NAB Show Preview: Remote production grows up as a permanent operating model

The question of whether remote production works has been answered. The industry spent the better part of five years proving it could – through pandemic necessity, cost pressure and a gradual accumulation of real-world deployments.

What the 2026 NAB Show will reflect is a different set of questions: how to make distributed production consistent, reliable and scalable as a permanent operating model.

“Remote production has matured from an emergency solution into a long-term operational strategy. Broadcasters are building workflows that allow teams and systems to operate across locations without sacrificing reliability or speed. The result is more agile operations, where teams collaborate more efficiently and publish content faster, regardless of where people or resources are based,” said Sam Peterson, chief operating officer at Bitcentral.

The ambition has shifted alongside the maturity.

“The next phase is less about reducing travel and more about enabling highly specialized teams to collaborate from anywhere while maintaining the reliability and responsiveness required for live events. As productions become more distributed, robust communications and unified control layers are becoming essential to keeping complex broadcasts coordinated in real time,” said Joyce Bente, president and CEO of the Americas at Riedel Communications.

Consistency at scale

Remote production’s proof-of-concept phase produced workflows that worked under controlled conditions. The harder problem is making them work consistently – across locations, operators and production types – without requiring individual expertise to compensate for system variability.

“Remote production is no longer about proving it can work, the focus is on delivering consistency across locations,” said Paddy Taylor, head of broadcast at MRMC. “The goal is to make these systems feel immediate and reliable, so remote operation matches the responsiveness of being on-site.”

That reliability is harder to maintain than it appears. As signal chains extend across networks, timing and synchronization issues can develop gradually and silently, often going undetected until they affect the output.

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“Remote production has moved from a cost-saving experiment to a core operational model, with signals travelling through complex networks between stadiums, production hubs and cloud environments before reaching viewers. As these workflows scale, endpoint-only verification is showing its limits, as timing can degrade silently across the path between those points without being detected until it affects the output. Particular attention is needed where SDI and IP environments meet within the same signal chain, as these boundaries are often where assumptions about synchronization break down first,” said Anna Hurd, head of sales at Hitomi Broadcast.

The SDI-to-IP boundary issue is one of the more specific and underreported failure points in distributed production. Most facilities in active transition are running both environments simultaneously, and the handoff between them is where timing assumptions made in one domain can quietly fail in the other.

REMI and the centralized model

REMI has become one of the more established frameworks for live event production, particularly in sports. The model keeps the on-site footprint minimal while centralizing production resources at a hub, reducing both logistical complexity and cost.

“Remote production, and particularly REMI workflows, will be a key focus at NAB Show 2026 as broadcasters expand event coverage without increasing the operational footprint at each venue. By centralizing production resources and keeping on-site deployments minimal, REMI reduces both logistical complexity and cost while enabling more scalable coverage. These workflows rely on maintaining precise timing and synchronization across distributed environments, whether using AVC or HEVC over constrained networks or JPEG XS where ultra-low latency is required,” said Stephan Stadler, vice president of product management at Appear.

JPEG XS is a lightweight compression format designed for low-latency applications where image quality needs to be preserved and processing delay kept to a minimum, qualities that make it well suited to live production over IP networks.

Appear’s X Platform supported NBC Sports’ coverage of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and Paralympics, providing a large-scale test of REMI across a high-profile live production. Stadler noted that customers are also moving away from all-cloud thinking toward hybrid approaches that balance cloud and on-premises performance, a shift already evident in how major sports productions are being architected.

“Remote production has become part of our daily workflow, not just a stopgap. The challenge, and what we’ve learned, is making distributed production feel as natural as working together in the same control room,” said Roberto Musso, technical director of NDI.

The cultural dimension

The technical challenges of distributed production get most of the attention. But operators and production managers working across remote workflows have identified a parallel challenge that is harder to engineer around: the human one.

“The more subtle shift is cultural. By building the working trust between collaborators who may never meet in person, productions are developing new flows. Remote review sessions, shared reference libraries, and workflows that allow collaboration without creating bottlenecks,” said Duncan Beattie, market development manager at Tuxera.

Beattie also noted that hybrid workflows connecting on-premises and cloud environments are enabling productions to draw on talent pools that would have been inaccessible under traditional location-based staffing models, a practical benefit that compounds as productions develop working relationships across distributed teams.

Emerging frameworks

As remote production matures, attention is turning to the next layer of infrastructure: frameworks that will enable systems from different vendors to work together more efficiently in cloud-native and virtualized environments.

“Emerging frameworks such as the Media Exchange Layer are gaining attention. MXL is an open framework designed to allow media applications from different vendors to share audio and video directly within the same memory environment, enabling far more efficient, interoperable workflows in cloud-native and virtualized production environments. Although still in early stages, initial workstreams are picking up momentum and seeing positive results — we’ll start to see more of these proof-of-concepts shown and discussed on the show floor,” said Costa Nikols, executive team strategy advisor for media and entertainment at Telos Alliance.

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MXL represents a different approach to interoperability than protocol-level standards.

Instead of defining how content moves between systems, it defines how applications share media within the same computing environment, reducing the overhead of repeated encoding and transfer. Whether it gains meaningful traction beyond proof-of-concept at NAB Show 2026 will be one of the more technically specific threads to follow on the exhibit floor.

For a deeper look at the transport protocols and connectivity infrastructure underpinning remote production, see our companion piece here.

NAB Show 2026 opens April 18, with exhibits running April 19-22 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Make sure to check out the latest NAB Show News in our dedicated section or visit the NAB Show website to register for the show.