With IBC 2026 now behind us, we're taking a moment to reflect on another jam-packed few days at the biggest gathering in media and entertainment. More than 41,000 visitors made their way through the halls this year, and the Friend MTS team was right in the thick of it, meeting customers, catching up with partners and showing what we've been working on.
Front and centre was the launch of the FMTS Platform, which brings our anti-piracy monitoring, analysis and enforcement services together in one place. Instead of working across a set of separate tools, content owners, broadcasters and operators now receive piracy intelligence, analysis and action through a single connected system, spanning monitoring, watermarking, social media, blocking, intelligence and analytics. The Platform provides instant access to mission-critical piracy data, 24x7x365.
At the heart of the platform is AI trained on 25 years of the deepest verified piracy data in the industry. Rather than learning once and stopping, it keeps searching new ground every day, surfacing piracy in places nobody else is looking, and drawing on the 26,000 hours of content we capture and process daily. What it finds becomes real, actionable insight, with enforcement options built in as the next step, not a separate one. And behind the technology are our people, whose expertise turns data into decisions and keeps our customers one step ahead.
In practice, that means one place to see what matters the moment you log in, and one connected view of everything protecting your content. Monitoring reaches across the open web, social channels, streaming services and closed IPTV, not just public broadcast feeds. Forensic watermarking traces piracy back to its source, right down to the individual subscriber or distribution partner. Blocking disrupts infringing servers and domains at scale in cooperation with ISPs, while intelligence connects the dots between sources to reveal the bigger operations behind individual leaks. And when you need answers, you can ask the platform in plain language and get them in seconds, rather than waiting on a separate report.
It's a serious amount of protection working behind the scenes. Today, Friend MTS safeguards more than $120bn of media rights and protects over 100 million apps and devices worldwide. Bringing all of that into one adaptive platform is what turns anti-piracy from a cost you carry into revenue you recover, giving teams a clear view of where piracy is doing the most damage and where to act first.
Demonstrating the Platform live to customers and new audiences alike was a highlight of the weekend. Seeing the response first-hand confirmed what we believe: as piracy grows faster, becomes more fragmented and increasingly AI-enabled, anti-piracy has to become just as connected and adaptive. The FMTS Platform is our answer, and the biggest step forward in anti-piracy.
There was also plenty to talk about with our technology partners. Just before the show, we announced an integration between the AgileTV CDN and our server-side watermarking, optimised to protect the highest-value sport and entertainment content at speed, with no impact on the quality of video delivered to viewers. Operators running the AgileTV CDN can now deploy our watermarking in a pre-integrated environment, for faster rollout and less implementation risk.
We were also proud to be one of twelve British specialists in an IBC showcase led by RedSquid TV, demonstrating how UK technologies can work together to redefine television for the Agentic AI era. It's a future no single company can build alone, and it was good to help shape it.
Thank you to everyone who came by the stand to see the demo or to meet the team. A special mention, too, to our Senior Vice President of Threat Intelligence & Response, Dave Gilmore, who swapped the show floor for the start line at Race 4 the Future, Rise Academy's charity run raising money to help underrepresented young people build careers in media and technology.
That's a wrap on IBC 2026; we'll see you there again next year! If we missed you in Amsterdam, get in touch to book a call with the team.
