Moote Points: What critical MediaTech trends shaping businesses that broadcasters need to track closely

Every year, the IAMT Technology & Trends Roadmap provides a visual representation of the lifecycle of business initiatives within the media and entertainment industry, mapping key technologies and trends against their adoption curves across the content chain, from creation and production through to distribution and monetisation.

The IAMT Technology & Trends Roadmap 2026 covers 10 major categories:

Transdisciplinary integration — Media technology is now shared across industries, with concepts and best practices flowing bi-directionally between traditional broadcast and sectors such as healthcare, education, and corporate communications.

AI-enhanced creation and assistance — AI tools that support and augment human creators across writing, editing, captioning, and production workflows.

Agentic AI and orchestration — AI that goes beyond assistance to autonomously manage and orchestrate media workflows and scheduling.

Security architectures and controlled AI — Zero Trust frameworks and governance boundaries defining what AI systems can access, generate, and decide.

Content authenticity and data integrity — Provenance tracking, tamper-evident credentials, and deepfake detection as trust becomes a strategic priority.

Capture, infrastructure and compute — The shift to software-defined, GPU-accelerated, and cloud-native production and ingest workflows.

Service platforms and Anything as a Service (XaaS) — Transcoding, QC, and metadata services moving to hybrid cloud models driven by AI-triggered actions.

Business intelligence — Real-time, AI-driven decision-making across audience modelling, revenue optimisation, and operational analytics.

Immersive and multi-screen user experience — Interactive, personalised viewing experiences across multiple devices, venues, and platforms, including XR.

Contribution and delivery — IP-first, adaptive distribution across content delivery networks, satellite, 5G, and broadband, increasingly software-defined and energy-aware.

To find out what the IAMT Technology & Trends Roadmap 2026 has to offer broadcasters and media technology professionals, APB+’s Shaun Lim sat down for an exclusive chat with Stan Moote, CTO of IAMT.

As IAMT CTO, your focus is on technology and trends. Are these specifics only meant for broadcast technologists?

Stan Moote: Initially, that was our focus when we started compiling the Technology & Trends Roadmaps. That quickly changed as several people in our roadmap working group began sharing it within their own companies.

Our working group is a combination of end-users and IAMT member companies, and the roadmap has found a much wider audience than I expected. One member presented it to his board of directors to help them understand where the company’s products sit on the adoption curve. Another used it to inform their marketing communications activities and gain a better understanding of adjacent and vertical market areas.

Before long, CFOs were using it to evaluate projects and ensure they were covering possible future directions.

You used the phrase “all managed media services” to describe the roadmap’s scope. That’s a broader framing than most people might expect. What do you mean by that, and why should traditional broadcasters care?

Moote: The key word here is “managed.” This covers entertainment, sports, corporate communications, healthcare imaging, education streaming, government town halls, and influencer and creator ecosystems, among many other MediaTech applications.

Broadcasters have long been at the forefront of technology, but what has changed is that the technology stack is now shared. More often than not, concepts are also flowing back into traditional media and entertainment from other sectors.

Trends are being shared across MediaTech groups, with organisations learning from each other regardless of their size or type of distribution. We call this trans-disciplinary integration, the idea that media now spans multiple industries with bi-directional benefits.

From your perspective, what should broadcasters be keeping a close watch on?

Moote: Before we get into that discussion, here is something to think about: Media technology is transitioning from device-centric infrastructure to agentic service platforms, orchestrated by AI and operating across a unified media ecosystem.

Getting into the details, the roadmap covers dozens of trends and technologies grouped into 10 major categories. Beyond trans-disciplinary integration, which we touched on earlier, I see two areas changing particularly quickly.

The first is creator economy integration, which refers to traditional media companies adapting their business models to work with, and capitalise on, the growing power of individual creators. 

The second is media supply chain standardisation, which is about making the processes, technical best practices, and standards for creating, managing, exchanging, and distributing media content more consistently across the MediaTech industry. Standardisation does not mean every piece of content looks the same. It means the underlying workflow makes it easier to create the right version for each platform.

These two trends are closely linked. Creator economy integration expands the sources of content, while media supply chain standardisation enables that content to be efficiently adapted, packaged, and distributed across multiple formats and platforms. The 16:9 versus 9:16 aspect ratio is a concrete example, illustrating how one creator’s content can become multiple standardised media assets for different audiences and distribution channels.

The roadmap has three separate sections on AI. Why is that?

Moote: AI is far too broad a topic to treat as a single category, and for practical usage, it needs to fit into today’s operational mindset. AI-enhanced creation and assistance is about AI tools that support human creators, whereas agentic AI and orchestration is about AI managing workflows autonomously. 

We always like to keep security front of mind, as it tends to slide down the budgeting priority list. That is why we grouped controlled AI together with security architectures, defining controlled AI as an approach where an organisation sets clear boundaries around what the AI can access, do, generate, and decide. This has become increasingly relevant given recent examples where AI systems have operated outside of their intended parameters.

Broadcasters went through the ultimately failed 3D TV experiment. What is the next big immersive experience on the horizon?

Moote: It is less about 3D and more about interactive spatial TV. Think about seeing multiple camera angles in sports alongside the stats you are actually interested in, or taking advantage of 4K Ultra HD (UHD) feeds to zoom into a specific area during a live concert. You essentially become the director, creating your own personalised interactive experience.

The intriguing part is that television will not necessarily disappear. The likely future is layered rather than one that replaces today’s TV. There will still be times when you simply want effortless viewing on a conventional screen, and just being a “couch potato” without any interaction required.

There is clearly a lot for broadcasters to consider in this new MediaTech world. How do they pick the right direction and investment strategies?

Moote: That is exactly why we have a business intelligence category in the roadmap. Broadcasters should be taking advantage of the new business tools available to align resources and build scalability and flexibility into their budgeting and planning.

The strategic mistake is to invest heavily in every emerging technology simply because it is exciting. The better approach is to identify a few high-conviction bets, build relatively small experiments around them, measure audience and commercial response, and then scale the winners.

Ultimately, MediaTech strategy becomes less about predicting the future but more about creating enough optionality to participate in several possible futures without overcommitting too early.