Best Video Conferences in 2026: Streaming, WebRTC & MoQ

TL;DR. Five conferences are still on the 2026 video and real‑time communications calendar. If you build interactive media or real‑time multimedia, RTC.ON (16–18 September, Kraków) is the natural fit, with CommCon (9-11 June, Düsseldorf) as a strong companion. IBC (11-14 September, Amsterdam) and NAB Show New York (21-22 October) cover the broadcast and streaming industry. Demuxed (October, San Francisco) is where on‑demand and live streaming engineers gather.

For Media over QUIC (MoQ), RTC.ON 2026 is shaping up to be the deepest program of the five. Luke Curley leads the MoQ workshop, and new MoQ speakers are added to the lineup every week.

Now, let's go through the options in detail.

CommCon 2026

When: 9–11 June 2026
Where: Düsseldorf, Germany
Theme: Real‑Time Communications and Open Media

CommCon is a small, focused, three‑day event for the open‑source RTC community. Expect deep dives on FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, Janus, Jitsi, Kamailio, and the wider WebRTC stack. The tone is practitioner‑to‑practitioner and the hallway track is unusually high‑signal because the room is small.

Pair it with: RTC.ON in September if you want both the operational/telephony side (CommCon) and the multimedia / video‑heavy side (RTC.ON).

IBC 2026

When: 11–14 September 2026
Where: RAI Amsterdam, Netherlands
Audience size: ~45,000 attendees from 170+ countries; 1,300 exhibitors

IBC is the European counterpart to NAB and the largest broadcasting and media‑tech show in the world. The 2026 conference programme centers on AI‑driven creativity, evolving audience behavior, new commercial models, and the role of trust and provenance in media – alongside the usual Future Tech tracks on 5G, XR, and cloud workflows.

For engineering teams, IBC is most valuable as a vendor reconnaissance event: encoder vendors, CDNs, packagers, ad‑tech, and analytics platforms all converge there.

Pro tip: RTC.ON 2026 starts on 16 September in Kraków, two days after IBC closes. The flight time from Amsterdam Schiphol to Kraków Balice is about two hours. Many engineers do both back‑to‑back.

RTC.ON 2026 – Kraków, 16–18 September

When: 16–18 September 2026 (workshop day on the 16th; talks on the 17th and 18th)
Where: Kraków, Poland
Organizer: Software Mansion (4th edition)
Audience: Real‑time multimedia engineers – WebRTC, low‑latency streaming, MoQ, edge media, AI in real‑time pipelines

RTC.ON is the European conference for engineers who actually ship real‑time multimedia. The 2026 edition keeps the format that has worked well for three years: hands‑on workshops on the 16th, followed by two days of technical talks on the 17th and 18th. The CFP for 2026 is now open; expect tracks on WebRTC at scale, MoQ in production, edge AI for media, and audio/video infrastructure war stories.

Practical details:

Two ticket types: Conference (talks only, 17–18 Sep) and Combo (talks + one workshop on the 16th).
Lunch, snacks, and conference merch included.
Kraków in September is one of the better cities in Europe to travel to: walkable, well‑connected, and considerably cheaper than Amsterdam, Vienna, or San Francisco.

Early Bird tickets are now available – grab yours before they are gone.

Demuxed 2026

When: October 2026 (date to be confirmed)
Where: San Francisco, USA
Organizer: Mux + community
Format: Single‑track, talks‑first, engineer‑run since 2015

Demuxed is the conference for video engineers. One track, two days, no marketing booths, no sponsor pitches from the main stage – just talks. The bar for content is high and the post‑talk hallway track is the best in the business. MoQ has appeared on the Demuxed program for several years running and will almost certainly be back in 2026.

NAB Show New York 2026

When: 21–22 October 2026
Where: Javits Center, New York, USA
Organizer: National Association of Broadcasters
Format: Two‑day East‑Coast trade show + conference
Audience: Broadcasters, streamers, sports media, creator‑economy platforms, brand storytellers

NAB Show New York is the smaller, more focused East‑Coast counterpart to the Las Vegas mothership. The 2026 edition leans into streaming, sports media, and the creator economy – three categories where the audience is increasingly East‑Coast and the budgets are increasingly software, not hardware.

At NAB Las Vegas in April, eleven companies – Ant Media, AWS, Bitmovin, Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare, Nomad Media, Norsk, Oracle, Red5, and Synamedia – demonstrated their first MoQ implementations on the show floor. That was the loudest signal yet that MoQ has crossed from "interesting draft" to "vendors will ship this."

Why we wrote this guide

Someone on our team spent a morning trying to figure out whether to send an engineer to IBC, Demuxed, or both. The existing roundups were either ad‑sales fluff or a year out of date, so we wrote the post we wished we'd found.

Yes, we organize RTC.ON. That makes us biased, and we've tried to be honest about it. If you ship telephony or SIP infrastructure, CommCon is your event. If you're vendor‑shopping for broadcast, go to IBC or NAB NY. If you live in on‑demand and live streaming, Demuxed is where your people are.

If you build real‑time multimedia, work on MoQ, or are bringing AI into media pipelines, RTC.ON 2026 is built for you. The CFP is open. If you should be on that stage, submit. If you're coming to listen, Early Bird tickets are now available.

We'll be at IBC and Demuxed, too. If you're going, find us.