IBC 2025 Daily for Sept. 14: We meet Netflix's Iberian hitmakers and Telestream's new shot-callers, and we dive into the heated Eurovision controversy

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What happened in Day 2 and what’s in store for IBC 2025 Day 3? Our daft Europhile David Bloom is once again joined by frequent Next TMT collaborator Bevin Fletcher, editor of StreamTV Insider, to talk SUNDAY, sunday, SUNDAY!

How ‘Money Heist’ became an innovation driver for Netflix (and a global hit)

DAVID BLOOM: Netflix's far-flung production operations in 40 centers around the globe have also become surprising centers for production innovation. During the company's last earnings call, co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent Hollywood observers scrambling when he mentioned the use of AI to create a collapsing building sequence in a small Argentinian production called The Eternauts. It was a model for future Netflix projects with modest budgets and outsized ambitions. Similarly, Netflix's Spain and Portugal head of production, Victor Marti talked with Money Heist (Le Casa de Papel locally) executive producer and visual designer Migue Amoedo, the man behind the show’s many production innovations over the past several years. Casa, known as Money Heist in Netflix's English-language households, has been one of the company's biggest international hits, spawning multiple seasons and tens of millions of hours of views. It's also led to other Amoedo projects, including Sky Rojo and the upcoming Billionaire's Bunker, which debuts Sept. 19. "I wanted to keep the show in premium entertainment level," said Amoedo, whose company is Vancouver Media. "That was very important. I had a mantra: 'We're a global show,' and I kept repeating it to my crew. If we wanted to reach a global audience, we have to look like a premium show."

That led to innovations (at least in Iberia) that Amoedo developed with Marti going back to before the pandemic: shooting with 8K-resolution Red cameras, HDR, LED volumes, camera synchronization protocols, and more. The initial sensors on the Red cameras were unstable from heat generation when used in a sustained way, leading Red and Netflix to work closely with Amoedo, even sending a color scientist to Spain to find ways to cool and improve the unreliable sensors for ongoing production use. "For us, that was like magic," Amoedo said. Also, funnily enough, Amoedo found a way to revive and enliven a very old visual trick, rear projection, to film chase scenes that otherwise weren't working well with newer tech. The fix: finding a projector that used much higher-resolution optics (and brightness) than any consumer could ever need or afford. Amoedo also figured out a way to match three-color-based LED volumes with reflected fill light that might otherwise come from full-spectrum lamps. The trick: use giant mirrors to capture the LED volumes' light and reflect it into fill areas. "My advice: keep it simple, do it step by step," Amoedo said. And another bit of advice: "Kick the non-believers off the set. You're trying to create a new show. The (LED) volume by itself doesn't do nothing. All the departments have to do something to create the illusion of reality."

How Eurovision’s Israeli participation beef is part of bigger political controversies in Continental broadcasting

BLOOM: I hadn't intended to cover the on-stage appearance of Noel Curran, director general of the European Broadcasting Union, but I was so glad I stumbled into the conversation about controversies facing the Continent's public-service broadcasters, which the EBU represents. Top of the list: whether Israeli public broadcaster KAN will be allowed to participate in Eurovision, the gigantically popular music competition (why Middle East countries are part of a putatively European reality competition is a whole other question). The EBU board will recommend a decision in November and then the organization's general membership will vote. "It's tricky," Curran said. "The views are diametrically opposed." Some other public broadcasters have said they won't participate this year if KAN does, in protest of the Israeli government policies that have devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands after Hamas' brutal attacks on Southern Israel nearly two years ago. Other members have said they won't participate unless KAN gets to again participate this year. Curran, displaying admirable diplomatic skills, said he welcomed the statements from some member services.

"We're a member-owned organization," Curran said. "This is a member decision. This is not a decision taken in an office in Geneva. We understand how complicated this is." Curran pointed out that a few years ago, no one protested KAN's involvement in Eurovision, even when it hosted the competition featuring single bands from each participating country. When an audience member asked whether it made sense to pause Eurovision for a year or two, Curran said he would "respectfully disagree," after ratings last year were "absolutely huge" and likely to continue strongly, bolstering all the participating services. "We can pause it one year, two years, three years, this geopolitical situation isn't going away," Curran said. "We've got to make Eurovision as good as possible, then manage this very difficult geopolitical situation as well as we can." Curran also noted a rise in more general Europe-wide interest in digital "sovereignty," i.e., getting services from Euro-based tech companies. Sixty percent of the EBU membership uses only American-based cloud providers, and likely will continue to do so, he said. But in the past eight months or so (that is, since Don Trump became U.S. president on a nativist platform), "More and more questions are being asked about European sovereignty," Curran said. "The level of political interference is increasing, I see it year over year. More and more we're having to get involved in protecting our members. The American companies are going to have to address it. It is a growing issue."

Come see how Matchpoint’s fully automated media supply chain takes content from ingest to QC, packaging, and multi-platform delivery — without the manual bottlenecks. We’ll demo AI-driven orchestration, auto-QC with exception handling, one-click versioning for AVOD/SVOD/TVOD/FAST, and real-time cost-to-serve and SLA dashboards. The result: faster time-to-market, fewer errors, and dramatically lower operational costs. Stop by for live workflows, partner integrations, and a peek at what’s next for end-to-end automation.

In addition, the Cineverse Technology team will be demoing CineSearch and how we are redefining content discovery with AI that’s both emotionally and strategically intelligent. The demo will showcase real-time, cross-platform search that understands mood, intent, and context—surfacing the right title at the right moment—while also aligning with platform priorities to boost engagement and ROI. Attendees will see how cineSearch learns from behavior, bridges fragmented catalogs, and makes choosing what to watch as engaging as the entertainment itself.

Stop by the Future In Tech Hall Meeting Room 14.C68 as we will be covering all these topics. Visit www.matchpoint.tv for more information.

Also, check out Cineverse technology chief Tony Huidor’s overview of his company’s fully automated supply chain and its groundbreaking AI-based search and discovery tool. You can also listen to Huidor’s talk as an audio podcast on Spotify.

Telestream’s reunited ‘band’ getting video production stalwart back on its feet

BLOOM: After "getting the band back together" this year, Telestream's new leadership pitched analysts and media on its ongoing integration of more than a dozen acquisitions, and a new Amazon Prime Video deal helping produce and distribute weekly NBA games live globally. "We had acquired a bunch of things as a company, but hadn't done a great job of integrating them together," said executive VP of products Charlie Dunn, who like chief growth & strategy officer Benjamin Desbois and other top execs rejoined the company after co-founder and long-time CEO Dan Castles came out of retirement to again lead the company.

"I think you'll see some great things from us again next year," Dunn said. "We're planning to unify everything into one product. You'll see more at NAB.” Dunn called AI a "bullet point for every company here," and said Telestream is embedding it in  video ingest, automating complicated processes for clients that don't want teir valuable content vulnerably floating on the cloud. "For us, it's just an expansion of what the workflows can do," Dunn said. "We have nine more things we want to do with AI that will save people time." Castles’ return has been accompanied by big client wins, like helping Amazon with its expensive NBA deal, sending weekly doubleheaders and other programming to subscribers in all the countries where Amazon operates. AI allows Telestream to "start correcting issues immediately," as on a recent reality show they helped make, Desbois said. Now those just-in-time technologies will be vital "down the road" generating automated highlights during sports events.The company used a hybrid cloud and on-premises system with NBCUniveral on last year's Paris Olympics, an example of where they think the industry is headed. "We see the future as who's the best at providing a hybrid solution," Dunn said.

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How real-time translation can unlock sports, and job hunting, worldwide

BLOOM: Avneesh Prakash is a genial sort, a tech veteran out of India who collaborated with his son, an Apple engineer, to launch translation company CAMB.AI two years ago. I'll confess that I've become jaded about the many companies claiming to use AI for translation, captioning and subtitling, mostly because so many are promising miracles. CAMB.AI, however, is getting attention from the right kinds of companies to think it's actually doing a lot of things right, especially in the baptism by fire that is real-time translation of live sports and other events. Investors include Comcast, and sports partners include Major League Soccer, NASCAR, the Australian Open, and Eurovision Sports. The first day of IBC, CAMB announced a partnership with India Today, the big broadcaster in Prakash's native country (he now lives in Dubai; his team is sprinkled around the planet). The implications could be huge for sports leagues trying to build a global reach, like MLS with its 360-degree Apple TV deal. Apple wants to get MLS games everywhere it reaches, and having a local-language version, with the subtleties of each region's take on that language, can have a big impact, Prakash said.

In sports, "much of what's said in the original language doesn't make sense," even to many speakers of that language, Prakash said.  "For sports it's really the first time there's an option to do sports at a massive scale." I pointed to trying to understand, as a native English speaker, the unintelligible match reports in British papers of the latest cricket matches, but Prakash had an example even closer to home: "The ball peppered off the Green Monster." The program knows that means a ball was hit hard off the oversized left-field wall in MLB's Boston Red Sox home, Fenway Park. CAMB.AI has trained its models on about 150 languages, including some in danger of disappearing, like Maleku, spoken by about 500 Indigenous First Nations people in northern Canada who are connected with Canada College. But being able to translate live sports is only part of CAMB's capabilities, which also can handle text, voice and other applications in business, education, training and more.  Imagine, Prakash said, the implications for international operations such as call centers. "You can hire for the subject matter expert, not just for the language speaker," he said.

BLOOM: Disney Studios CTO Eddie Drake discuss Zero Trust Asset Sharing. (You can see a clip of that talk above.) I also stopped by the Whale.TV booth to chat with Mike Duin, the globally distributed TVOS company’s Dutch-born marketing and communications chief. Check the video below. The TVOS space is a fascinating one, as tech giants view with the white-labelled offerings of OEMs and true independents such as Whale, which claims a substantial market of 10 million to 15 million Whale-equipped sets sold a year. Given the brutal margins of TV hardware, most of the action these days seems to be in TVOS Land.

DANIEL FRANKEL: I’m still here … back in Los Angeles, battling through a touch of pneumonia and an absolute Corridos rager down the street. Nice job today, D. Looking ahead at tomorrow’s IBC sked, top tech and broadcasting execs for the PGA Tour are going to show off a new drone-based AR system for covering events at 12:45 p.m. And I mentioned this earlier, the Media Coding Industry Forum will be packed with demos and presentations on the successor codec to H.265/HVEC, Versatile Video Coding, H.266. To wind things up, I’d request an invitation for the Evergent Executive Dinner @TheDuchess. You can also hit the Bitfocus After Party at 9 p.m. at booth 8.A91.