Microsoft is no longer content being the silent backbone of the media industry. Heading into the 2026 NAB Show, April 19-22 in Las Vegas, the tech giant is pivoting from 'enterprise provider' to more of a software-defined broadcasting leader, powered by Agentic AI and high-profile sports partnerships.
In a recent Q&A with TV Tech, Simon Crownshaw, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Director at Microsoft, discussed the company’s plans for the NAB Show and how he thinks the company’s role in M&E is evolving.
Crownshaw admits that although Microsoft has been a household name for decades, the company wants to do a better job telling its story.
“Microsoft has been a bigger part of the media and entertainment industry—and sports, for quite some time,” he said. “I think we may not be the most vocal about how we engage and where our customers spend time with us, but obviously, we're one of the largest enterprise platforms in the world, and a lot of media companies over the past five years are really looking to extend how they think through that enterprise platform.”
The Increasing Value of Partnerships
Crownshaw says the value of Microsoft’s impact comes through its partnerships with some of the more “pure-play” media tech companies.
“We partner a lot with the likes of Avid and Adobe and we have other extended partnerships with Evertz as well and we’ve partnered with Vizrt and Ross Video, where we spend a lot of the time helping customers think through their production workflows,” Crownshaw said. “And I would argue that, as we've become more and more known for AI and everything else we're doing in that realm, we've now started to figure out ‘how do we bring the kind of core elements of our platform closer to media?’ But also with the expectation that our customers—who either have a traditional linear broadcasting feed or a stream platform—want to leverage more of their linear platform, more of their broadcasting platform, to do more with their enterprise components.”
Microsoft also has a large role in sports broadcasting as well, Crownshaw said.
“We have some pretty amazing sports partnerships; we do a lot of things with the NBA, NFL, the Premier League in the UK, everything from thinking through broadcast production workflows with partners like MediaKind for example,” he said. “And thinking about how we transform processes for SRT feeds using AI optimization of workflows and network components, and infrastructure to deal with issues of disaster recovery, and making sure that we can optimize for personalization at every level.”
Being that live sports is among the most valued franchises in media and entertainment, security is paramount. Although Microsoft retired its Azure Media Services in 2024, moving towards a partner-ecosystem model rather than a first-party service, Crownshaw stressed that its platform continues to emphasize the critical role Azure continues to play throughout its M&E offerings.
“With Azure Front Door, we have PlayReady from a DRM perspective, so for anything running on Windows it’s obviously using PlayReady from a DRM,” he said. “We spend a lot of time with customers, thinking through how they can use that security foundation and obviously, we're streaming platforms with a lot of leakage, whether that be through IPTV or others and working through that in a more rigorous way with new partners—that's the focus of our work with the NBA going on right now. And we're also working through the very first direct-to-consumer experience for the Premier League in Singapore with Premier League Plus.”
A Holistic View
For broadcasters who want to bridge the gap between traditional media and online streaming and social media, Crownshaw says Microsoft has the capability to help its customers view their media ecosystem holistically.
“Traditional broadcasters, especially the ones that we work with, have struggled to figure out how to modernize their technology stack,” he said. “They realize the platform proliferation, the fact that speed of service is really critical—especially if you're trying to compete with TikTok, for example—we spent some time with local broadcasters trying to figure out how we can do multiplatform publishing at the speed and size that like a Tiktok would do.”
“On our end, I think it's realizing that there is a place for everybody and those systems have to modernize,” he added. “There's security around data, there's security around content. There's also speed and agility around the systems that need to update and to be modernized to some degree. We do a lot of analysis on the content that comes in, figure out the metadata that could be deployed, make sure people can search for a faster client, and automate some of those processes. We also work with partners to figure out how to build new architectures.”
NAB Show Buzz
Crownshaw discussed what he thinks will be among the most important conversations will be around artificial intelligence at the NAB Show, including the use of agentic AI in the media production chain via its Copilot AI.
“We're leveraging Copilot to replace some of the automation that goes in or replacing some of the workflows that exist,” he said. “We may use Copilot Studio to build custom copies, where we can use agentic or agent-to-agent type workflows. We can basically start to replace commodity hardware or other processes with Copilot.”
Crownshaw used newsrooms as an example of how Copilot can enhance operations and workflows, highlighting the use of Copilot Studio to build "agent-to-agent" workflows that can replace commodity hardware. In a newsroom setting, this means a producer can task an AI agent to validate archives or run origination tasks automatically, significantly cutting down on manual search time, he added.
Microsoft’s message at the 2026 NAB Show will focus on the company’s role throughout the media chain, from origination to distribution, as well as its role in software-defined production, Crownshaw said.
“Microsoft plays a pretty critical role between what we do from a hyper-converged infrastructure perspective, and enabling the connective tissue between the intelligence of all of the different layers that exist within media—from everything coming directly off the camera, all the way to the the ingestion process, through to the production and through the distribution component,” he said. “I would argue that if you look at the things that we enable across our platform, we play a pretty important role. I cannot overstate the importance of the software-defined broadcasting process that I think we are at the forefront of.”
Microsoft will be in Booth W1731 in the West Hall of the LVCC.
