A core theme that emerged from IBC 2026 was not a ravishingly sexy one, but a necessary one – costs. During the Covid lockdowns, media organizations the world over rushed to the cloud. The migration was expedited by the necessity for remote production at scale, and everything else followed throughout the value chain. Cloud and SaaS were game-changers, but they also caused integration headaches and cost concerns along the way. It didn’t take long before cloud bills started spiraling. Storage was an obvious culprit, but it was never just about storage. Transcoding, compute, egress, data movement, redundancy and the sheer cost of running workloads continuously all added up. Media companies started looking at which workloads really benefited from hyperscale elasticity and which were cheaper to…