Head of Orchard Clips Luke Smedley reflects on his visit to the UK’s leading event for the media, production and broadcast industries.
Last week I attended the Media Production and Technology Show at Olympia in London. This is the UK’s largest trade show for all things TV production and was celebrating its 10th anniversary. Having visited the show for most of its 10-year history, it was interesting to see the changes and how the show has developed this year.
The seminars and panel sessions are becoming increasingly prominent at the show each year. There are more but smaller stages, reflecting the increasing diversity of the attendees and their interests. I find these the most useful part of the show, providing new insights on familiar topics and providing introductions on new topics.
Over the last few years, the dominant theme has been AI. Because of this, I mostly avoided sessions that were explicitly about AI. However, every session I attended did mention it at some point, providing evidence that it is now an established part of everybody’s workflows, to a greater or lesser extent.
YouTube – Longform and Long Game
A new stage for 2026 was the Creator Hub, acknowledging that an increasing proportion of the industry revolves around platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, compared with the broadcasters and latterly streamers that have dominated content dissemination. I attended a few seminars on this stage, and found them enlightening. A recurring opinion from many of the speakers was that, as Grace Andrews commented, shortform video has probably peaked. Audiences are now looking for longer and more immersive content. 5-8 minute videos no longer work on YouTube, 20-30 minute videos perform much better, with watch duration being the key metric. But, building a successful YouTube channel isn’t just about video duration, it’s about dedicated effort and takes a long time to build a community. As Jordan Schwarzenberger pointed out, Mr Beast didn’t have a major success until his 450th video! This requires a great deal of footage. You can shoot this yourself, but it is sometimes better to augment this with quality stock and archive footage. Ultimately, YouTube is a major opportunity, but it is a massive investment in time and money, it’s a long game.
Archive Stories
One of the key reasons I was there was to hear the latest thinking in the world of archive. I attended on the Wednesday and was frustrated to see that two of the three archive-related seminars clashed. But the ones that I did attend were interesting.
First up was Protecting Sport’s Archive Legacy with Steve Rider, someone who was instantly recognisable to Brits of a certain age as the presenter of a wide range of sports on TV, including Formula One and touring car racing. He spoke about Racing Past Media, a company started in 2022 that came out of a mission to collate the first 30 years of Formula One in footage form. Working alongside archive producer Richard Wiseman, they have scoured archives large and small to find professional footage of Formula One races around the world, as well as film shot by racing fans in the early years of the sport. They have since branched out into other areas of motorsport, including the International Rallying archive. This was an interesting story, showing how a niche archive can be built around a subject matter, and the opportunity to turn archive footage from a cost-sink to a revenue source. Many of Rider’s experiences resonated with what we have achieved at Orchard Clips and the work we do to commercialise historic and contemporary footage.
I also attended Digital Isn’t Forever: The Real Cost of Keeping Archives Alive, which discussed how easy it is to become complacent when content is stored digitally and ignore the risks. As Helen Edmunds from the BFI stated, there are misconceptions that digital is easier and cheaper than physical media, when often it is not. The danger is digital decay, caused by physical deterioration of storage, such as hard drives or SSDs, or obsolescence, such as storing content on older generations of LTO tape. It’s important to maintain three copies, with one off-site and to have a scheduled audit process with fixity checks to monitor data integrity. As Chris Fossey of Iron Mountain Media & Archival Services pointed out, maintaining accurate metadata is also imperative. If you don’t know what you have, where it is stored, as well as information on copyright, etc., you may as well not be storing it at all! If this resonates for you, or you have questions around digital archiving, Orchard Clips Archive Services team can provide advice and assistance in maintaining and improving access to your archive.
Hardware and Software
The other part of MPTS is the trade show floor, where companies show off their latest products. I noted that there seemed to be less hardware this year. Although there were some nice pieces of kit, there were fewer cameras, tripods, lighting and the other tools for video production. Instead, there were more software-based systems across media asset management, editing and post production, video playout, and more. And of course, they all had AI integrated!
MPTS is a significant show. Over the day I easily completed my 10,000 steps, walking around the show hall and from seminar to seminar. I learned a lot and spoke to industry contacts old and new, rounding off a successful day in West London
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