Bitfocus, the specialist in media control and monitoring, will show at IBC2026, how its Buttons control layer is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for broadcast as well as pro AV installations. The latest release of Button will be unveiled, featuring high-performance and high-efficiency broadcast functionality, and the company will also show how the growing Connections programme is delivering real value for users and technology partners.
Buttons is a powerful workflow designer and software-defined management layer, bringing complex multi-vendor technology stacks under simple, logical, secure, reliable control. The software is widely used across the media industry, from simple AV installations to the largest broadcast and streaming networks, de-risking operations and delivering real efficiencies.
Buttons grew from an AV platform, Companion, which provided a means of bringing diverse equipment under the control of a single surface like the Elgato Stream Deck. It rapidly developed a community around it, with open source developers building and sharing the APIs they needed.
Today Buttons can manage directly almost 800 devices, and in 2025 launched its Connections programme. This is an agreement between third-party vendors and Bitfocus which sees the Buttons team developing, managing and validating each connection, and the vendors giving Bitfocus advanced notice of updates to firmware and functionality, to ensure peak performance at all times.
“This is a real win-win-win,” said Ole-Andreas Løvland, Bitfocus CEO. “Users can be assured that they can choose the right equipment for the job, confident that it will always be perfectly integrated. Vendors see Buttons as the de facto standard for control these days – one major manufacturer told me that more than 50% of its PTZ cameras were controlled by Bitfocus – and being able to say they are elite members of the Connections programme is a strong boast. And of course we can continue to serve the whole industry with the best possible workflow design and control.”
IBC2026 will also see the release of version 1.8 of the core Buttons software. The previous major release incorporated key enterprise-level functionality like guaranteed non-stop performance through parallel processing and the ability to design federated architectures for remote production and control. Version 1.8 will bring in large-scale functionality requested by users, enhancing still further the ability to control any device from anywhere, as well as providing efficient management for tielines and routers, and the introduction of virtual routing to safely isolate the user from the engineering.
