TV Tech: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trends at the 2026 NAB Show?
Sam Peterson: AI will dominate the conversation again, but the real story isn’t AI itself. It’s whether it’s actually being operationalized. Over the past year, the gap between experimentation and real deployment has started to close, and that’s where the industry is finally seeing measurable impact.
What matters now is how AI is being applied behind the scenes, improving content discovery, accelerating production workflows and making growing media libraries usable at scale. That’s where the value is.
At the same time, hybrid cloud is no longer a strategy, it’s the baseline. Broadcasters have moved past the “cloud vs. on-prem” debate. The focus now is on how to integrate both in a way that delivers flexibility without compromising reliability.
We’re also seeing remote and distributed production fully mature. What started as a necessity is now a competitive advantage, allowing organizations to scale coverage, centralize resources, and respond faster to live events.
Ultimately, all of this is being driven by a simple reality: teams are being asked to produce more content with fewer resources. The companies that succeed will be the ones that turn automation and workflow efficiency into a core operating capability.
TVT: What will be your most important product news?
SP: The industry has reached a point where large-scale, disruptive migrations are no longer practical. Broadcasters can’t afford to pause operations or take on unnecessary risk just to modernize, so the focus has shifted to how you evolve without breaking what already works.
That’s exactly where we’re focused at NAB Show.
With Fusion Gateway, we’re introducing a cloud-based integration framework that connects systems, metadata, and workflows across both cloud and on-prem environments. It enables broadcasters to bring in new capabilities, integrate third-party technologies, and expand their infrastructure incrementally, without forcing a reset.
A good example of how that comes to life is our Core News Browse & Ingest Module. It allows news teams to browse approved third-party content sources and selectively ingest assets directly into their existing workflows. That content is immediately available inside Core News and Create, so editorial teams can use it without changing how they work.
What’s important here is that discovery and acquisition are being expanded without adding friction. And when paired with Fusion Gateway, broadcasters can securely connect to cloud-based content sources and exchange metadata seamlessly.
Alongside this, we’re continuing to advance Core News, Fusion Hybrid Storage, Fusion Insights and Central Control, all focused on improving efficiency, accelerating content discovery, and simplifying playout within a more unified, flexible workflow.
TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?
SP: For years, the industry has been told that transformation requires disruption, that adopting new technology means replacing what came before. We fundamentally disagree.
Most solutions in the market still approach content aggregation and ingest as a bulk process, pulling in large volumes of material and expecting teams to adapt their workflows around it. In practice, that often creates more noise than value.
Our approach is more deliberate. With the Core News Browse & Ingest Module, we’re putting control back in the hands of editorial teams. Users can browse approved third-party sources and selectively ingest only what’s relevant, bringing that content directly into Core News and Create without changing how the newsroom operates.
What makes this scalable is how it connects. When working with third-party cloud content sources, Fusion Gateway provides the secure connectivity and metadata exchange that makes that workflow possible across environments. That integration ensures content moves seamlessly while maintaining the integrity of existing systems.
More broadly, our focus is on integration over replacement. Broadcasters can evolve their workflows, expand their content ecosystem, and introduce new capabilities without being forced into a complete reset.
TVT: What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?
SP: NAB Show remains one of the few places where you can cut through the noise and see what’s actually real in this industry.
There’s no shortage of new ideas or technologies, but what matters is what’s being deployed, what’s scaling and what’s delivering value. NAB creates a space where those distinctions become clear very quickly.
It’s also where the industry pressure points come into focus. You hear directly from broadcasters about what’s working, where they’re struggling and what they need next, and those conversations are often more valuable than anything happening on a stage.
But beyond that, it’s about relationships. This industry runs on collaboration and NAB brings together the people who are shaping what comes next. The most meaningful insights don’t come from presentations; they come from conversations that challenge assumptions and open the door to new ways of thinking.
