By Mike Boucke, senior product manager, AJA Video Systems.
Between the Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup and other global events on the horizon, 2026 is gearing up to be yet another landmark year for live sports. As it takes shape, content providers face significant challenges in delivering the scale and video quality fans expect for some of the world’s biggest live sports moments, while also meeting the seasonal broadcast and streaming demands of professional leagues. Many have spent months, if not years, preparing the necessary infrastructure and workflows. In this ramp-up, IP video has quickly become foundational to many of these productions.
But IP video isn’t just for top-tier sporting event productions; it’s also helping to broaden accessibility to more niche sports that may have previously only been available to watch in person. As IP video technologies have become more accessible and intuitive to implement, sports leagues and organisations of all shapes and sizes are opting to produce high-quality live match and tournament content using full IP workflows or hybrid baseband/IP video pipelines for delivery to global audiences. IP video is unleashing new possibilities across live sports, making the live productions that power them more flexible, dynamic and accessible.
Uncovering new flexibility
IP video is catching on so quickly, in part, because it enables production teams to streamline operations. They can build their systems around a single IP network, which can support more sources than SDI infrastructure. With this central hub, video sources can be instantly available and flexibly routed to any destination.
That versatility puts the power in producers’ hands, who can manage more streams simultaneously and experiment with new content formats such as different angles or behind-the-scenes coverage. They can determine what resonates with audiences instantaneously. Additionally, multi-venue productions, like the Winter Olympics, for example, could integrate the feeds from multiple arenas without complex cabling.
The hybrid road ahead
While greenfield infrastructure builds have the benefit of being established to support IP video from the get-go, organisations with legacy infrastructure can still harness IP video’s unending potential using a hybrid approach. For instance, more production teams today are capturing the action on site using baseband equipment, packaging and converting the video for IP transport over the public internet, and then converting it back to baseband for use in and around a production facility. Prior to IP video transport, this would require costly satellite uplink equipment and services.
At the same time, this hybrid approach unlocks more creative possibilities since production teams can easily integrate footage from unconventional sources, like clips from smartphones, social media, or fan streams, to enhance the broadcast. It’s not only changing how sports are produced, but also how the stories during and around the game are being told.
In addition to hybrid baseband/IP environments, IP video comes in a variety of flavours. This often means productions must also support a combination of different IP video protocols, standards and codecs. Although uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 is emerging as a popular choice, many professionals today are blending a mixture of uncompressed and other compressed IP paths to balance quality, latency and cost.
Having the right technology in place to bridge the worlds of SDI and IP video, as well as between all the different IP video approaches, will remain crucial to sports broadcasters and streamers in 2026.
Addressing key hurdles
For all its flexibility and creative possibilities, IP video still presents a learning curve for many in the industry. Managing a network-based infrastructure requires engineers who are fluent in both broadcast and IT. ST 2110 demands a knowledge of topics like precision timing protocol (PTP) synchronisation and multicast routing in L3 networks, as well as control between multiple vendors. For this reason, among others, the right talent must be chosen in the growing pool of IT engineers being trained and mentored by today’s video engineers.
Interoperability is also a top concern. End-to-end systems testing remains vital to ensure all devices play nicely together. Beyond these technical hurdles, successful IP adoption requires the right dedication to pipeline research and development. Teams must research, test and refine their workflows, and stay on top of a technological landscape that is constantly evolving.
Future projections
As we look forward to 2026, the efforts facing the industry in its embrace of IP video are poised to more than prove their worth. For major broadcasters, IP video will facilitate larger, more distributed workflows capable of handling immense volumes of high-quality, low-latency video. For smaller broadcasters, it will provide the means to create compelling content in an affordable and flexible way.
Well-suited to handle advanced video formats, like 4K HDR, IP video will also help content providers meet increasing audience demand for higher quality video coverage of their favourite sports. We anticipate more momentum around the technology to spur new innovation, including deeper integration with cloud-based systems, automated signal management, and adaptive compression technologies.
These advancements will allow teams to scale coverage more easily and dynamically. Additionally, remote collaboration technologies that support IP video will continue to mature so that teams can access more real-time match feeds from anywhere in the world.
Ultimately, the continued evolution of IP video in live sports is as much a creative shift as it is a technological one. It opens the doors for more leagues and broadcasters to deliver standout experiences for fans and audiences across the world that bring them closer to the action. Looking to next year, the industry’s biggest opportunities lie in continuing to embrace IP’s flexibility, scalability and innovation – transforming how sports at all levels are captured, produced and experienced for years to come.
