Faultline’s IBC notebook is always a mountain of acronyms, but this year was a little different. AI, ML, LLMs, MCP, A2A all jostled for attention across the halls, with vendors claiming to be rewriting the rules. Ten months ago, the phrase “MCP server” barely existed outside of obscure AI research papers. At IBC 2025, the Model Context Protocol, released less than a year ago by Anthropic, was the acronym on everyone’s lips, showing that multi-agent communication protocols have quickly become a new badge of credibility at tradeshows. The trouble is, an MCP server doesn’t yet help the media and entertainment industry do anything meaningful. We saw a few slick workflow demos—automation chaining tasks together at frightening speed—but practical use cases…