Every NAB Show gives the media and entertainment industry the chance to assess trends and challenges and create and strengthen personal networking connections, and the 2026 version was no different.
Attendees were greeted with a fully finished Las Vegas Convention Center and, while the National Association of Broadcasters reported an increase in registered attendees at approximately 58,000, attendance felt similar to last year. With a non-NAB event in the South Hall, and with the remodeling and better bridging of the front of the North and Central halls, the visible number of people was harder to gauge.
Nearly half of those 58,000 registered attendees were “first timers,” and their presence was felt on the show floor, in conference rooms and at booth discussions.
Vertical Video and AI
With much of the online video world moving towards 9:16, the integration of vertical video was a hot topic. And where last year’s dominant themes were artificial intelligence and tariffs, this year it was the impact of AI on both creativity and infrastructure.
Vertical films were also part of the show-floor discussions, but it wasn’t about simply how to “flip an image on its side.” Rather, the talk centered on how to switch and compose shots for both horizontal and vertical use and then add multilayered graphics that will work in both 16:9 and 9:16.
Among the standouts in this area were Amazon Web Services (AWS), which showcased its new Elemental Inference, which creates vertical cuts using AI and the power of AWS Cloud, as well as FOR-A, which demonstrated viztrick AiDi GoVertical!, a solution it developed with Japan broadcaster Nippon TV to integrate the process into one of its switchers that features dual outputs compatible with the style of presentation.
Another trend this year was more services. Companies are offering to manage streaming billing and customer service, and using AI for quality control and outsourcing to third parties for content manipulation and even creation.
Deepdub, for example, uses AI and human intervention for quality control. Its process analyzes entire movies, creating scripts and determining which character is delivering the lines. AI chooses the voices, “marking” the video for when script lines begin and end. An editor then monitors and “babysits” the AI voicing, replacing the original dialogue (in a voice the editor/producer chooses, not a recreation of the actor, but a similar voice to match the character).
The entire movie can be revoiced in any of dozens of languages in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Agentic AI
A good example of the use of agentic AI could be found in the TVU Networks booth which showcased “TV Cortex,” a service that uses agentic AI to aggregate and manage the audio and video content used to create news stories. TV Cortex has the power to act autonomously and purposefully to achieve an outcome independently of our interaction with it. In theory, operating this way may involve less “human shading” of events and more factual coverage.
According to TVU Networks President Paul Shen, TV Cortex is intended to augment human productivity, not to replace it. If used effectively, the system frees up producers and editors to focus more on the creative aspects of news production, like crafting compelling stories and providing more human context.
“TV Cortex leverages agentic AI, deploying a hierarchy of master and subordinate agents that dynamically scale to handle the volume and complexity of incoming stories,” Shen said. “These agents automate the retrieval, categorization and scoring of stories based on factors such as recency, relevance, market size and customizable editorial priorities.”
ENCO showcased the use of AI in advertising and sales, demonstrating how its SPECai can generate client spec spots using multiple scripts, different background music and dozens of voices, allowing a spec spot to be produced for a client in just seconds.
On the camera side, Sony marked the NAB Show debut of its PXW-Z300, its first ENG camera to capture content and mark it with the C2 PA certification protocol to confirm that it is (in its words) “Genuine…No AI.”
“You’ll be able to see before you distribute the content…a broadcaster, for example, will be able to see what has been done to that media,” Lindsay Martin, head of networked solutions for Sony Professional, said. “It’ll show what’s been edited specifically, if there’s any AI that had been introduced into that clip throughout the [production] chain.”
The Dark Side of AI
But there was another side of AI that became a part of nearly every booth conversation: its impact on software and hardware development.
AI—and the amount of processing seen at the show—is related to what’s in the news today. The data center needs of private enterprise, and in particular the M&E industry, are dominating the headlines. Remember how power-hungry tubes were replaced by transistors and LEDs seemed to be the answer to reducing power consumption?
Processors came about (as did the heat and fans), and we then went back not just to “full power,” but needing even more. Massive data centers are now required to carry the processing load, and this is creating a crisis for our own power grids to the point where we’re seeing a lot of discussions on these data centers: where they’ll go, how many (or few) they’ll employ and who will pay for the infrastructure upgrades needed to deliver the massive amounts of power.
The other, more immediate impact from data centers is the shortage of chips and memory. That raises costs for exhibitors, many of whom admitted they would have to consider raising prices.
“I think everybody has, or will have to [raise prices] shortly, if they haven’t already, because they have no choice,” Jeff Moore, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Ross Video, said. “The pricing changes are so extreme that anybody that’s in the hardware business will have to increase prices.”
NextGen TV
For broadcasters, content delivery was top of mind, particularly in the transition from satellite acquisition and services to IP-delivered content. With reduced “space bandwidth” due to the increase in Earth-bound 5G—and an anticipated Federal Communications Commission auction of C-band spectrum in 2027—we’ve seen more issues with satellite delivery and reliability than in the past.
A number of developments in the industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0 were highlighted on the show floor. The ATSC showcased prototypes of new sub-$60 converter boxes designed to prime consumer demand for NextGen TV at its Central Hall pavilion and celebrated the worldwide expansion of its adoption, hosting communications executives from India, the Caribbean, South Korea and, in particular, Brazil, which announced its adoption of the standard’s physical layer last summer.
The Broadcast Positioning System was also front and center, with the BEIT offering tech updates.
There was also talk about monetizing the standard. GatesAir showcased its work supplying exciters for NAB’s pilot testing of BPS in the Washington, D.C., area. GatesAir Director of Global Marketing Keith Adams discussed BPS’s commercial potential, suggesting that with the federal government considering BPS as a “backup” to GPS, it could be offered as a service to private industry.
BPS and GPS can complement each other, he said, suggesting that financial institutions would be among the first industries to consider its use.
Any business that makes extensive use of GPS is a candidate, Adams added. “I do see a monetary application, absolutely,” he said. “Because once you open that up as an alternative to GPS, some people will say, ‘OK, we’re just going to use BPS period, because I don’t need the GPS at that point,’ right? But then there’s going to be others to say, maybe I want to use both.”
The 2027 NAB Show will take place April 4-7 in Las Vegas.
