What NAB Show 2026 was really telling us about the state of broadcasting

Every NAB Show has a mood. Sometimes it is excitement around a new technology, remember when everyone was excited about virtual production and the “lift and shift” to the cloud? Sometimes it is anxiety, such as the mood last year around tariffs and the global economy.

This year the mood was something closer to pragmatism with a side of quiet urgency.

The industry knows what it needs to do. Whether it moves fast enough is another question.

I came away from Las Vegas with a notebook full of recurring themes, some of which we anticipated in our show preview and others that genuinely surprised me. 

The pressure is real, and everyone feels it

Speed, scale and efficiency were the dominant conversations across virtually every meeting I had, regardless of what a company actually sells.

Broadcasters need to produce more content, distribute it to more places and find more eyeballs – all while overall linear viewership declines, the ad market softens and consolidation continues to compress headcount.

NAB’s LeGeyt makes the case that broadcaster scale is about survival, not consolidation

That combination is not new, but it has reached a point where it is shaping actual purchasing decisions rather than just boardroom conversations.

What struck me was how consistent the language was. From a router manufacturer talking about floating software licenses to a managed services company pitching outsourced playout, the conversation was almost always some version of: do more with what you already have or do more without hiring people you cannot afford. The vendors who had that story figured out were busy. The ones still leading with feature lists were quieter.

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There is a useful way to think about this. The broadcasters who are winning right now are not necessarily the ones with the most technology.

They are the ones who have figured out how to get maximum utilization out of what they already own. The shift from CapEx to OpEx, from building to buying, from owning infrastructure to renting capability – all of that is accelerating. And it is changing what a vendor actually needs to be good at.

Experimentation is finally happening

Nexstar’s Perry Sook, in a conversation with Deborah Norville on the NAB Show stage, used the phrase “flywheel of content” to describe what broadcasters need to build – a self-reinforcing cycle where content produced for one platform feeds the next, generating audience and revenue across the full ecosystem rather than just at the linear endpoint. It was a good phrase.

More importantly, it was a sign that the people running major broadcast groups are thinking differently about the relationship between their platforms.

For years, I have watched the broadcast industry talk about innovation while protecting its sacred cows with remarkable dedication. The 6 o’clock news was not to be touched. The linear feed was not to be disrupted. The brand was not to be experimented with.

That conversation has changed.

This year, the word experimentation came up in meeting after meeting – not as an aspiration but as something broadcasters are actually doing. Some are trying rough-around-the-edges vertical video from reporters in the field. Some are putting live programming on FAST channels for the first time. Some are rethinking what a newscast actually looks like for a viewer who is watching on a phone at noon rather than a television at six.

Is all of it working? Of course not. But the willingness to try, fail and try again is new. And it matters, because the alternative, protecting a model that is slowly losing audience, is not really a strategy. It is a delay.

The infrastructure is being rebuilt, whether people like it or not

C-band dominated the distribution side of the show floor in a way I have not seen a single regulatory issue dominate before. The breakfast event drew more than 200 broadcasters and was standing room only. Every vendor, even tangentially related to satellite or IP distribution, had it as their primary conversation.

False urgency or impending deadline? C-band transition divides NAB Show

The honest read from the floor: the larger broadcasters get it and are moving methodically. Some of the smaller tier-one operators are still in a wait-and-see posture, telling themselves they can hold off until the FCC issues a formal timeline. That is probably a mistake. The auction happens in July 2027 regardless of what any individual broadcaster decides. Planning now costs nothing. Being unprepared later costs a great deal.

On the broader infrastructure question, the COTS versus dedicated hardware debate surfaced in multiple conversations with an interesting twist.

The appeal of using off-the-shelf computing hardware such as  standard servers, commodity switches and software-defined everything, is real and well-understood. The pushback, which several vendors offered quietly but clearly, is that by the time you add the specialized network cards, the high-end switches and the software licensing that actually makes it work, you are sometimes not saving the money you thought you were. COTS is not a free lunch. It is a different set of trade-offs.

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Related to that is MXL, the Media eXchange Layer, which kept surfacing in infrastructure conversations as the most credible candidate for eventually solving some of the problems SMPTE 2110 created but never fully resolved.

The promise of 2110 was a path to the cloud and to true COTS workflows. The reality, as more than one engineer noted this week, is that it delivered neither cleanly. MXL’s approach, using shared memory and direct memory access rather than traditional streaming, eliminating the proprietary interface cards that made 2110 expensive and complex, addresses those gaps in a way that is generating genuine interest.

How much interest? Word on the floor was that at least one major U.S. broadcaster was quietly asking questions and learning. That is not a deployment. But when organizations of that scale start sniffing around an emerging standard, it tends to accelerate the timeline for everyone else.

MXL is not ready to displace 2110 in large-scale facilities today. But it is no longer just a standards committee conversation either.

And monitoring and quality control, which might sound unglamorous, kept coming up as a genuine priority. When your content is going to 15 different endpoints across streaming services, FAST channels and broadcast feeds simultaneously, knowing that it arrived correctly and completely is not optional. That conversation is getting louder.

HDR is closer than you think

This one surprised me. HDR, which produces richer colors and brighter highlights than standard television, has been standard on streaming services for years. On linear broadcast television, it has been largely absent except for major sporting events.

Word on the floor was that CBS is likely to move to HDR this fall. That is significant. It would be the most visible deployment of streaming-grade picture quality on a major broadcast network, and it makes sense given that Skydance, CBS’s new parent company, has signaled a desire to modernize Paramount’s broadcast properties.

Bringing HDR to everyday linear television changes the conversation about what broadcast can look like and puts pressure on others to follow suit.

Spatial is bubbling, not boiling

Spatial video, immersive content designed for headsets like Apple Vision Pro and increasingly for other platforms, has been talked about at NAB for a couple of years now. This year felt different, not because spatial has arrived but because serious companies are treating it as a real production category rather than a curiosity.

Sony is thinking about it more deliberately. Blackmagic Design expanded its immersive camera ecosystem at the show, including a live production-capable version of the URSA Cine Immersive that was already used for live NBA games this season. The distribution numbers for spatial content remain tiny compared to linear or streaming. But the production infrastructure is maturing faster than the distribution side, which means when the distribution catches up, the industry will be more ready than it was for streaming.

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When will a major broadcaster or streamer make a real commitment to spatial? That question has no clear answer yet. But it is getting harder to dismiss.

The cloud conversation has changed

For years, AWS was the default answer when a broadcaster asked about cloud infrastructure. Not anymore, or at least, not exclusively.

Two things stood out at this year’s show. Google Cloud appeared on the NAB Show floor for the first time, a physical presence that carried its own signal. And across multiple vendor conversations, Oracle Cloud came up with a frequency that would have seemed strange even 12 months ago. This is not a coincidence, given the relationship between Oracle and Paramount Skydance.

Broadcasters are looking hard at their cloud costs, examining redundancy strategies and pushing back against the idea of being locked into a single hyperscaler. The egress fees, the OpEx creep, the growing sense that concentrating everything with one vendor creates its own kind of risk… all of it is driving a real re-evaluation.

Some of this is the natural maturation of cloud adoption.

The early days of cloud strategy in broadcast were often driven by whatever credits a vendor was offering or whatever platform a system integrator was most comfortable with. Now that those early decisions are baked into real operations, broadcasters are looking at the actual costs and asking harder questions.

Some of it is also technology-driven. Google’s strength in search and AI, such as Vision Warehouse and Vertex AI, gives it a genuine capability argument in media workflows that goes beyond price. Oracle’s pitch is different: competitive pricing and a less crowded field. Neither of those is the same as AWS’s argument, which has long been depth of ecosystem and breadth of services.

The multi-cloud conversation is no longer theoretical. It is showing up in vendor partnership announcements, in broadcaster RFPs and on the NAB Show floor. Whether it represents a genuine shift in market share or simply a negotiating posture that keeps AWS honest remains to be seen. But the dynamic has clearly changed.

The governance question nobody wants to lead on

Across many conversations, often toward the end of meetings when people stopped talking about their products, the topic of AI governance and content authenticity came up.

How do you verify that content is what it claims to be and not just AI slop? How do you establish provenance for AI-generated or AI-assisted material? How do you comply with evolving standards, including C2PA and SMPTE’s work across various committees, in a way that does not become a compliance nightmare?

Nobody has a clean answer. The standards are still evolving. The platforms are not yet requiring compliance. And so the honest reality is that most organizations are watching and waiting rather than leading.

That is understandable. It is also the same posture the industry took toward streaming for too long, toward FAST for too long, and toward C-band planning for too long. At some point the watching and waiting ends, usually when someone else moves first and the rest of the industry scrambles to catch up.

The themes that dominated the floor this year, including efficiency, experimentation, infrastructure rebuilding and governance, are not going away. If anything, the pressure behind each of them intensifies in the next 12 months. NAB Show 2027 will tell us how many of this year’s conversations turned into action.