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Away from the bright lights and spectacle of the show floor, the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference (BEITC) is the conference within the conference. 

Totally focused on broadcast engineering, the BEITC is designed for engineers, technicians, technology managers and researchers and is not about where the broadcast industry is today; BEITC is where the grown ups work out what happens next.

Running from April 18 – 21, this year’s BEITC once again covers a lot of ground. Across more than 70 sessions, BEITC 2026 covers a diverse range of themes, and although this year AI is by far the most dominant thread, it covers it from every conceivable angle. From autonomous QA to agentic device control, there are sessions on QA, accessibility, monetization, workflow, audio description and more. In fact, as conversational, generative, and agentic AI embeds itself deeper into media operations, the event closes with a 60-minute session exploring the future of AI-driven control in content environments.

“Securing and Scaling Agentic AI: Safe Conversational Control for Media Workflows” on Tuesday, April 21, 3:30pm (room N261) features sessions approaching AI from different sides. Panel one focuses on defending conversational agents from emerging threats, and panel two looks at using agentic AI with SMPTE ST 2138 to enable open, plain-English control of broadcast devices across vendors and platforms.

In the first of two BEITC previews, we look at some of the sessions exploring how AI is transforming every layer of the broadcast chain. In part two, we will cover the conference’s other main themes, including cloud compute and software-based infrastructure, which is a topic close to our heart at The Broadcast Bridge. We will also highlight sessions based on the adoption of ATSC 3.0, security, and how DeepSea Power & Light went about engineering a UHD imaging system that can be used 7,000 meters under the sea.

That’s over four miles deep. More on that in part two.

AI Beyond The Hype

Broadcast operations are already benefitting from the efficiencies of artificial intelligence, and we’ve only really scratched the surface. It’s why the BEIT Conference has such a focus on it; because while AI’s output can speed up processes and boost creativity, without applying an appropriate amount of rigor in its application it has the potential to do a lot of damage.

News is a good example, and on Monday, April 20, at 11:00am, it will be put to the test in room N256. “Broadcast-Ready Innovation: Practical AI, Secure IP Links and NextGen Emergency Wake-Up” features a trio of sessions that questions what “broadcast-ready” really means in 2026. The first, “Beyond the Hype: How Four AIs Perform in Everyday Broadcast Tasks”, compares four flagship AI systems (namely Grok, GPT, Gemini and DeepSeek) and uses them to map day-to-day tasks found in an average newsroom, promo team, traffic, or compliance desk. These include script generation, fact-checking wire copy against cited sources, violence-scene recognition to support compliance flags and scheduling decisions, and things like ratings analysis and ad-inventory optimization. It also examines how on-prem and private-cloud deployment affects results. The organizers describe it as “a field guide for CTOs and engineering heads balancing security, speed, and cost without sacrificing capability.”

AI In Sports

With live sports’ reputation of pushing the boundaries of new tech, it’s unsurprising that there is also a series of sessions aiming to demonstrate how AI can drive more value for audiences.

On Saturday April 18, “AI for Future Media: Smarter QA, Inclusive Experiences and Live Sports Streaming Innovation” (3:00pm, room N256) takes a step back to look at the full media pipeline, from how services are tested, to how content is adapted, distributed, and monetized. Across three sessions it looks at how agentic AI can autonomously perform QA across Smart TVs and set-top boxes, and how AI-powered adaptations are expanding accessibility beyond captions and basic audio description. The final session in this set might be well worth a visit. “AI Technology Advancements Driving the Next Generation of Live Sports Streaming and Monetization” (3:40pm) explores how automated ad signaling, metadata extraction, personalization, localization, and enhanced video quality are delivering real-time AI enrichment for live sports.

There’s more about AI’s impact on sports on Monday, April 20 in “AI-Driven Live Production: Real-Time Metadata, Workflow Automation and Accessible Audio” at 1:30pm in Room N256. In another series of sessions looking at AI support, “Audio Description: AD and AI - For Good or Ill?” features Joel Snyder from the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind exploring how AI speech synthesis is already being employed by companies producing Audio Description (AD) for broadcast television. He asks if this is a time-saver for AD production or if AD requires more nuance, attention to detail, a thorough understanding of the phrasing used in AD writing, and a contextual understanding of creator’s intent.

This set of sessions also explores AI synchronization of video, audio, and metadata and the automation of live workflows through real-time orchestration. It asks whether the benefits of speed and efficiency are enough to balance the potential impact on reliability and the audience experience; questioning where automation can help and where human expertise is still essential.

AI Behind The Scenes

For anyone undecided about when to leave the show, it’s well worth staying for Tuesday’s sessions. There’s a lot going on.

In addition to the aforementioned double bill on media workflows, “AI That Elevates Broadcast: Accessibility, Rights and Quality” in Room N256 at 1:30pm presents three papers that explore real-world applications of speech translation and subtitling for local communities, AI-governed rights automation that unlocks archive value, and AI-based Quality of Experience (QoE).

With papers on AI-based translation for local communities and ensuring consistent video QoE, the session also looks at the back end, where AI is helping out behind the scenes with media asset management (MAM). In “GEAR (Governance Engine for Archives Rights): Introducing AI-Driven Governance and Automation to Maximize Broadcast Asset Value”, NHK’s Yo Narita and Tadashi Yura present an AI agent system designed specifically to introduce essential governance into the rights logging workflow. Arguing that archive rights records can suffer from inconsistencies due to operator-dependent data entry methods, it aims to demonstrate how AI can transform rights logging from a manual task into a standardized workflow and maximize content value. The session is at 1:50pm.

AI Building Trust

Later that afternoon at 3:00pm, again in room N256, “Content Provenance in Composable Live Media” tackles the challenges around AI-generated and adapted content. The Broadcast Bridge has covered the C2PA extensively, most recently here, but there has never been a greater need for more authenticity, and applying C2PA provenance standards to live media has the potential to create greater transparency and build audience trust.

Synthetic content is everywhere and AI-generated and AI-altered content risks the credibility of news organizations globally. And this is where we came in: rigor is absolutely necessary in the application of AI across our industry, and as it becomes more commonplace it is important to ensure that robust guardrails like the C2PA are in place.

In part 2 of this preview we’ll look at how the BEITC is rebuilding broadcast architectures to dig into the sessions beneath the AI headlines; expect a lot on the Dynamic Media Facility and the Media eXchange Layer.