London – September 16, 2026 -- Vizrt has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Driven Business Cycle in the Media Industry, 2026 Vendor Assessment, a ranking that evaluates technology providers applying artificial intelligence across media business and production workflows.
Burlington, Mass. – September 16, 2026 -- Avid and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to embed Gemini Enterprise and BigQuery directly into Avid's post-production software, launching a browser-based version of Media Composer that lets editors work from any location without dedicated hardware.
A Q2 2026 Avid survey of 120 professional editors found 79% use AI in their workflows, with speech-to-text and transcription the leading application at 60%. Editors want AI confined to efficiency gains rather than creative substitution: 87% said AI is most valuable when it helps them execute creative intent faster, and 76% said its top use is freeing time for storytelling. A further 63% said AI tools need tighter integration into existing workflows to be genuinely useful.
Culver City, Calif. – September 15, 2026 -- Pocket Entertainment, parent company of AI audio drama platform Pocket FM, has surpassed $500 million in annual revenue run rate, growing 70% year-over-year.
Revenue retention on Pocket FM rose from 44% to 76% over the past year, a shift the company attributes to deeper listener engagement rather than pure subscriber growth. Listeners now spend an average of 155 minutes daily on the platform, with 51% of weekly active users returning every day.
Pocket FM's catalog now includes 96 titles that have each generated more than $1 million in revenue, with 13 titles exceeding $10 million. The platform draws on a network of more than 550,000 creators producing 2.6 million hours of content annually.
Los Angeles – September 15, 2026 -- iodyne will run its Pro Mini Smart Drive live across four partner booths at IBC2026 in Amsterdam, marking the first time European attendees see the device operating in real production workflows rather than a display case. The show runs September 11-16, and iodyne's storage will move encrypted, RAID-protected footage through capture, color, ingest and archive stages at booths run by Hedge, Adobe, RED Digital Cinema and Cintegral Technologies.
Burbank – September 15, 2026 -- Iyuno, which describes itself as the world's largest media localization company, has detailed the multi-agent engineering behind CLOE's Contextual Memory, a system built to solve narrative continuity in AI-driven video localization without relying on ever-larger models.
Rather than deploying one monolithic model, CLOE runs a network of hyper-specialized micro-agents, each handling a discrete function such as character relationship mapping, emotional intent detection, prosodic matching, or brand compliance. The company argues that for enterprise AI applied to long-form video, bigger context windows and larger compute budgets still fail to preserve continuity across scenes, episodes, and seasons.
Unterföhring – September 15, 2026 -- ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE secured two top honors at the Deutscher Fernsehpreis 2026, with productions from its Kabel Eins and ProSieben channels winning in the Best Factual Entertainment and Best Documentary/Reportage categories respectively.
"Roadtrip Australien - Drei Spitzenköche auf vier Rädern," featuring chefs Ali Güngörmüs, Alexander Kumptner and Frank Rosin, took the Best Factual Entertainment prize on the Kabel Eins channel.
"Joko & Klaas LIVE - #dontlookaway," hosted by Klaas Heufer-Umlauf and Joko Winterscheidt on ProSieben, won Best Documentation/Reportage. The program addressed the ongoing war in Ukraine and its impact on civilians.
London – September 15, 2026 -- BRAHMA AI has secured a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its AI-based face replacement and performance-preserving post-production system, placing the AI-native firm alongside Disney Research, Rising Sun Pictures and Digital Domain as the only non-legacy studio recipient.
The award recognizes systems capable of altering a performer's appearance while holding natural expression, movement, lighting and scene realism constant across a sequence, even as pose, lighting and occlusion shift. BRAHMA AI's Neural Performance technology was singled out for meeting that bar at feature-film, television and live-production scale.
Beijing – September 15, 2026 -- iQIYI has launched the Global AI Creator Challenge, the first international contest on its professional filmmaking platform NadouPro, partnering with Alibaba's Wan3.0 model to drive end-to-end AI video production.
Themed "Make Ideas Unforgettable," the challenge runs submissions from September 10 to 23, 2026, with judging from September 24 to 30. A total prize pool exceeding USD 10,000 will be split among 156 winners: three Masterpiece Awards, three People's Choice Awards and 150 Active Participation Awards. Winning entries will receive additional promotion from NadouPro and Wan3.0 after judging concludes.
Berlin – September 15, 2026 -- WELT chief reporter Ibrahim Naber won the Deutscher Fernsehpreis in the category "Best Presenter / Individual Achievement Information" on September 9, 2026, for his continuous frontline reporting from Ukraine.
The WELT chief reporter has documented combat zones and the civilian toll of the war since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. In autumn 2025, Naber, his producer and his cameraman were wounded during a research trip when a Russian drone struck their location.
ZDF moderator Markus Lanz, delivering the award laudation, said Naber had experienced death directly and that fear had become visible in his eyes after the drone strike, yet he continued reporting from both sides of the conflict without theatrics.
Amsterdam – September 15, 2026 -- SMiT will debut a CI+ 2.0 USB dongle embedding Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology at IBC2026, targeting Pay-TV operators seeking consent-based audience measurement on the main screen.
The platform integrates SMiT's secure TV-access hardware, TrueSense UWB positioning, The Hashgraph Group's BrandBoost engagement product, and Sofia Digital's TV application layer. The dongle connects directly to a compatible iDTV, eliminating the need for a separate set-top box.
TrueSense UWB technology allows the system to securely associate a registered viewer's smartphone or tag with the television and calculate its proximity and relative position. This data feeds BrandBoost, which layers gamification, targeted engagement and reward workflows onto the viewing session.