The economic reset facing broadcast and media tech spending in 2026

The broadcast and media industry enters 2026 facing an uncomfortable reality: growth alone is no longer sufficient to justify its cost structure.

Audience fragmentation, rising operational complexity and uneven revenue performance have converged into a sustained pressure on margins. For many organizations, the question is no longer how to expand, but how to remain economically viable while delivering the same or greater volume of content.

The trends shaping broadcast and media production in 2026

Executives across the sector describe a shift away from optimism-driven investment toward financial restraint in our 2026 outlook.

Steve Reynolds, CEO of Imagine Communications, described the core problem as structural rather than cyclical. The fragmentation of audiences across platforms has created a cost structure that many organizations cannot sustain with current revenue models.

“At the highest level, the problem is sustainable profitability,” Reynolds said. “The underlying cause is the fragmentation of audience and the costs associated with the multiple platforms, delivery systems and advertising models that results from this situation.”

This economic pressure is compounded by what Richard Jonker, vice president of marketing and business development at Netgear, termed a “legacy debt problem.” Many facilities operate control rooms and studios on equipment that has aged well beyond its intended operational life, creating both direct maintenance costs and opportunity costs from an inability to adopt more efficient workflows.

“The defining challenge in 2026 is that the industry finally must admit it has a legacy debt problem, not a technology problem,” Jonker said. “Everyone talks about innovation, but half the control rooms and studios are still running gear old enough to vote.”

Graham Sharp, vice president of sales and marketing at BCNEXXT, said the economics of streaming continue to strain the industry’s financial health, leaving consolidation and cost reduction as the primary paths to profitability. The pressure is particularly acute for organizations attempting to increase content output while managing smaller budgets and reduced staffing.

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Jim Akimchuk, president and CEO of BitFire, said economic forces are reducing the profitability of individual broadcasts while simultaneously demanding higher production volumes with limited resources. This creates a situation where efficiency gains are not optional improvements but essential to survival.

Legacy infrastructure costs force disciplined investment approach

The burden of maintaining aging systems has created a financial trap that is reshaping how organizations evaluate technology investments. The high operational costs of legacy infrastructure make modernization necessary, but capital constraints make comprehensive replacements impossible. The result is a newly disciplined approach to spending where every dollar must demonstrate clear returns.

Reynolds said spending in 2026 is concentrated on projects with solid return on investment, improved total cost of ownership and reasonable payback periods. This represents what he characterized as significant financial prudence across the industry.

“Yes, but we see spending being focused on projects with a strong business plan, i.e., solid ROI, improved TCO and reasonable time to payback,” Reynolds said. “There is a lot of financial prudence in the industry going into 2026.”

Jonker said organizations are spending, but with a level of skepticism that threatens vendors of premium-priced infrastructure. The focus has moved decisively away from capital expenditures toward projects that reduce operational expenses.

“Yes, they will be spending, but with a level of skepticism that should scare anyone selling luxury-priced physical or cloud-based infrastructure,” Jonker said. “Companies are spending on things that reduce OPEX, not inflate CAPEX.”

This shift is forcing a reckoning in the vendor community. Kristan Bullett, CEO of Humans Not Robots, said broadcasters and operators remain highly risk averse, with investment budgets for innovation continuing to shrink. The consequence is that buyers now expect vendors to absorb the costs and risks of developing new technology rather than passing those expenses to customers through premium pricing.

“Broadcasters and operators will remain highly risk averse,” Bullett said. “Investment budgets for innovation will continue to shrink, with buyers expecting vendors to carry out the cost and risk of developing new technology.”

The traditional broadcast equipment business model is under direct assault. For decades, vendors commanded premium prices based on the assumption that professional-grade production required purpose-built, specialized equipment. That assumption is eroding.

Jonker said the era of purchasing broadcast-grade versions of standard technology at inflated prices has ended. When production teams discover they can achieve comparable performance without premium pricing, traditional buying patterns collapse.

“The era of impulse buying the ‘broadcast-grade’ version of everyday tech is over,” Jonker said. “When a production team learns they can get the same or better performance without the sticker shock, the old buying patterns collapse.”

The pressure on vendors is intensified by products from the professional audiovisual market proving adequate for broadcast applications at lower price points, creating competition that challenges the pricing power of traditional broadcast equipment suppliers.

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Martin Sebelius, CEO of Accedo, said money remains tight and must be allocated to maximize impact, whether through lowering operational overhead, improving service quality, reducing customer churn or increasing lifetime value. This financial discipline extends beyond technology purchases to affect how organizations structure infrastructure strategy.

The traditional broadcast model relied on significant capital investments in dedicated hardware designed to operate for years. The emerging model favors flexible, software-defined systems where costs can be scaled with actual production requirements.

Francesco Scartozzi, vice president of sales and business development at Matrox Video, described the goal as creating a “minimum viable infrastructure” for every production—the smallest, most cost-efficient combination of compute, input/output and network capacity that can sustain creative intent.

“The industry practice of throwing huge CPU farms at every streaming challenge, or avoiding new codecs because ‘it’s too expensive to encode,’ will be replaced by a leaner approach where efficient dedicated silicon handles the heavy lift,” said Mark Donnigan, head of strategic marketing at NETINT.

The cloud has proven more complex economically than initial projections suggested. Donnigan said the notion that moving operations to the cloud would solve all workflow challenges is now recognized as overhyped, with organizations experiencing what he termed “cloud fatigue” from high egress bills and operational complexity.

The result is a more pragmatic hybrid approach that leverages cloud infrastructure where it provides distinct value while maintaining on-premise systems for predictable, continuous workloads. Reynolds said the decision requires ongoing financial analysis rather than one-time calculations, with factors including the nature of workflows, existing facility investments and total cost comparisons.

“If you’re deploying a disaster recovery solution or operating FAST channels that are never going to touch an antenna, it’s probably cheaper to do it in the cloud,” Reynolds said. “But if you’re running 24/7/365 workflows or have significant investments in studios, HVAC systems and backup generators, on-prem solutions may make better economic sense.”

Strategic shift from cost reduction to revenue generation

The disciplined investment approach, born from the need to escape legacy infrastructure costs, is enabling a more fundamental strategic shift. Organizations are moving beyond asking how to operate more efficiently and are instead focused on how to generate new revenue from existing assets, particularly content archives that historically represented cost centers.

Fred Petitpont, co-founder and CTO of Moments Lab, said the questions from customers have changed fundamentally. Organizations that previously asked how many hours a technology would save are now focused on how to monetize archives and enable new revenue streams.

“The companies we work with used to ask ‘How many hours will this save?'” Petitpont said. “Now their focus is ‘How do we monetize our archive?’ and ‘What new revenue streams does this enable?'”

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This shift reflects a recognition that further cost-cutting has limits, but revenue opportunities from underutilized assets remain largely untapped. The transition from efficiency to monetization as the primary strategic goal represents a maturation of how the industry thinks about technology investment.

Sergio Brighel, executive vice president of robotics and prompting technology at Videndum, said monetization does not come from reducing headcount but from increasing output. When production systems become predictive and object-aware, organizations can turn a single event into multiple revenue streams without increasing labor costs.

“Monetisation emerges not from saving operators but from multiplying output,” Brighel said. “When the production stack becomes predictive and object aware, it can turn a single event into dozens of revenue streams without increasing human workload.”

Hannah Barnhardt, COO of TMT Insights, pointed to the application of financial operations principles to the media supply chain as an underappreciated development. This approach reveals hidden costs from duplicated content storage, repeated manual processing and fragmented inventory oversight – inefficiencies that, when eliminated, free resources for revenue-generating activities.

The focus on extracting value from existing assets is driving demand for technologies that can automate content processing at scale. The ability to automatically generate metadata, create highlights, produce multiple versions for different platforms and identify monetization opportunities within archives transforms static libraries into active revenue engines.

This evolution from cost reduction to revenue generation represents the strategic endpoint of the industry’s economic journey. Legacy infrastructure created unsustainable costs, which forced disciplined investment, which enabled the deployment of technologies that now make new revenue streams possible without proportional increases in expense.

The economic pressures are also accelerating industry consolidation as organizations seek economies of scale that individual companies cannot achieve. Sharp said streaming economics make cost reduction and scale essential for survival, driving mergers and acquisitions as a path to profitability that might not be attainable independently.

Brighel offered a perspective on one aspect of cost reduction that runs counter to pure efficiency logic. He argued that protecting human creativity is not sentimental but strategic, noting that without authentic creation, competitive differences vanish. This makes the preservation of creative capabilities essential even under financial pressure.

“Broadcasters will discover that protecting human creativity is not sentimental; it is strategic,” Brighel said. “Without authentic creation, competitive differences vanish.”

Industry faces fundamental reset in 2026

The economic constraints reshaping the broadcast industry are not temporary pressures that will ease with improved market conditions. They represent a permanent shift in how the sector operates, with 2026 marking a decisive break from previous assumptions about what broadcast production requires and what it costs.

Jonker predicted that by the end of 2026, the assumption that broadcast requires broadcast-specific gear will feel as outdated as SDI-based workflows – a reference to the serial digital interface standard that dominated for decades before IP networking began replacing it.

“The assumption that ‘broadcast requires broadcast gear,'” Jonker said. “By the end of 2026, that mindset will feel as outdated as SDI.”

This shift is already visible in how organizations approach facility builds and infrastructure upgrades.

“In 2026, most new broadcast and media studio and facility builds will default to IP-first designs, even if their day-one workflows remain hybrid. Organizations will finally begin to see ST 2110 infrastructure as a long-term foundation rather than an experimental path,” said Abe Abt, senior product consultant, AJA.

The default assumption for new installations is IP-first architecture that treats processing capacity as software-defined services rather than dedicated hardware. The question is no longer whether to migrate from legacy systems but how quickly organizations can complete the transition without disrupting existing operations.

“One of the smartest decisions broadcasters can make in 2026 to stay competitive long-term is committing to a hybrid baseband/IP roadmap anchored by an IP core. This will make it easier to move to ST 2110 incrementally, predictably, and without sacrificing existing investments,” said Abt.

The financial model supporting this transition is fundamentally different from previous technology cycles. Rather than large capital investments in proprietary systems designed to last a decade, organizations are adopting incremental approaches that spread costs over time while maintaining operational flexibility. This allows modernization to proceed within constrained budgets while avoiding the all-or-nothing risk of comprehensive replacements.

The vendor ecosystem is adapting to this new reality, though not uniformly.

Companies that built their business models on premium pricing for specialized equipment face pressure to justify costs against alternatives from the professional audiovisual market. The competitive advantage is shifting from proprietary performance to interoperability, flexibility and demonstrable return on investment.

For broadcasters, the imperative is clear. The economics of audience fragmentation make the old infrastructure model unsustainable. The path forward requires disciplined investment in technologies that reduce operational expense while enabling new revenue from existing assets. Organizations that successfully navigate this transition will emerge with business models built for sustained profitability. Those that cling to legacy approaches risk becoming uncompetitive as the gap between their cost structure and available revenue continues to widen.

The industry that emerges from 2026 will operate on different economic principles than the one that entered it. The question is no longer whether broadcast can afford to transform, but whether it can afford not to.