerated Compute to deliver exceptional VPU density. The goal isn’t to push a single deployment model but to provide one toolchain that adapts to on-prem-first, cloud-first, or hybrid-when-it-matters realities — whether that’s ingest spikes, regional redundancy, vendor risk, or disaster recovery.
Practical AI — Not Hype
AI was everywhere at IBC 2025, but the conversation has shifted from buzzwords to results. For Capella, AI isn’t a headline feature — yet — but it’s becoming an important part of how we add value, automate work, and enrich content.
Cambria FTC:
- Automatic metadata generation (face, logo, event recognition) during transcoding — reducing manual work and making media more searchable and reusable.
- Use recognition results to trim irrelevant content automatically (e.g. pre/post press conference).
- Automatic ad-insertion point suggestions based on scene changes.
- Score detection for automatic highlight clip creation.
Cambria Stream:
- Automatic ad insertion with SCTE-35 signaling for SSAI.
- Score and audio-level detection to trigger highlight clip creation.
- Player recognition and metadata generation for enhanced discoverability.
Our focus is simple: AI should do something useful — save time, enrich content, automate repetitive tasks, and open new monetization opportunities. It’s a measured, ROI-first approach that customers can trust in production.
A Major Milestone: Akamai Accelerated Compute Integration
One of the most significant announcements in Capella’s history landed just before IBC — and it’s a clear signal of where we’re heading in 2026. Our new integration with Akamai’s Accelerated Compute Instances brings VPU-based encoding into the Cambria ecosystem for the first time, starting with Cambria Stream.
This isn’t just about raw performance — it’s a strategic leap. By combining Cambria Stream with Akamai’s hardware-accelerated edge infrastructure, we’re achieving dramatically higher channel density per server, unlocking major cost savings and reducing energy consumption. The result is a streaming architecture that is leaner, greener, and more scalable, enabling customers to process more content at higher quality, with lower power draw and lower total cost of ownership.
This will be a central focus for Capella through 2026 and beyond. As workflows become more distributed and performance-hungry, the combination of Cambria Stream and Akamai’s accelerated compute platform positions Capella at the heart of the industry’s shift toward efficient, sustainable, high-density video processing. And this is just the beginning — over time, we plan to extend VPU acceleration across our broader product line, including Cambria FTC.
New Capabilities Shaping the Road Ahead
IBC was also where we unveiled a series of significant new features designed to make Cambria more powerful, flexible, and easier to operate and manage:
- Terraform Automation – Deploy and tear down transcoding infrastructure in minutes with Infrastructure-as-Code, bringing speed, consistency, and DevOps integration to large-scale workflows.
- Expanded Multi-Cloud Support – Run across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, and now Akamai, giving customers real flexibility to balance performance, cost, and resilience.
- Dynamic Stream Swapping – Seamlessly switch between live streams without interrupting output, keeping high-availability workflows running smoothly.
- NETINT VPU Support – Unlock major efficiency and density gains through hardware acceleration, cutting costs and power consumption while scaling capacity.
- Native Oracle Cloud Integration – With deep support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Cambria can now be deployed directly into Oracle environments, enabling customers to take advantage of its high performance, predictable bandwidth pricing, and strong enterprise security. This expands deployment choice beyond traditional hyperscalers and is especially attractive for customers building hybrid architectures or seeking multi-cloud redundancy.
- Enhanced Monitoring with Grafana & Loki – Gain real-time visibility into system health, performance, and errors, turning monitoring into a proactive advantage.
Together, these features strengthen Cambria as a unified platform built for the realities of 2026 — scalable, flexible, and ready for the next generation of media workflows.
All of these were built with a single aim: to make media processing more efficient, scalable, and future-proof.
What We Heard — And What Comes Next
IBC isn’t just about showing what we’ve built. It’s about listening. And the message from customers was clear:
- Pricing simplicity is rare in this industry. Customers welcomed our simple, transparent, and highly competitive pricing, which removes complexity and makes planning and scaling far easier.
- Seamless integration is critical — Customers expect transcoding to plug straight into their existing MAM, scheduling, and delivery environments without costly engineering projects or workflow disruption.
- Transparency builds trust — Customers value vendors who are upfront about capabilities, limitations, and roadmaps — honesty builds trust and long-term partnerships in a way hype never will.
- Support is essential, good, fast-acting support is vital. We heard again and again that our support team is a major differentiator. Customers described them as fast-acting, engaged, and exceptionally helpful — a critical reason they trust Capella for production workflows.
Some conversations pushed us hard on features and timelines — exactly the kind of pressure that sharpens our roadmap. And that roadmap is now shaped around what we heard.
The Road Ahead
The journey from NAB to IBC tells a clear story: the industry is accelerating. What were early signals in April are now real deployment plans. Experiments are turning into revenue workflows. And Capella is evolving rapidly to meet that momentum.
Looking ahead into 2026, our focus is sharper than ever — and it centres on Cambria Stream. Live workflows are becoming more demanding and more central to customers’ businesses, and that’s where we see the biggest opportunities to innovate.
Two major development areas are already underway based on direct customer feedback.
First, we’re exploring new ways to display ads — including support for advanced formats such as L-shaped ad overlays, a feature specifically requested by major customers. This will expand monetisation options and give customers more creative flexibility in how ads are integrated into live streams.
Second, we’re planning support for SMPTE 2110 input in Cambria Stream, following strong interest from tier-1 broadcasters. This will allow seamless integration into modern broadcast production environments and make Cambria Stream even more valuable as part of end-to-end live workflows.
Beyond that, our priorities for 2026 remain clear:
- Expanding hybrid orchestration – making it even easier to scale across on-prem and multi-cloud environments without friction.
- Evolving the CloudBurst pricing model – refining it based on real-world usage to keep costs predictable and competitive.
- Deepening observability and monitoring – delivering more insight and control as workflows grow in scale and complexity.
- Building on our Akamai integration – unlocking new levels of density, efficiency, and sustainability through VPU acceleration.
- Continuing a pragmatic, ROI-first approach to AI – focusing only where automation creates measurable value.
IBC 2025 wasn’t just our busiest show — it was proof that the market is ready for what’s next. The conversations we had in Amsterdam are already shaping our roadmap through 2026 and beyond.
The future of media workflows isn’t a distant prospect anymore. It’s here. And Capella is ready to help customers build it — faster, smarter, and more efficiently than ever before.
