A Guide to Exhibiting at IBC for the First Time
IBC2026 runs from 11 to 14 September 2026 at RAI Amsterdam. It is organised by International Broadcasting Convention LLP, a partnership owned by six industry bodies — IEEE, IET, IAMT, SCTE, SMPTE and RTS — and it draws exhibitors and visitors from more than 170 countries. The venue sits just south of the city centre, ten minutes by direct train from Schiphol and directly beside the A10 orbital motorway, which is the detail that matters most for anyone trucking a stand in.
The show days are Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Doors open at 10:30 on the Friday, at 09:30 on the Saturday and Sunday, and close at 16:00 on the Monday. Read that sequence twice before you build a budget, because it is not the pattern any other major European technology fair follows and it changes staffing, crew and hotel costs in ways that are invisible until the invoices arrive.
Who Exhibits, and What Visitors Actually Do on Your Stand
The floor covers the whole chain: acquisition, production and post, playout, distribution, streaming and delivery, plus the storage, networking and cloud infrastructure underneath all of it. Alongside the main halls, the organiser runs Content Everywhere for direct-to-consumer and OTT technology, and Future Tech in Hall 14 for start-ups and emerging technology, including a start-up package restricted to companies founded within the last five years.
The visitor is a broadcast engineer, a head of technology, a systems integrator or a post facility owner. They are not browsing. They arrive with a project, a signal chain problem or a refresh cycle, and they want to see the thing working. That produces a distinctive rhythm: short technical qualification standing at a demo position, then a long seated conversation somewhere quieter. Stands that cannot host the second half send those conversations to a coffee bar, where you are competing with the noise and cannot show anything.
Demonstration and Hospitality: How IBC Stands Are Actually Used
This is the section worth reading twice, because it is where IBC diverges from a components fair. On this floor, hospitality is not decoration. Deals here are consultative and slow, the audience is senior, and the show runs across a weekend when people are more willing to sit down. A stand with nowhere to sit is a stand that hands its best conversations to somebody else's meeting room.
The practical split we design to is roughly two thirds demonstration and circulation, one third seated and semi-private, though the ratio moves with what you sell. A camera or lens brand needs open sightlines and space for people to handle equipment, so hospitality gets pushed upstairs or into a single enclosed room. A cloud or playout platform is demonstrating a screen and a workflow, so it can afford more seating and fewer open positions. Either way the seating has to be genuinely usable — a table, a real chair, and enough acoustic separation that two people can hear each other over an adjacent demo.
Three constraints shape how that gets built. First, the 30 square metre space-only minimum means even a modest IBC stand has room to do both, which is not true at every show. Second, the 25 percent double-decker surcharge makes a raised meeting deck the cheapest square metres you will ever buy for hospitality, because the ground floor underneath stays available for demonstrations. Third, if you want private meeting rooms directly on the show floor rather than on your own stand, Content Everywhere is the only exhibition area that offers them — everywhere else, meeting space is either on your stand, in the dedicated meeting suite area beside Hall 8, or in an RAI meeting room off the floor.
One honest warning about the meeting-suite route: the organiser asks meeting-suite users to also take a public exhibition space or reach a minimum combined spend on space and sponsorship, quoted in pounds. If your plan was to skip the stand and take a quiet room, price that condition in before you commit to it.
Stand Size: Why the Conversation Starts at 30 Square Metres
Space-only at IBC cannot be contracted below 30 square metres. That single rule removes an entire tier of decision-making. There is no nine-metre corner and no eighteen-metre starter stand to be had on a space-only contract, so the real question is not whether to go small but what to do with thirty.
Thirty to thirty-six square metres is a working stand: two demonstration positions, a counter, storage that is actually lockable, and seating for a proper conversation. It is enough, and plenty of respected vendors exhibit at exactly this size year after year. What it will not absorb is a third demo position plus a private room — something has to give.
Forty to fifty-four square metres is where an enclosed meeting room becomes practical without starving the demonstration area, and it is the size most systems integrators settle at. From sixty upward, the decision changes shape entirely: instead of trading demo space against meeting space, you put the meetings on a second storey and keep the whole ground floor working. At a 25 percent surcharge on the space rate, that is unusually good value, and it is why we model the double-decker option by default at this show rather than presenting it as an upsell.
One further note on hall choice. Halls 1, 7 and 12 are priced as premium halls because demand for them is higher. Whether the premium is worth paying depends entirely on who your visitor is and where the adjacent content programme sits — it is a question for your account manager at IBC, not for your stand builder, and any builder who tells you otherwise is guessing.
What an IBC Stand Costs by Size
Ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, graphics, road freight from Frankfurt, installation and dismantling. They exclude the floor space rental you contract with IBC, the organiser's double-decker surcharge where a second storey is used, and the electrical, data and rigging orders placed with the venue.
- 30 m² modular, the space-only entry point: €15,000–€19,000
- 45 m² modular with a seated meeting corner: €18,300–€24,800
- 54 m² custom with an enclosed meeting room: €22,000–€29,000
- 60 m² custom with three demonstration positions: €34,000–€44,000
- 80 m² premium single-storey build: €34,000–€48,000
- 80 m² double-decker, meetings upstairs: €34,000–€48,000
Build-Up, Show Days and the Monday Teardown
The weekend calendar reshapes the whole schedule. Build-up falls mid-week, which is convenient — crews are not competing with weekend traffic on the A10 and the drive from Frankfurt is a straightforward day. The show then occupies Friday through Monday, and teardown begins after a 16:00 close on the Monday afternoon, with freight collection running into the following days.
Three consequences follow. Your crew is on standby across a Saturday and Sunday, which is a different rate everywhere in Europe. Your stand staff are working four consecutive days, and the fourth is a Monday, which is when attention fades and rotas break down — build the shift plan assuming somebody will need relieving. And your own engineers, if they are supporting a live demonstration, are on site for the same four days plus build-up, which is close to a full working week away from their normal jobs. None of this is difficult, but all of it is expensive if it is discovered late.
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
First is budgeting from a weekday show and being surprised by weekend crew and hotel costs. Second is ordering package power without checking whether the demonstration can survive being switched off overnight — daytime supply is the default, and a twenty-four-hour feed is a separate order with an earlier deadline. Third is designing all demonstration and no seating, then losing the long conversations that justify the trip. Fourth is planning a small stand before checking that space-only starts at 30 square metres. Fifth, for anyone bringing a vehicle outside, is designing a welcome area larger than the 30 percent the organiser permits. Every one of these is settled at briefing stage or not at all.
Getting Started
Send us your stand size and hall position once IBC has issued it, a note of what you intend to demonstrate, and one specific answer: does anything on the stand need to stay powered overnight? That single detail changes the services order, the deadline you are working to, and sometimes the floor plan. You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote, at no charge and with no obligation.
Because IBC is annual and the space-only floor starts at 30 square metres, a reusable system frame pays for itself faster here than at a biennial show — the structure comes back to our Frankfurt warehouse and the next edition costs a graphics refresh rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
