Inter BEE 2026 Puts IP Measurement on the Show Floor

Inter BEE 2026 runs from 18 to 20 November at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, with doors open 10:00 to 17:30 and until 17:00 on the final day, free to attend with advance registration. The exhibitor list reads less like a camera show than it did a decade ago. Alongside production hardware there is a dense layer of measurement: DekTec brings modulators and SDI/ASI cards up to 12G with a JPEG XS over ST 2110 record and playout demonstration, plus mockups of a six-channel RF modulator and a 25GbE ST 2110-ready SmartNIC. Sencore shows the VB440, which analyses many ST 2110 streams at once with video, audio, waveform and timing views in a browser. Calian's Decimator D4 covers 5 MHz to 6.5 GHz of RF spectrum with constellation display and remote alarms.

The presence of that gear is the story. An SDI facility can be checked with a waveform monitor and a cable tester; an IP facility has to be checked for PTP lock, stream registration, packet loss and, above all, whether the redundant path actually carries the same content when the primary fails. ST 2022-7 does not create redundancy, it uses two paths that the network has to provide, and the only way to know that both exist is to pull one and watch. MediaKind's ProSwitch, which monitors IP and ASI streams and switches on fault, is the same argument in hardware form. Buying the transport without the instruments to prove it is how facilities end up discovering their redundancy during a live match.

Audio has its own row of boxes. Digigram is showing PCIe cards for both AES67 and Dante, the latter with redundant network support, which quietly turns an ordinary workstation into a multichannel node on the audio network. That matters because software-based production has moved from novelty to normal: once the mix, the commentary and the replay operate on a PC, the sound card becomes a network interface and the engineer's mental model has to include a clock domain. PlexusAV's Visual Array, a browser-based system with NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 discovery and connection, points the same way at the control layer - who registers, who connects, and what happens when the registry is down.

For Pro AV visitors the practical value of a broadcast show is calibration. The questions asked by a broadcaster about jitter, sync and path diversity are the questions a university, a house of worship or a stadium will ask two years later, usually after an incident. Amtune's Dante and AES67 interfaces, AES67 modular I/O and AV-over-IP decoders are built for sites that have crossed that line, where the network is no longer a transport detail but the system itself.