What is Cloud Native Media in 2026?

UPDATE: François Legrand from CBC/Radio Canada will be joining us to talk about their DMF work and what they'll be doing at the Milano-Cortina winter Olympics next month - don't miss it!

We've come a long way since our first meetup. In 2026, Cloud Native Media is less about experimenting with hyperscalers and more about interoperability at scale.

This year this group is going to evolve - we're still going to experiment, encourage new ideas and have some fun events, but we want to get more into the nitty gritty of the real cloud-native media architectures that are emerging.

This means expanding more on initiatives we've covered before, like the EBU Dynamic Media Facility, the Time Addressable Media Store, and the DPP Live Production eXchange (LPX, and how these point towards shared exchange layers, time-aware systems, and federated operation across organisations.

Turning those ideas into working platforms is not trivial. It means building and operating distributed systems using modern cloud-native tooling - containerised services, orchestration with Kubernetes, and observability via systems such as Prometheus - while meeting the reliability and timing demands of live media.

We're going to start in this session by looking at what that really implies in practice: where the complexity sits, why incremental deployment matters, and how cloud-native discipline changes the shape of media engineering.

As ever, we'll try to steer clear of hype and vendor demos, and focus on a clear-eyed discussion of what Cloud Native Media actually involves in 2026.