Anna Mallett, VP of Production, EMEA, Delivers a Keynote Speech at IBC 2026

Good afternoon. It's wonderful to be here at IBC.

Walking the floor here today, it really is amazing to see the sheer volume and scale of everything on display - new technology, pipelines, and processing power within the production industry. And what's even more exciting is the fact that it's all ultimately in service of one thing: getting a great story, in front of someone who will love it.

This year at Netflix, we're marking a decade since we went from entertaining audiences in about 60 countries, to more than 190 - in a single day. All of a sudden, a story from anywhere in the world could reach millions of people, all at once.

And for all of us, the audience, we have a whole sphere of stories just one click away, offering more choice than ever before.

There's no question that streaming has changed our industry and the scale of what's possible for storytellers. And over the last ten years, we've changed too, thanks to the ambition and innovation of the creators we've been lucky enough to work with.

Today, Netflix is producing in over 50 countries worldwide, including EMEA. Behind every one of those stories are hundreds of incredible people working to bring them to life. I have the pleasure of leading the Netflix Production teams here in EMEA - spanning Production Management, Post, VFX, Music, Technology, and more.

Our role is to serve our partners' ambitions and rise to the challenges they put to us, making their vision a reality, and ultimately giving our members the best films and series from around the world.

Now - in my career, I have been in rooms and forums where I have been asked, "Are you a creative, or are you a non-creative production person?" But I don't subscribe to that philosophy, and I'm sure you don't either. Every role across a production is a creative one - from colourists and sound mixers, to the DIT protecting the image from the set to screen, and production managers, inventively navigating the many curveballs that come their way. When we talk about the creative community at Netflix, we mean the whole ecosystem.

Today, I want to talk about how we've been working to give everyone in that ecosystem room to do their best work: by embracing technology and workflows that clear the pathway for creativity. Working with partners like you so we can evolve and learn together, and ensure those learnings are shared right across our industry.

It's an understatement to say our industry has changed at a rapid pace, and those of us in production are always looking for ways to evolve. Innovation is in our DNA.

Before Netflix, I had the opportunity to work with a number of other companies, all adapting to change. Over the last two decades, this has included: leading a company's transition from tape to digital in 2010; navigating a complex shift from public funding to a commercial model in 2018; and steering a news operation through the height of COVID19 in 2020.

And when I joined Netflix five and a half years ago, I felt right at home. I found a genuine spirit of entrepreneurship and a deep curiosity for doing things better. It's an environment where staying agile is the norm, and where being open to new ideas keeps us moving forward. It's honestly the most inspiring part of working here.

But when I think back to how things were when Netflix started our original productions in EMEA - all the way back in 2016, we came up against some real challenges (or as we like to say at Netflix - opportunities!). Teams were restricted by geography, equipment was still catching up to the promise of digital cinema, and post-production ran like a relay race. Editorial, and then VFX, then sound or colour… each team waiting on the last before it could get started.

Every baton pass from teammate to teammate took time and was not always smooth. And each handoff carried the risk of a creative decision being lost or misunderstood.

The logistics of production were just as hard. Directors watched dailies that didn't match what was actually shot on set, because the colour management had broken down somewhere along the way.

Production members drove for hours after a night shoot to safely archive the footage. I still distinctly remember earlier in my career, impatiently waiting for a tape to be delivered by hand, by someone on a bicycle, who was pretty hot and bothered when he arrived. And - it wasn't that long ago!

This kind of friction slows the work down, and a logistics problem quickly becomes a creative one.

So, a challenge lay before us: how could we work with our partners to remove this friction at scale? How do we give them the space and time to focus on the creative work that makes a good story, great?

Well, since 2020, we've been building and scaling Netflix's Media Production Suite (MPS for short) - a set of tools to upload, archive, find and share our partners' media in the cloud. The aim was simple: fix the systems underneath production, so they run quietly in the background and let the creative process take centre stage.

Hopefully, these imposing figures are familiar to you. They are, of course, the cohort of criminals at the centre of our Spanish thriller, La Casa de Papel, or Money Heist .

Our MPS journey began as an idea while producing the final season.

And this new adventure of ours started, as most good stories do, with "chapter one," and a "what if." What if nobody had to stay up all night waiting for a drive to upload? What if instead of bringing media to people, we could build an agile way to bring people to their media instead, wherever they are? And what if, in doing so, we could give them a set of tools that ran as a silent layer underneath a production, removing friction, and giving teams back precious time for the all-important creative work?

This was challenging. We had to build and launch the system from scratch in three months. We had to make sure it was good enough to run on one of our biggest series.

But - at least we didn't have to figure out how to break into the Bank of Spain, like our friends in Money Heist !

We began to get an idea of what cloud workflows and remote workstations could look like in production. And it worked - we ended up moving close to a petabyte of data to the cloud, across camera footage, editorial and post.

And we proved it was possible to have different parts of a production - like editorial and VFX - working in parallel, without one waiting on the other. No more relay racing - everyone's running together instead.

Now, we know the concept of cloud-based workflows is not new. But what hadn't been done before was finding a way to deliver across hundreds of productions all over the world.

By 2023, the idea of MPS was put to the test at a much larger scale. Society of the Snow , our Oscar®-nominated Spanish film about the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, was being shot in five different locations in three countries, with post-production based in Madrid and the director in Barcelona.

The same cloud infrastructure, now MPS, let six VFX studios work in tandem while the cast and crew, who spent many grueling weeks shooting in the Sierra Nevada, as well as the Andes, captured the true grit of that incredible story.

We're thrilled with how this first chapter of MPS has turned out, and I'm pleased to say it's now being used widely across our productions in EMEA, removing friction and allowing teams to focus on the creative work - whether it's refining pacing, more time for sound design creativity, deeper colour grading sessions, or even more space for VFX artists to work their magic.

And any savings made in time and money are invested by the production, straight back onto the screen.

The next chapter in our MPS story gave us a bit of a plot twist.

Once we had built that shared, cloud-based foundation, the next challenge was layering algorithms and machine-learning tools on top of it. Adding tools that plug straight into a partner's existing workflow and adapting to their production in real time.

Tools that can identify and flag errors in real time, such as production equipment visible in shot. That can generate transcripts of video and audio at the end of each take, and attribute each line of dialogue to the character who said it. And even better - tools that can make characters searchable within footage.

Take Drive to Survive, our high-speed docuseries that shows the gripping action on and off the F1 track. It's all shot by multiple crews, capturing every race weekend across more than twenty-five cities. But while the action on screen goes at hundreds of miles per hour, it was quite a different story for the production crew who had to wade through hours of footage to pull the story together.

But, for the Season 9 shoot, the team's footage is now being tagged and transcribed as soon as it hits the cloud. So if someone needs the exact shot of a specific overtake, or hot mic moment, they can search for it automatically. Just like in a race, every second counts, and the team can now focus on keeping pace with what's happening on the track.

And we're also thinking about other ways these algorithms can help save time. For example - when a busy exec or a director urgently needs to see what's been shot that day, can MPS help get media ready for review, without hours of prep work by the team? By removing that friction and speeding up the daily review process, teams could quickly make better-informed decisions, as soon as a sequence had been shot.

But the story does not stop here for MPS. We are now opening the door to existing tools - perhaps some of them built by folks in this room today - and bringing them into our Netflix ecosystem through our Tool Library. By integrating the tools people are already using into their workflows, we are enabling a whole new set of characters in the MPS ecosystem.

All these tools have to meet our strict criteria on security, rights and responsibility, and the important thing is we're not telling our partners which tools to use. We're making it easy and safe for them to explore. This includes tools that can let teams design costumes and sets early, test how a scene will be lit before anyone steps on set, and previsualize stunts before shooting them for real.

Like on Anaesthesia , our new hospital drama from Poland. Our production partner was able to generate concept art for the show's operating theatres and ICU wards - down to the surgical trays, ventilators and monitors. And then, they refined them by hand - speeding up the concept phase while keeping creative control with the artists.

It's about giving creators smarter tools. Some we are building ourselves, while others we will license and integrate from across the industry. That's what our Tool Library is for - bringing the best tools directly to our filmmakers so they can be more ambitious with the resources they have. Clearer communication of the vision and faster decisions on locations all lead to a more efficient shoot.

The most important part of this effort is: none of this works if we're doing it alone. When we spot a way to innovate on a production, we don't tuck it away after we've wrapped - we work together with our partners to build a new solution together. That's the partnership we want to build: not just vendor and customer, or studio and creator, but true collaborators.

It's also why we sit on industry bodies like the Academy Software Foundation, working towards shared frameworks and Open Standards. They're the secret weapons that let creative teams focus on the craft instead of the friction by allowing tools and teams to speak the same technical language from the outset. And the pay-off is industry-wide. Learnings from one production become a solution for the whole industry.

Cloud-based infrastructure - Netflix's, or someone else's - does change business as we've known it. What's key is we, as an industry at large, keep an open and transparent dialogue about how we're working, so our partners have the time and support they need to adapt along with us.

Last year, we were joined by producers and creative partners from 15 countries for our EMEA Production Innovation Summit, to share our direction with MPS and talk about some of the wider innovations in the industry. One standout moment for me was the panel on our UK drama Adolescence, which explored the fallout of a 13-year-old's arrest for murder, with every episode filmed in a single, continuous shot. When discussing the massive technical challenge of recording this way, one of our sound mixers on the panel called the production 'a masterclass in one team doing one job' - a perfect reminder that great technology adapts to people and teams, not the other way around. We're doing the same event next year and I have no doubt we will be able to continue to learn from each other.

And just yesterday, here in Amsterdam, we brought together over 140 manufacturers for our Technology Roadmap Briefing, to see firsthand how we're shaping our tools to meet real production needs.

We've come a long way from that first "what if" on La Casa de Papel. As I said, production used to run like a relay race, with each of us carrying our leg of the work, then handing it off, and stepping back. Now, it's more like the pit crews we see on Drive to Survive : experts working seamlessly together to keep the car on track.

We're proud to sit at the intersection of entertainment and innovation, testing and building tools and ecosystems. But it's not the tools that make the story - it's the people who use them, and the role of all the innovation I've talked about today is to make sure nothing stands in the way of creators telling the stories only they can.

To all our partners here today - current and future - thank you. Whatever the next technological shift brings, let's stay curious, embrace change, and continue telling great stories together.

Thank you.