Devoncroft’s 2026 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS) of global media tech buyers has once again ranked `IP Networking & Content Delivery’ as the top media tech trend.
Reflecting the ongoing transition to IP technologies, the result marked the sixth consecutive year (and for the seventh time in eight years) that `IP Networking & Content Delivery’ was the top trend.
Devoncroft researchers noted, however, that the margin between the top trend and the second ranked trend of ‘AI / ML / GenAI’ technologies narrowed versus 2025 BBS Global Trend Index.
‘AI / ML / GenAI’ has received a ranking of second since the 2023 BBS Global Trend Index, according to Josh Stinehour in a blog post announcing the results.
“One of the key outputs from the BBS is the annual BBS Global Trend Index,” he noted. “This is a ranking of the media industry trends that are considered by technology end-user respondents the most commercially important to their businesses in the next 2-3 years. In the 2026 survey efforts, we presented BBS respondents with a list of 23 industry trends and asked them to select the one trend that is `most important’ to their business, one trend that is `second most important’ to their business, and the other trends (plural) they consider `also very important.’
The BBS is the largest annual global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands.
REMI came in number three, followed by multiplatform content delivery and automated operations, rounding out the top five.
The study reported the following ranking:
More data and information from the study is available here.
Check out TV Tech's extensive IP and Networking coverage here.
