NAB Show Preview: Sports broadcasting faces more coverage, tighter budgets and higher expectations

Sports broadcasting has always demanded more than other production environments: faster turnarounds, more simultaneous feeds, no opportunity to correct mistakes after the fact.

What has changed is the scale of those demands. Rights holders are covering more events across more platforms while audience expectations have risen and production budgets have not kept pace.

“Sports production will be at the center of many discussions at NAB Show 2026, in particular, sports productions’ balancing act between rising expectations and tightening budgets,” said Joyce Bente, president and chief executive officer of the Americas at Riedel Communications. “Audiences want more content, more perspectives, and more immediacy, but production teams are being asked to deliver this without dramatically increasing resources. The industry’s real innovation challenge now is scale — producing more content, more efficiently, without sacrificing the quality audiences expect from live sports.”

That tension between expectation and resource runs through nearly every conversation about sports production technology heading into the 2026 NAB Show, from the workflows handling ingest at major global events to the tools enabling smaller leagues to produce broadcast-quality coverage for the first time.

Ingest and workflow as the production enabler

“Live sports continue to push the limits of production workflows because the demands are immediate, global, and multi-platform,” said Benjamin Desbois, chief growth and strategy officer at Telestream.

The infrastructure that makes a sports broadcast possible – ingest systems, cloud workflows, real-time access to media – increasingly determines what that feed can contain and how quickly it reaches audiences across different distribution platforms.

“Sport remains a primary testing ground for live production as distribution expands across platforms,” said Rene van Koll, senior solutions architect, Big Blue Marble. “Broadcasters are aligning broadcast-grade reliability with cloud-enabled workflows to support remote production models and faster content turnaround, while maintaining consistent delivery wherever audiences are watching.”

“The pattern emerging across major events is that ingest infrastructure and real-time access to media are becoming as important as the production itself. As audiences expect highlights, alternate angles, and social content delivered across the full spectrum of screens within seconds, the underlying ingest and workflow architecture becomes the real enabler of modern sports storytelling,” added Desbois.

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Desbois pointed to major sports events this past winter where large-scale live ingest and cloud workflows were used to capture dozens of feeds daily and make content immediately available for clipping, social distribution and broadcast partners working thousands of miles from the action.

The codec infrastructure underneath those workflows is also evolving. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, Globo delivered live UHD 4K HDR at 10 Mbps using a VVC base layer enhanced with MPEG-5 LCEVC, a layered codec architecture that achieved significant bitrate savings compared to standalone VVC, according to V-Nova.

“The deeper lesson for the industry is that layered codec architectures, where an enhancement layer works alongside the base codec rather than replacing it, allow broadcasters to achieve the performance necessary to better manage their spectrum, and allow broadcast systems to compete with and surpass IP delivery in terms of quality, flexibility and cost,” said Fabio Murra, senior vice president of product and marketing at V-Nova.

The software layer coordinating these workflows has also matured.

“Modern sports production demands deterministic, low-latency workflows that scale, from REMI to fully centralized environments. Tightly integrated, software-defined solutions that deliver frame-accurate performance across switching, graphics, and replay enable broadcasters to produce more content, more efficiently, without compromising reliability,” said Kevin Cottam, vice president of sports and entertainment at Ross Video.

As IP contribution becomes more dependable and cost-effective, the operational model for major events is shifting toward centralized production hubs that aggregate feeds from multiple venues. 

“As IP contribution becomes more dependable and cost-effective, leagues, federations and smaller rights holders are becoming less reliant on traditional broadcasters or large-scale production partners, enabling them to build in-house capabilities and expand distribution,” said Stephan Stadler, vice president of product management at Appear.

Democratization of sports coverage

One of the more significant shifts in sports production is taking place not at the top of the market but below it. Smaller leagues, scholastic sports, regional federations and emerging sports organizations are gaining access to production capabilities that were previously out of reach, not because the technology has been simplified but because automation and IP infrastructure have reduced the crew size and capital investment required to produce broadcast-quality coverage.

“Sports production continues to act as a testing ground for new workflows, particularly where budgets and crew sizes are limited,” said Claudia Barbiero, director of global marketing at PTZOptics. “We expect to see growing interest in technologies that allow schools, smaller leagues, and emerging sports to deliver polished broadcasts without traditional trucks or large crews. Automation, remote control, and AI-assisted tagging are helping these organizations scale their coverage while maintaining consistent quality.”

Barbiero identified agentic AI workflows as a particular area of development at the lower end of the sports market. Cameras that adjust framing based on game context rather than just player tracking, scoreboard readers that trigger graphics prompts, and automated replay markers are practical examples of capabilities that were previously unavailable to smaller production teams.

“Broadcasters are under immense pressure to make their operations more agile and cost-effective, which for sports and live production means finding more scalable and cost-efficient ways to contribute and distribute video. The sports industry is highly dynamic and evolving quickly both from a commercial and operational perspective, so broadcasters need technology that is adaptable to these changing needs and at the same time allows the maximum value to be squeezed out of sports content,” said Kieran Kunhya, founder and chief executive officer at Open Broadcast Systems.

AI and the value of footage

The volume of footage generated at major sports events has outpaced the capacity of production teams to manually process and distribute it. AI-based metadata generation is emerging as the practical solution, not as a creative tool but as an operational one, enabling content to be searched, clipped and distributed at a scale that manual workflows cannot match.

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“Live sports production is evolving to meet multi-platform demands by using AI to transform every second of footage into intelligent, monetizable assets through metadata. For major events like the Olympics or World Cup, this allows broadcasters to move beyond a single feed and create thousands of personalized, hyper-relevant clips for a global audience in near real-time. This capability not only services diverse fan passions at scale but also creates a dynamic, searchable content ecosystem that maximizes the value of premium sports rights during and after live events,” said Sean King, chief revenue officer at Veritone.

The rights value argument is significant.

Sports content is among the most expensive programming in the industry, and the ability to extract more value from that investment directly affects the economics of rights acquisition and retention. 

The viewer experience

While production infrastructure has commanded much of the innovation investment in sports broadcasting, the viewer-facing experience is also evolving. The standard 16:9 broadcast feed is increasingly supplemented — and in some contexts challenged — by formats designed to create a different relationship between viewer and event.

“Sports broadcasters are increasingly stretching their coverage across more platforms, while striving to keep their storytelling consistent and create the feeling of being there whether a fan or viewer is watching on a big screen or a phone. That pushes us to develop tools that expand creative freedom, help remote and onsite crews work as one team, and support operators in real time,” said Kento Sayama, deputy head of the media segment for imaging solutions at Sony Electronics.

Cinematic camera styles, typically associated with film production rather than live sports, have gained traction as rights holders look to differentiate the visual quality of their coverage. Immersive production formats designed for VR headsets represent a further extension of that ambition, with the NBA among the organizations that have conducted early experiments in capturing live games for immersive viewing.

“One trend gaining serious momentum in live sports is the use of cinematic style cameras, delivering a more dramatic visual style previously reserved for film. Immersive production is an area of growing interest, with early experiments done by the NBA to capture live games in formats designed for VR headset-based viewing. A broader push to create more engaging experiences for live audiences has been on the rise, and it will be interesting to see how the sports world embraces these developing immersive opportunities,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations for the Americas at Blackmagic Design.

The in-venue experience has also drawn increasing investment.

“In the last year, we’ve seen more venues invest in new high-end in-venue LED displays and revamp their production pipelines to elevate the quality of content they can distribute to those displays. Color management has become a priority, and I expect many professionals from the space will be looking for tools that can help them accurately calibrate and control color across in-venue displays at NAB Show this year,” said Tim Walker, senior product manager at AJA Video Systems.

The vertical format is also reshaping how live sports content is produced and delivered.

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Broadcasters including NBCUniversal and Fox Sports Digital have begun using AI-powered tools to optimize live video feeds for vertical viewing, reflecting the reality that streaming sports content is increasingly discovered and consumed on smartphones and social platforms.

“Streaming content is predominantly consumed via smartphones today and discovered on social platforms, making vertical video an important deliverable,” said Steph Lone, global leader for solutions architecture in media, entertainment, games and sports at Amazon Web Services.

Server-side multiview, technology that allows streaming viewers to select their own camera angle during a live event, is also moving from pilot deployments to live production.

“Server-side multiview for multi-sport or multi-camera events is moving from pilot projects to live deployments, allowing fans to control their own camera angles during games. This shift signals that viewer choice is an expected capability in modern sports streaming,” said Eric Gallier, vice president of video customer solutions at Harmonic.

Audio in a multi-platform world

The audio dimension of sports production has grown considerably more complex as rights holders deliver events simultaneously across multiple regions and platforms, each with different language, commentary and accessibility requirements.

“Live sports remains one of the most demanding environments for broadcast audio. As rights holders deliver events simultaneously across multiple regions and platforms, production teams must support multiple languages, commentary options and accessibility features within a single workflow. Innovations in immersive and object-based audio, along with IP-based production infrastructure, are helping broadcasters create more flexible and personalized viewing experiences. Next Generation Audio is a key part of this shift and will be in focus at the show, following successful deployments at major tournaments and live events this year,” said Costa Nikols, executive team strategy advisor for media and entertainment at Telos Alliance.

Next Generation Audio, or NGA, refers to a set of standards and technologies that allow audio to be delivered as discrete objects or elements rather than as a fixed mix — enabling different versions of the same audio to be assembled for different platforms, languages and listening environments from the same source material.

Reliability as the baseline

Underlying all of it is a reliability requirement that is more demanding in live sports than in almost any other broadcast context. There is no opportunity to correct a timing error or resolve a synchronization issue after the fact.

“Sport remains one of the most demanding production environments, with multi-venue coverage, remote commentary and direct-to-consumer streaming all operating simultaneously. These workflows depend on precise timing between cameras, graphics, audio and replay systems across multiple locations, and the margin for error is shrinking as audience expectations rise. Understanding actual latency from the point of capture, rather than verifying synchronization only at selected checkpoints, is becoming the standard that serious live production operations are working toward,” said Anna Hurd, head of sales at Hitomi Broadcast.

For a closer look at the advertising technology and monetization strategies shaping sports streaming, 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.