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Our meeting rooms at IBC, the M&E technology show in Amsterdam, never emptied. From the first morning to the last afternoon, the Conviva suite was full of broadcasters, operators, rights holders and partners, with one meeting running straight into the next.
And every conversation was centered on one person: the viewer.
What it Means to be Viewer-Obsessed in 2026
Media and entertainment publishers paid attention to quality of experience before anyone else had to. That’s because the success of their streaming businesses were measured against the status quo: broadcasting. And when streaming launched, broadcasting had spent 80 years getting really good.
For the 20 years since then, Conviva has helped publishers measure quality of experience on streaming video. At IBC this year we showed them what that looks like when it’s combined with app and ad data on one timeline, and they loved it.
One timeline, every surface
We opened a real session on customer data and scrolled from content into an ad break and back again, and the room leaned in. The questions started immediately.
- Is the same ad playing more than once in a session?
- How long do viewers search the home screen before they find something to watch?
- What are the most common paths to the title they finally choose?
None of those are video-quality questions in the traditional sense. They're viewer-experience questions, and they only have answers when video, ad, and app data live on the same timeline.
Every session, at the peak
A streaming leader preparing for a marquee live sports rights package wanted concurrency broken out by each of their live events, and to see how quality of experience holds up as concurrency climbs. Halfway through the demo, they stood up to photograph the screen. This summer's World Cup peaked at a record 56.9 million concurrent streams across the entire Conviva platform, and understanding experience at that peak was paramount. You can't answer questions on an event of that scale with a sample. You need every session, in real time.
Video data, product answers
The best use case we saw at IBC for Nexa, Conviva's analytics agent, wasn’t built by us. It was from a product team that used Nexa to determine when they needed to pre-load video on the content picker to optimize start time. That's a product analytics question, answered entirely with video metadata, and it's what happens when you point an agent at census-level data instead of a sample.
Streaming Analytics + Agentic Analytics
The ability to see video, app, and ad data in a single timeline will help publishers make incredible leaps in what they deliver for viewers. But, measuring the right thing is only half of it. The other half is how the answer reaches the people who need it.
One publisher challenged us on our agentic analytics approach, saying, “I can’t help but wonder if the entire industry will end up using AI to create new dashboards that get reviewed by a different AI.”
It's a fair question, and the rest of the week answered it.
- A CDN performance leader said he doesn't need a UI at all. He wants headless access over MCP (the protocol that lets an AI agent query a system directly, without a screen in between), so the data flows straight into his team's own tools.
- Several broadcasters and operators asked to bring data from their other operational systems into Nexa over MCP, so one question can span all of it.
- Executive teams asked for Nexa inside Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, because that's where they already work, and it would let them start the root-cause investigation the moment an alert fires, not when someone finally opens a laptop.
Yes, the world is increasingly becoming more agentic. Things that used to take teams of data analysts weeks to pinpoint can be done in minutes by AI. But the data being created and analyzed is also more complex and created at larger volumes in faster bursts. And viewers' expectations of brands have scaled proportionally.
What we heard at IBC from the people who are responsible for delivering these experiences was that they’re rising to the challenge. And Conviva is honored to be their partner in meeting it.
