BRUSSELS—Mediagenix will showcase its vision for the Real-Time Media Enterprise at IBC2026 IBC 2026, Sept. 11-14, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The Mediagenix platform connects content strategy, title management, scheduling and personalization through Semantic Intelligence and trusted agentic workflows, enabling decision intelligence across the media lifecycle. The platform is built for digital transformation, offering faster, better-informed editorial decisions, more engaging audience experiences and continuous operational optimization. At IBC2026, the Mediagenix Real-Time Media Enterprise showcase will feature:

• Title Management from Content Repository to Content Intelligence Platform, providing a single source of truth for content-driven media companies powering content metadata workflows, enrichment, discovery, and monetization.
• Schedule Optimization, leveraging smart automation for linear, FAST, and VOD channels, capable of building weeks of programming in minutes.
• Personalization and curation to create experiences that keep audiences engaged. Combines editorial engagement with intelligent recommendations powered to help audiences discover more content, increase engagement, and improve retention.
• Trusted agentic AI workflows in which agentic workflows are safely operationalized with new AI capabilities across channel operations—from title management and rights to personalization and curation.

At the gathering, Mediagenix will unveil new innovative workflows and capabilities, including content-aware scheduling, performance-based scheduling, intelligent curation, trusted agentic media operations and advanced personalization.

"Media organizations don't need more isolated automation. They need connected decision intelligence," said Emmanuel Müller, chief product officer at Mediagenix. "By continuously connecting editorial decisions with audience insights, media organizations can move beyond disconnected workflows toward intelligent, continuously optimized operations that adapt in real time to changing business priorities, audience behavior and market conditions. That's the foundation of the Real-Time Media Enterprise."

See Mediagenix at IBC 2026 stand 1B.57.

More information is available on the company’s website.

‍Waymark has announced that Cox Media Group (CMG) is deploying Waymark's AI-powered video platform at stations in nine markets.

By combining multiple generative AI models, Waymark has developed an end-to-end video creation platform that allows anyone to produce ready-to-air commercials suitable for TV, streaming, and digital platforms.

That makes it easier for local advertisers and businesses who might not have the tools to create traditional ads, which in turn can help increase local ad sales.

The deal adds Cox Media Group to Waymark’s growing roster of national broadcast and media partners, which includes Comcast, Spectrum Reach, FOX TV Stations, Sinclair Broadcast Group, E.W. Scripps, Gray Media, Paramount, and Nine Entertainment (Australia).

“What we’re seeing with Cox Media Group represents how broadcasters help clients grow and unlock revenue,” said Alex Persky-Stern, CEO of Waymark. “When a platform can help reps open doors, close deals, and deliver finished creative, the impact compounds. CMG’s teams have proven that video drives campaign revenue throughout the sales cycle.”

As part of the agreement, CMG stations are tailoring Waymark to its own workflow and market conditions to shorten sales cycles and increase the number of local businesses running television campaigns.

“We’re always looking for ways to help our clients meet and exceed their business goals,” said Darren Moore, CMG’s chief sales officer – TV. “Waymark helps us have better initial conversations, reduce the time between those conversations and the advertising launch, and create targeted and compelling content. We’re better – and our clients share in that – because of Waymark.”

STAMFORD, Conn.—As part of a broader push to capitalize on the potential of AI in its ad sales and other operations, Charter’s AI and data commercialization business unit Spectrum Intelligence Ventures has announced its first product, a household intelligence platform called Latis.

Built on information spanning digital engagement, TV viewership, and connected device activity across approximately 30 million U.S. households and 500 million connected devices, Spectrum said that Latis is designed to transform real-world activity into intelligence that will help companies and organizations better understand consumer intent, context, emerging trends and shifting demand at national scale.

“The transition from data to intelligence is one of the most important shifts happening across technology and business today,” said John Lee, head of Intelligence Ventures for Spectrum. “Latis is designed to help power this next generation of AI-driven systems by transforming large-scale household signals into continuously evolving real-world intelligence that organizations can use to improve decisioning, automation, personalization and business outcomes.”

Spectrum reported that Latis continuously models household activities across digital, video and device signals, transforming household-level data into pseudonymized mathematical and privacy protected representations of household activity patterns.

This will help advertisers, companies and organizations better understand changing consumer intent, priorities, responsiveness and likely future actions across such industries as retail, automotive, financial services, travel, media, telecommunications and consumer goods.

For example, traditionally, a clear sign of a consumer’s interest in travel typically only becomes available only after a consumer has taken a clear transaction-oriented step, Spectrum explained.

Latis is designed to help identify emerging travel-related interests earlier in the consumer journey by transforming household-level activity patterns—such as destination research, engagement with travel-related content, and comparison of vacation options—into a pseudonymized and privacy protected sense of intent, interest, affinities and trends.

Spectrum also reported that Latis is designed to support a broad range of enterprise and AI-native use cases, including:

• Consumer insights and segmentation
• Media targeting, optimization and measurement
• Data clean room collaboration and enhancement
• Personalization and decisioning
• Model training
• Agentic AI acceleration

Spectrum said that Latus was designed with a privacy-forward architecture and governed access framework.

It enables organizations to obtain intelligence through secure collaboration environments, controlled integrations and governed infrastructure models designed to support enterprise privacy, security and governance requirements. Partners may use the intelligence outputs for permitted business purposes, such as advertising, marketing, measurement, research, customer engagement, analytics, personalization, and improving AI-driven tools and services, but the underlying household-level data stays within Latis’ controlled environment and is privacy protected.

Spectrum Intelligence Ventures is currently selecting a limited group of partners for beta participation. Beta programs include collaboration with Spectrum Reach to provide select partners early access to Latis intelligence combined with Spectrum Reach and wider media inventory to improve targeting and business outcomes. Broader availability is planned for the second half of 2026.

Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that it is working with its preferred cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop next-generation advertising experiences built with AWS agentic AI.

As part of the effort, WBD is expanding its advertising technology stack on AWS and deploying an agentic AI-driven approach to how premium inventory across its U.S. linear and digital channels is planned, activated, optimized, and monetized.

By rebuilding its longstanding traditional internal workflows from the ground up with automated, data-driven processes on a single platform, WBD reported that it is reimagining its infrastructure for advertisers in ways that unify "the buying experience across previously siloed business units and enable automated campaign optimization."

"We're embarking on the next frontier of advertising where convergence brings linear and digital together on a single platform – each retaining its own essence, yet with the fluidity to plan, package, and optimize across both — all measurable and optimizable at cloud scale with agentic, AI-native decisioning," said Dr. Nage Sethu, senior vice president of technology - converged advertising and linear systems, Warner Bros. Discovery. "Building with AWS has been critical to streamlining the buyer’s experience across linear and digital, powering critical layers of our data, forecasting, and next-generation agentic advertising stack."

In 2026, WBD began rolling out a new generation of capabilities, including agentic automation for direct response and commercial workflows, advanced audience forecasting, and enhanced measurement and attribution.

Building on those rollouts, WBD said it will introduce unified media planning in Q3, followed by a phased rollout of composable order management, pricing, and stewardship in Q4.

"AWS is proud to deepen our relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery at such a transformative moment in media and advertising," said Samira Panah Bakhtiar, general manager, media, entertainment, games & sports, Amazon Web Services. "By combining WBD's iconic content portfolio and rich audience signals with AWS's cloud and agentic AI capabilities, we're enabling a new era of intelligent, automated advertising that delivers better outcomes for brands and viewers alike."

More specifically, WBD’s new platform features autonomous AI agents for intelligent planning, dynamic forecasting, real-time optimization, and closed-loop measurement. These agents continuously self-optimize, learning from outcomes to drive better results for buyers and sellers alike with every campaign. The system enables flexible targeting approaches, allowing buyers to focus on specific brands or audience segments across linear and digital, with WBD providing optimal inventory allocation recommendations.

The platform streamlines the ad buying process for WBD inventory so that advertisers can more effectively allocate budgets across multiple platforms and brands. Additionally, advertisers can more easily leverage new ad formats, including interactive ads, while viewers receive more customized ad content.

Underpinning WBD's new advertising technology implementation is a composable data and interoperability layer that gives WBD's AI agents the real-time context they need to act, integrate seamlessly across the ecosystem, and deliver buyer transparency. Key AWS services powering the platform include:

Amazon Bedrock hosts the various foundation models employed in WBD’s closed instance

Amazon SageMaker provides the tools for training custom machine learning models for WBD’s exclusive use and in compliance with WBD data protection, segmentation and security controls

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores data in the Apache Iceberg format for the underlying data lake.

In addition, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) powers application hosting and Amazon Quick provides a personalized, proactive AI assistant that enables Ad Sales teams to interact with data through natural language, uncover actionable insights, receive proactive recommendations, and make faster, data-driven decisions.

CHESEAUX-SUR-LAUSANNE, Switzerland, and PHOENIX, Ariz.—Nagravision has launched Nagra Venturi, a new intelligence-led streaming security offering that helps service providers and rights holders detect threats, combat piracy, and safeguard revenue.

Nagra Venturi brings Nagravision’s streaming security capabilities together under a single intelligence-led model, shifting anti-piracy from fragmented, reactive tools to coordinated, data-driven offering.

“With AI in the hands of pirates, the market has reached an inflection point,” said Morten Solbakken, executive vice president and COO at Nagravision. “As piracy becomes faster, more automated, and increasingly intelligent, the industry needs a new approach. Nagra Venturi is built to fight AI with AI, giving operators and rights holders the ability to move faster and with greater precision, providing the clarity to see the full picture, the focus to target the threats that matter, and the impact to protect revenue and the audience experience.”

The new offering is designed to address the fact that today’s pirate operations are automated and increasingly AI-assisted, scaling illegal services globally within minutes and targeting live sports during the narrow window when content is most valuable. That has put operators and rights holders in the difficult position of managing growing volumes of data and alerts, without clarity on which actions will make the biggest difference.

Nagra Venturi answers that challenge by transforming security data into prioritized, decisive action. It aggregates and analyzes data from across the streaming ecosystem to create a real-time view of piracy activity, identifies the highest-value threats, and coordinates targeted intervention where it will have the greatest business impact. Rather than reacting to every signal, teams can focus on the threats that matter most to their business.

Through its managed service option, Nagra Venturi includes Nexus, the Nagra Anti-Piracy Center, where analysts coordinate monitoring, intelligence, investigation, and enforcement against a global view of piracy activity. Because Nagravision tracks the wider ecosystem rather than a single network, it can uncover pirate infrastructure and leaked content that individual operators may never see, then coordinate disruption across multiple points at once to maximize impact. Individual solutions, including forensic watermarking and multi-DRM, remain available as standalone solutions within the Nagra Venturi portfolio.

“For more than 30 years, Nagravision has protected the world’s most valuable content,” adds Solbakken. “Built on that heritage—and informed by decades of front-line anti-piracy intelligence—Nagra Venturi moves content protection from a reactive, tool-based model to a proactive, intelligence-led one designed for today’s piracy landscape. Nagravision is proud to be leading the charge to help its customers demonstrate the impact of their anti-piracy strategy—one that proves its value in commercial terms, not just technical ones.”

To learn more about Nagra Venturi, visit nagra.vision.

LONDON—Cascade Studio has announced the Open Beta launch of Cascade, an AI-native production platform that aims to democratize storytelling by bringing Hollywood-grade storytelling infrastructure to creators of any size.

"Too many great stories never make it to screen – and we built Cascade to change that," said Simon Windsor, CEO of Cascade Studio. "We didn't set out to build another AI generation tool. That's not what the industry needs. What we've created is the all-in-one production environment we wished we'd had throughout our careers.”

Cascade was co-founded by Simon Windsor, co-founder and former co-CEO of Dimension Studio; Junaid Baig, former lead of DNEG rendering and pipeline whose credits include “Avengers: Endgame”, “Tenet”, “Fantastic Beasts”, and “No Time To Die”; and Darren Hopkins, technology entrepreneur, former CFO of Dimension Studio, and CEO of AI-focused investment firm Mollyroe PLC. The company has also appointed games industry pioneer Dominic Wheatley, co-founder and former CEO of Eidos, as Chairman.

Described by its founders as "the Unreal Engine of storytelling", the Cascade platform is powered by a proprietary agentic AI framework that acts as a creative co-pilot throughout production, helping creators develop ideas, build assets, manage projects and orchestrate workflows through natural interaction, while keeping every creative decision firmly in human hands.

Cascade Studios stressed that the platform has been built for scaling productions and IP. Its unique asset-based system enables creators to maintain character consistency, visual coherence and IP integrity across entire projects – from shot to shot, series to series, and across expanding story worlds and sequels. Cascade brings AI-generated content, existing creative assets and live-action production together seamlessly in a single platform.

The result is a scalable production environment where solo creators or agile teams can build everything from teasers, trailers and advertising campaigns to episodic series, animation, films and music videos without juggling multiple tools, subscriptions or disconnected workflows.

"The creativity has always been there, but what the industry has been missing is a platform that connects everything – one that supercharges high-grade production while respecting the creative process and helping storytellers bring ambitious ideas to life,” Windsor added. “That's what Cascade is. The production platform modern storytelling has been waiting for. We're redefining who can make films, how fast they can make them, and at what quality."

The Open Beta of Cascade is available now: Sign up at www.cascadestudio.ai.

State associations representing broadcasters in all 50 states as well as groups in District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have sent a letter to Congressional leaders supporting the "Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe" or NO FAKES Act of 2026.

Amid the ongoing, rapid expansion of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”), the NO FAKES Act would create important guardrails for the use of digital replicas without unduly restricting the potential benefits that generative AI can contribute to the broadcast and creative industries now and in the future, the groups said.

The letter was sent to John Thune Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer Senate Minority Leader, Mike Johnson House Speaker, and Hakeem Jeffries House Minority Leader.

“This bipartisan legislation would protect the voice and visual likeness of all individuals, including the most trusted broadcast news anchors and local on-air personalities, from unauthorized computer-generated recreations made by generative AI,” the letter said. “It would also provide important exclusions for use of digital replicas in certain bona fide news reporting and broadcasting, as well as commentary, criticism, scholarship satire, parody, and other First Amendment speech.”

Nothing that “nonconsensual voice and image clones can sever that trust, ruin reputations and careers, and distort our public disclosure,” the letter argued that the “NO FAKES Act would create a federal remedy, while also preserving certain state laws, for individuals to fight back against abusive and manipulative deepfakes that threaten to disrupt that trust. And while combatting misinformation, disinformation, misappropriation of content, and deepfakes is a multifaced problem, the NO FAKES Act is a step in the right direction.”

DOWNINGTOWN, Pa.—PTZOptics and LayerJot will demonstrate how prompt-based AI, robotic camera control, and high-performance computing can work together to identify, follow, and respond to objects and events in real time at InfoComm 2026, June 13-19 in Las Vegas.

The demonstrations, which run on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, combine LayerJot’s purpose-built AI software application with PTZOptics’ SimplTrack3 cameras, featuring advanced auto-tracking capabilities. The demos will show how natural-language prompting can guide the system to identify and/or track objects in the room, then use PTZOptics camera control to respond automatically.

The collaboration is designed to show integrators, educators, broadcasters, and pro AV teams a practical path for building on-site AI video workflows, according to the companies. By pairing PTZOptics camera robotics with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 -powered compute and LayerJot’s agentic AI application layer, both exhibitors will demonstrate how Visual Reasoning can move from concept to deployable workflow without requiring large teams, custom hardware stacks, or cloud-only processing.

"AV and enterprise buyers today are asking the same question: how do we deploy AI that actually works in our environment, without building a data center or waiting on the cloud?” said Dr. Ben Cope, Principal Engineer, Intel. “Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors were purpose-built with that reality in mind, delivering the on-device AI compute performance that makes local visual reasoning practical at scale. Collaborating with PTZOptics and LayerJot lets buyers take that compute capability and turn it directly into deployable, prompt-driven camera workflows. Together, we're removing the barriers between AI potential and operational reality."

Visual Reasoning
For PTZOptics, the demo is part of its broader Visual Reasoning initiative, which focuses on turning video into actionable data by combining camera robotics, AI, and open integration. Visual Reasoning is designed to help systems describe, count, understand, and trigger actions based on what cameras see, supporting workflows across broadcast, pro AV, education, healthcare, manufacturing, houses of worship, and live events, the company said.

“Visual Reasoning becomes powerful when integrators and developers can adapt it to the needs of everyday environments,” said Matt Davis, CTO, PTZOptics. “This partnership shows what is possible when robotic cameras, local AI compute, and prompt-driven automation come together. Our goal is to inspire the pro AV community to build customized solutions faster, more affordably, and with more flexibility than ever before.”

LayerJot’s Agentic Visual Application (AVA) connects to the PTZOptics SimplTrack3 camera and uses AI prompting to identify and/or track objects in the space. The demonstration will show how developers can create custom AI workflows that connect directly to camera control, while giving users the freedom to direct camera actions using natural language.

“We’re focused on delivering advanced visual AI solutions that combine scene understanding, automation, and natural-language interaction to support critical workflows in real-world environments,” said Etay Gafni, CEO of LayerJot. “This demonstration shows how scene understanding and natural-language instructions can drive meaningful actions in live operations, enabling users to interact with complex systems in a more intuitive and efficient way.”

Example workflows include prompting the system to identify an object or person in the room, directing the camera to track that target, and showing how similar logic could be adapted for classroom automation, event production, training spaces, and other applications where small teams need consistent video coverage.

The demonstration also reflects a larger shift in the AV industry, the companies said. Cameras are no longer limited to passive capture. With Visual Reasoning, robotic cameras can become intelligent endpoints that help systems interpret what is happening, make decisions, and trigger workflows in real time. PTZOptics says it is working with a wide range of partners and integrators to combine their own domain expertise with PTZOptics cameras via open APIs – supporting teams and improving operations across multiple industries.

The live demonstration will be available at PTZOptics’ booth N8227 during InfoComm 2026. For more information, visit https://ptzoptics.com/book-a-demo/

ALBANY, N.Y.—The New York State Senate and Assembly has passed landmark legislation (A.11292/S.9934A) protecting news media from being bombarded by deceptive “stealth crawlers” from tech companies.

“By protecting broadcast news operations from unauthorized access by Big Tech, the legislation ensures the economic foundations of producing original, local news by broadcast stations throughout the Empire state,” David Donovan, president of the New York State Broadcasters Association, said in hailing the legislation, believed to be the first of its kind in the country. “It prohibits using ‘stealth crawlers’ to extract a broadcaster’s news content without permission or payment. In addition, the legislation requires AI systems to disclose when crawlers are employed to extract content from broadcasters.”

The legislation addresses a longstanding problem faced by broadcasters and news sites. Some AI systems use “stealth crawlers” to hide their identities and secretly access digital services owned by newspapers and broadcasters. This practice imposes substantial burdens on local newspapers and stations, which are often overwhelmed by millions of bot hits each day. It can also devalue the website traffic figures that news websites rely on to sell advertising.

“The New York Assembly and Senate just took a strong stand for transparency and the health of our information ecosystem,” said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. “Right now, news websites are drowning in bot traffic. Bad bots are disguising their identities to overload publisher servers and access the quality content on our sites, hurting our ability to serve readers. This bill will be a simple, common sense solution to this problem. By requiring transparency and accountability for bad actors, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act gives publishers the tools they need to defend themselves and continue providing quality and critical information.”

Diane Kennedy, president of the New York News Publishers Association, also lauded the precedent-setting legislation: “News publishers invest substantial resources of labor, skill, and capital in producing original journalism. The proliferation of stealth crawlers — automated bots that access news sites without identifying themselves or disclosing their purposes — enables technology companies and other actors to access the fruits of that investment without consent or transparency. This legislation prohibits crawlers from disguising their identity when accessing covered news sources and creates a meaningful private right of action for journalism providers to enforce that obligation.”

The three associations thanked “Assemblyperson Steven Otis, Chair of the Internet Assembly Science and Technology Committee (A.11292) and Senator Mike Gianaris, Deputy Majority Leader of the NY State Senate (S.9934A) for sponsoring this important legislation. Through their extraordinary efforts citizens in New York will continue to access original local news by their favorite newspapers and broadcast stations.”

Lenovo has detailed how its deployment of a near-real-time AI-powered infrastructure platform for this year’s FIFA World Cup will enable ultralow-latency IPTV, better operational control and new fan experiences for billions of viewers.

As FIFA’s official technology partner, Lenovo has deployed servers and other solutions at the International Broadcast Center in Dallas to support the most expansive broadcast operation in FIFA World Cup history.

More than 17,000 Lenovo and Motorola devices and 200-plus engineers deployed across venues and Team Base Camp training sites will help ensure professional execution, Lenovo said.

The deployment is part of Lenovo’s larger push to expand its sports technology investments. In March, it launched a dedicated sports vertical designed to support organizations operating live, global and mission-critical environments. By integrating AI infrastructure, edge computing, devices, and services into a unified model, Lenovo said it aims to help sports organizations shift from fragmented systems to real-time, end-to-end operational control.

For this year’s World Cup, Lenovo’s technology solutions have reduced latency within IPTV infrastructure, with IPTV delays now under five seconds, enabling near-real-time access to live match action and more synchronized viewing experiences, the company said.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 V3 servers and technology will also help manage massive volumes of live video data coming in from stadiums across North America and power FIFA’s IPTV live feed by ingesting, processing, and distributing all match content in close to real-time via ten channels to over 1,000 screens throughout FIFA venues.

Beyond broadcast, Lenovo’s technology will be deployed at FIFA’s Technology Command Center in Miami and the Tournament Operation Center for the duration of the World Cup. This hub, where all the technology powering the games is monitored and managed in near-real-time by experienced engineers and FIFA management, serves as the central “mission control” for the tournament.

With the help of Lenovo’s enterprise solutions, FIFA’s Technology Command Center and Tournament Operation Center will ensure organizers can quickly observe and address operational issues across a tournament footprint of 16 venues across the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“Lenovo’s AI infrastructure is redefining the FIFA World Cup experience, delivering near real-time highlights, multi-angle views and insights at unprecedented global scale,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president of infrastructure solutions at Lenovo. “Together with FIFA, we are running AI under the world’s most demanding conditions—solving latency concerns and bringing billions of fans closer to the action than ever before, setting a new standard for live sports.”

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will also showcase Lenovo’s real-world AI advances in sports production, the company said. Lenovo products will manage complex on-premise edge computing, the company said, significantly reducing latency in cases where cloud-only solutions failed to meet broadcast requirements.

More specifically, during the World Cup, technologies powered by Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, engineered for high-density, mission-critical environments requiring massive throughput, and near real-time operational performance will support:

• Near real-time monitoring of stadium and tournament wide tech systems
• Live broadcast, streaming, and IPTV delivery
• Rapid incident detection and issue resolution to minimize disruption and downtime
• Enhancing the fan experience with real-time insight and transparency

Lenovo said it is also enabling a more immersive and understandable viewing experience through AI-driven innovations.

AI-enabled 3D player avatars will provide clearer, real-time visualization of complex decisions such as offside calls, Lenovo said. Built using advanced GenAI and real-world player data, these avatars are designed to help fans better understand the game as it happens. These avatars will also be an additional value input to support FIFA match officials in their offside decision-making during matches, Lenovo said.  

To improve the in-venue experience across three countries, Lenovo said it will deploy solutions designed to enhance safety, efficiency,and engagement, including: AI-driven navigation systems to reduce congestion and improve movement across venues; AI-driven stabilized “Referee Views” to give a first-person perspective with up to 50% less motion distortion; and immersive digital and holographic experiences to create new ways for fans to engage with the game.

In addition, Lenovo will deploy the FIFA AI Pro platform, a next-generation AI-powered knowledge assistant giving tactical insights to coaches, players and analysts. Built using Lenovo’s AI Factory, the platform will be provided to all 48 competing teams.

RESTON, Va.—As media companies continue to grapple with the impact that AI is having on digital audiences and traffic, Comscore has released its first AI Intelligence Report for 2026 with new data highlighting a number of emerging trends.

The report shows the scale of breakout growth from Anthropic’s Claude platform. Based on Comscore’s panel data, the Q1 report revealed that Claude recorded 1,858% growth in desktop conversations between March 2026 and October 2025. While ChatGPT continues to lead the AI assistant category up 55% year over year, the report shows consumers are using a wider range of options.

The report also found that women are emerging as key drivers of mobile AI adoption across major generative AI tools. In March, women posted mobile index scores of 113 for ChatGPT, 123 for Copilot, and 118 for Gemini, the data showed. Men across those respective platforms had scores of 87, 77 and 82 over the same period, Comscore found. These findings further highlight the influence AI is having on a consumer’s on-the-go and day-to-day behavior.

“Comscore is providing some of the industry’s first visibility into AI-influenced intent behavior, as AI rapidly becomes the prime gateway for consumer awareness, attention, and decision-making,” said Smriti Sharma, executive vice president of analytics and managing director of Custom IQ at Comscore. “For brands and publishers, understanding how AI shapes discovery, which sources it references, and how those interactions translate into measurable business outcomes will be increasingly critical in the evolving digital landscape.”

Other key findings from the Comscore Q1 2026 AI Intelligence include:

• ChatGPT remained the category leader, reaching 244 million desktop conversations in March, up 55% year over year.
• ChatGPT also led in March with 87 million desktop visitors, compared to 44 million for Copilot and 30 million for Gemini.
• Claude reached 22 million desktop conversations in March, up 1,858% compared from October 2025, signaling growing consumer interest in alternative AI assistant experiences.
• In Q1 2026, AI assistant tools reached 36% of desktop users and 23% of mobile users.
• AI search is becoming a new discovery layer. U.S. desktop searches reached 76 billion in Q1 2026, up 10% versus Q1 2024, as AI search experiences became more integrated into traditional search behavior.
• AI is influencing high-consideration purchase journeys. In consumer credit cards, AI Overviews appeared alongside 46% of paid search ads in Q4 2025, up from 21% in Q2 2025. Over the past three quarters, approximately 25% of credit card applicants were exposed to AI Overviews, and roughly 5% applied directly from pages where AI Overviews appeared.
• Prompt behavior reveals how consumers refine decisions. In March 2026, users averaged 4.9 prompts per conversation on ChatGPT, 4.6 on Gemini and 7.1 on Copilot, showing that AI interactions are often multi-turn journeys rather than one-off queries.

The full AI Intelligence report for Q1 2026 is available for download here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Utopai Studios has announced the PAI 2.0, a major upgrade of its cinematic storytelling AI system, as the company pushes forward on its plans to build an infrastructure layer for AI-native filmmaking.

PAI 2.0 arrives less than two months after PAI’s April debut and amid strong early commercial demand for Utopai Studios’ technology. The company reported that PAI has already reached $11 million in annual recurring revenue, reflecting growing demand from creators, studios, production companies, and professional teams seeking AI tools that can support higher-quality, longer-form storytelling with greater creative control, consistency, and production flexibility.

“With PAI 2.0, our goal is to help catalyze a ‘Claude Code moment’ for media generation,” said Zijian He, chief scientific officer of Utopai Studios. “Simply generating faster, isolated clips is not enough for true filmmaking. PAI 2.0 is designed to address the foundational challenges of long-form cinematic storytelling by preserving narrative context, maintaining consistency across extended sequences, and giving creators more granular control over the creative process.”

Designed as an agent-first cinematic creation platform, PAI 2.0 helps users plan, generate, and refine videos through a more personalized and flexible creative workflow.

The company said that the system is designed to understand a user’s goal and to guide them into the right creative experience based on how they want to work. PAI 2.0 combines a more powerful creative agent, a freeform Canvas-based workspace, voice input, and advanced image and video generation models to make cinematic creation more visible, controllable, and editable across story, assets, storyboard, and video generation.

PAI 2.0 introduces two creation modes built for different levels of creative control. Easy Mode guides users step by step through the full creation workflow, from story and references to storyboard, clips, and final timeline, giving creators a clearer path from idea to finished video. Pro Mode gives users access to Canvas, a connected creative workspace where they can organize, branch, edit, and refine story, assets, storyboard, and video generation in one place.

The new release also introduces advanced creation capabilities, including rapid variant generation, 2x2 keyframe generation for each 15-second video segment, and support for cinematic 4K video generation with virtually limitless extension - offering an industry-leading capability for continuous, long-form content. Within the Canvas workspace, users can directly edit story details, prompt PAI for variations, define references pre-generation, exercise precise control using both references and prompts, and seamlessly regenerate results throughout the process.

PAI 2.0 is built for prosumers and professional creative teams creating video content with clear intent and higher expectations for quality, consistency, and control. The platform is designed to support creators building short films, episodic stories, fantasy and historical videos, music videos, kids' animation, cinematic visual pieces, brand storytelling, and production-level content that requires greater continuity across characters, locations, scenes, and final outputs.

As part of the launch, Utopai Studios is introducing updated subscription-based pricing for PAI 2.0, including monthly and annual plans, direct credit top-ups, and customized enterprise plans. Existing PAI users will have access to a phased migration plan, with PAI 1.0 remaining available until July 2 to allow users to complete ongoing projects. Remaining PAI 1.0 credits as of June 2 will be matched 1:1 and added to each user’s PAI 2.0 account.

The only constant is change. For the past several years, much of the conversation around artificial intelligence has centered on generative systems—tools that can produce text, images, audio and video. These have captured the public imagination and, understandably, generated both excitement and concern across the industry. But a potentially more consequential shift is now beginning to take shape: the rise of agentic AI.

Before going further, let’s be clear about what this article is and is not. This is a thought experiment, not a forecast. The future described here may be a decade away, may look entirely different in practice or may not arrive at all. The value of the exercise is not prediction, but rather the perspective it can give about what is possible. As the saying goes: All models are wrong, but some are helpful.

With that framing in place, here is the central argument: the journalist of the future won’t directly write the story — they’ll train the agent that does. If that idea sounds like science fiction, read on. The pieces are already in motion.

What Makes Agents Different
Generative AI systems respond to stimuli (prompts). Agentic systems “act” and seek to accomplish broader objectives. Unlike a generative model, which responds to prompts, an agentic system can pursue goals, make multistep decisions and interact with other systems or agents on behalf of a person, organization or system. It is not so much a tool as it is a delegate.

Understanding this matters because it tells us where the real disruption lies. Generative AI changed what machines could produce. The evolution of agentic AI will change what machines can be trusted to do. The newsroom could be one of the clearest places we will see agentic technologies playing out in our industry.

The argument that follows rests on a specific assumption: that news will increasingly be assembled dynamically for each user, rather than consumed as static content. To be clear—not fabricated—assembled intelligently from trusted sources in response to what a user needs, when they need it and in the context of that moment. Whether that assumption proves correct or even desired is genuinely uncertain, but if true, it will change many roles.

There is already directional evidence of the possibility. AI-powered tools are generating summarized, citation-linked news experiences today. Users of search interfaces receive synthesized answers that draw from multiple publishers without directing them to any one source.

This is not entirely new—search engines have surfaced news snippets for years. What is changing is the sophistication of the synthesis and the degree to which audiences are satisfied without clicking through. The path toward dynamically assembled news is already being walked.

How News Is Encountered Now
If news is increasingly assembled by agents rather than read as discrete articles, then the journalist’s job cannot remain centered on writing those articles. And the current trends in how audiences consume news means that this future is more plausible.

Not everyone goes looking for news. Younger audiences, in particular, tend to encounter it while doing something else—scrolling through short-form video, moving through algorithmic feeds. News finds them; they do not seek it out. Push notifications and platform algorithms have become the primary editorial voice for a significant and growing share of the audience.

This matters because it means editorial control is already shifting—not to AI agents, yet—but to technology platforms and their recommendation systems. An agentic future would be an extension of a trend already underway. The cultural conditions for this shift are already forming.

One further implication would be that as news becomes more individually assembled, shared cultural experience erodes further. Monoculture—the common reference points that once came from everyone watching the same broadcast—have already shrunk dramatically. Agentic personalization would accelerate that fragmentation. The thesis we discuss carries consequences that are arguably negative.

What Changes in the Newsroom
If the journalist of the future trains the agent rather than writes the story, what does that look like?

The fundamental activities of journalism—interviewing sources, attending events, obtaining documents, verifying facts—are not going away. These are what give journalism its credibility, and they cannot be automated. What changes is that rather than assembling every story manually, a reporter feeds their gathered knowledge into a system trained on their expertise, voice and editorial standards.

Over time, that system—a digital extension of the reporter—responds to queries, synthesizes developments and surfaces context using what it has learned. The human journalist remains the source of credibility. The agent becomes the mechanism that scales it.

The implications ripple outward. The editor’s role shifts from revising individual pieces to governing the parameters within which agent systems operate. The news organization becomes less a publisher of discrete articles and more an operator of a trusted information system—one whose quality is determined not by today’s headline but by the integrity of everything that trained it.

This is not a reduction in the need for human expertise. It is a redirection of how expertise is applied. And it places an enormous premium on the thing that has always mattered most in journalism: the quality and credibility of the reporter behind the byline.

If agents are assembling and delivering information to users without directing them to the original source, the traditional advertising and subscription models face obvious strain. How publishers get paid in this world does not yet have an obvious answer.

Emerging ideas around usage-based or token-based compensation for content access are being discussed, but none has yet gained traction. These are not technical problems. The economic and governance problem may take longer to solve than the underlying technology takes to mature.

Why This Model Matters Now
The reason to think through this scenario today is not to prepare for an imminent transformation. It is to avoid being surprised by a gradual one. Technology shifts in media never arrive all at once—the transition from tape to file-based workflows took the better part of two decades—but the organizations that engaged early tended to fare better than those that waited for certainty.

The journalist of the future may not directly write the story; they’ll train the agent that does. If that future arrives, what will matter most is not whether AI is telling the news. It is who shaped the agent doing the telling, what they fed it and what standards they held it to. These are human decisions. They always will be. And the time to start making them thoughtfully is now.

As new advances in efficiency and vendor interoperability fuel momentum behind broadcasters’ reliance on production in the hybrid private/public cloud domain, cost challenges posed by AI resource scarcities are moving to the top of industry suppliers’ to-do lists.

The latest, frequently AI-enhanced solutions that came to light at April’s NAB Show have made the hybrid cloud model more attractive than ever amid waning enthusiasm for exclusive reliance on either public cloud or proprietary hardware resources.

In the case of Grass Valley’s customers, for example, “whether broadcasters choose to host aspects to their production workflows on premises or in the cloud can be decided on the basis of architectural complexity and what makes sense for the tasks at hand,” Chief Product Officer Adam Marshall said. “That’s what they’re looking for.”

Like just about everywhere else, AI is playing an ever-greater role at Grass Valley. Marshall said the company uses AI “to accelerate our ability to deliver what our clients need” and to provide a “third-party front door” that allows customers to add their own AI application layers.

The need to secure cloud operations, including vulnerability analysis of the type delivered by Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model, has added to AI processing requirements. Grass Valley will make the technology available if and when Anthropic lifts current restrictions on its release, Marshall said.

Inference Costs
A late 2025 report from Deloitte Insights underscored the immensity of the AI usage challenges facing all industries. That report found enterprises everywhere “are discovering their existing infrastructure strategies aren’t designed for AI’s demands,” Deloitte said.

The mismatch results from “inference,” or the incessant processing required as AI models generate new information based on changing conditions. “While inference costs have plummeted, dropping 280-fold over the last two years, explosive growth in overall AI spending… has dramatically outpaced cost reduction,” Deloitte said.

“Dependence on high-performance compute in the public cloud can get expensive,” Jonathan Gryckiewicz, business development director for cloud solutions at Ross Video, said.

Businesses are adjusting to the new realities “incredibly fast,” he said, but for now, “it seems largely the case that to get benefits from AI, we need to connect the media environment to the [public] cloud” where processing is “gobbling up GPU capacity and prices are getting higher and higher.”

Ross Video’s latest cloud- and AI-related contributions include support for its XPression real-time browser-based graphics creation and monitoring tools via a scalable on-demand service called XPression.cloud, which can be used instead of local XPression hardware. XPression.cloud uses AI to identify appropriate XPression templates and expedite graphics-related asset retrieval, creativity and generation.

XPression.cloud offers customers “a more sophisticated way to manage graphics on their own” without “shipping boxes around,” Gryckiewicz said.

Matrox Video is also riding the market surge toward hybrid cloud-optimized converged production solutions. For the past two years, Matrox has promoted its ORIGIN media-aware content transfer fabric as a way to control high-performance multiprotocol transport and scalability without dedicated hardware. ORIGIN was again a big focus for Matrox at this year’s NAB Show, but with a different emphasis this time, Product Manager Daniel Robinson said.

“We hadn’t seen very many use cases emerging until now,” Robinson said, noting uptake this year involves the likes of industry suppliers Amagi, EVS and TSL, as well as the Canadian multiservice giant Rogers Communications. The difference lies with Matrox’s success in using AI to make it easier for customers to put ORIGIN to work in their products and services, Robinson said.

“We’re not running AI on the software but using AI tools to build things quickly,” he explained, which means executing on projects that might have taken days or longer in a matter of hours. “It’s about shortcutting discovery of information. If you didn’t do that, you’d have AI searching through thousands and thousands of lines of documentation with outcomes that may or may not be the right ones.”

AI Supply Chain
Such uses of AI on the build side of supplier innovation are fueling acceleration in product development for cloud- and hardware-based solutions alike. While these applications don’t incur the ongoing inference processing costs associated with AI applications used in live production workflows, they are vulnerable to hardware capacity and cost trends, noted Stephan Stadler, chief product officer at Appear.

“Being a hardware manufacturer, the AI supply chain is top of mind,” Stadler said, citing Appear’s use of AI not only in “how we plan and build things” but in discovering new opportunities and creating sales messaging. “The big challenge is memory chips for everyone who builds hardware products in this industry,” he added.

Appear has moved into the hybrid cloud production space with the recent introduction of the VX Media (VXM) Gateway, which uses open-source interfaces to enable interoperability with other vendor solutions in commodity cloud support for the dispersed REMI production versatility enabled by its hardware-based X Production portfolio.

“VXM doesn’t replace XP,” Stadler noted. “It’s just an extension of that.”

The company’s release of VXM—even as it registered another big hardware win, with Fox Sports using its X platform to deploy its REMI production workflow for the 2026 FIFA World Cup—reflects the growing pull of the virtualized hybrid cloud opportunity across the traditional broadcast-production hardware supply chain.

Another case in point is the expanded support for cloud production introduced by Sony Electronics’ Nevion unit. Nevion has integrated MOXELA, a new cloud-native software platform, with its cloud-based VideoIPath media orchestration layer to transport, process and monitor production workflows encompassing output from cameras and other equipment supplied by Sony and by other vendors.

“The big problem we’re solving with MOXELA is producers’ need for flexibility to adapt to different workflows by running various processing functions for different streams in parallel across on-prem and public cloud clusters,” Nevion Head of Product and Solutions Jan Helgesen said.

The Impact of MXL
MOXELA aligns with common frameworks like SMPTE ST 2110 and NDI, as well as the emerging industry guidelines shaped by the European Broadcast Union’s open-source Digital Media Facility (DMF) initiative, including the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) specifying containerized microservice support for real-time, in-memory exchanges of uncompressed audio, video and metadata across multiple vendor software applications. This is a big step toward enabling cloud-based live sports and other productions, but there’s much more to come, Helgesen said.

“We’re currently on a cloud production journey from Tiers 3 and 2 to Tier 1,” he explained, noting that getting to Tier 1 still “requires some technical development that’s not completely there yet.” It’s a staged road map that will also bring AI into play to automate the complex troubleshooting, planning and setups that big cloud productions will require, he added.

Implementations of MXL in vendor product lines—facilitated by the Linux Foundation’s release of the first MXL Software Development Kit (SDK)—are fast becoming the norm. This is because the shift toward hybrid cloud production has made just-in-time activations of COTS resources with cross-vendor interoperability essential to cost containment.

Sony, along with a new commitment to the protocol by Ross Video, adds to a list of MLX supporters that includes Appear, AWS, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Intel, Lawo, Matrox, NVIDIA, Riedel Communications and Telos Alliance.

Pay As You Go
For Lawo, the growing consensus around the hybrid cloud approach to broadcast production is right in stride with its longstanding promotion of the Lawo HOME management and orchestration platform. HOME runs on commodity servers in private or public clouds to enable discovery, authentication, security management and monitoring of all production-connected devices from a single user interface.

To address cost uncertainties as the hybrid cloud production model takes hold, Lawo has introduced Flex, a payment system built on credits that makes it easier for customers to adjust to changing dynamics in private vs. public cloud resource usage.

“You can buy and use Flex credits like chips in a casino to spend on any HOME app,” Chris Scheck, head of marketing content for Lawo, said. The hybrid cloud model “is where we’re heading,” he added, but uncertainties mandate offering customers as much flexibility as possible in choosing how to spend on cloud resources.

For example, while customers would rather maximize use of private resources, “right now, servers have almost tripled in price because of chip shortages, and it can take six months to get them,” Scheck said. At the same time, as Grass Valley’s Marshall observed, in the public cloud space “we’ve seen processing costs rising at record rates, up 40% during the first part of the year and now up 80%.”

Factor in the complications added by the AI squeeze and it’s clear the hybrid cloud model might not be the cost-saving slam dunk it once appeared to be. But in a live-production environment that needs to accommodate fragmented workflows delivered through ST 2100, NDI, SDI and other pipelines while enabling browser support for executing editing tasks across dispersed locations, the advantages of cloud-based accessibility, agility and efficiency are too compelling to be ignored.

This puts a premium on cloud cost-containment know-how. As Marshall noted, at a moment of growing confusion among producers, figuring out what will work for each customer has much to do with knowing which questions to ask.

NEW YORK—As media companies face growing problems with AI bots and crawlers, the IAB Tech Lab has issued guidance that is designed to help publishers and content owners better evaluate and manage how non-human agents, including AI systems, access their content as they work to adopt the Tech Lab’s CoMP API framework for managing content crawling.

The new guidance, which is now available for public comment until June 26, 2026, outlines different approaches content owners and publishers can take to inform access from non-human user agents with the aim of helping the ecosystem make more informed decisions alongside the adoption of the CoMP API V1.

“Giving content owners clear, practical guidance is key if we want adoption to move forward in a meaningful way,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “This work helps simplify a complex area so companies can make decisions that fit their business while supporting a more sustainable marketplace.”

The IAB Tech Lab noted that following the release of the CoMP API V1, it became clear that many content owners and publishers have not yet developed formal strategies around their approach to bots and crawlers, which sit outside the scope of the API itself.

To address this gap, the CoMP Working Group developed this guidance to outline the range of available approaches and the advantages and trade-offs of each strategy. This gives stakeholders a clearer understanding of how to manage access from all non-human traffic, including AI systems in a way that aligns with their business goals.

More specifically, the guidance is designed to support the adoption of the CoMP API by helping content owners navigate an area that can be operationally complex and resource-intensive and is aimed at non-technical leadership to give them the questions they need to ask.

Those questions will ultimately help them understand the value and hard costs associated with each lever they pull. With clearer direction on these strategies, organizations can make more confident decisions, reduce risk, lower their operating cost, and operate more efficiently as they engage with AI systems. Establishing these strategies is also critical to enabling partnerships between AI systems and content owners, which are necessary to build a sustainable and scalable content marketplace.

A number of industry participants involved in the development of the guidance also emphasized the importance of clarity and practical direction as the ecosystem evolves.

“Content owners are being asked to make important decisions quickly, often without clear frameworks,” said Shailley Singh, EVP & COO, IAB Tech Lab. “This guidance helps break down the options so they can choose an approach that aligns with their goals.”

“The AI revolution has caught many publishers with their front doors wide open, essentially leaving the lights on for bots and crawlers to pilfer intellectual property.” added Scott Messer, principal & founder, Messer Media, “This IAB Tech Lab guidance is the essential roadmap content owners need—a practical framework to navigate the complex maze of decisions, tech, and tools available to protect their business. By empowering publishers to identify who is really there, this guide helps them distinguish between a value-driving 'ally' and a resource-draining 'extractor'. Managing AI bots is no longer just a technical background task; it is a critical business strategy for protecting what you’ve built and restoring a fair exchange of value for your content.”

Similarly, Dave Bellous, vice president of strategy, Metal Toad, explained that “non-human traffic now dominates most of the open web, and AI agents and crawlers are steepening the curve. Blanket bot-blocking is no longer a useful strategy. For publishers, advertisers, and ad-tech alike, distinguishing beneficial automation from invalid traffic through graduated, standards-based controls has become a baseline requirement. The Bot and Crawler Guidance from IAB is a much-needed tool in crafting a modern web strategy.”

Tom Koch, head of sales, ads and marketing ecosystem at TwelveLabs also highlighted the importance of the guidance in addressing the problem of bots and crawlers: "As AI agents increasingly serve as proxies for consumers, publishers and platforms need clearer frameworks for transparency and control. The crawler management framework is an important step toward giving content owners greater visibility into how their content is accessed and used. TwelveLabs is proud to contribute as this work is foundational to ensuring video, the richest form of data, is no longer overlooked in how AI engages with the web."

The guidance was developed by the CoMP Working Group, with public comment providing an opportunity for industry feedback ahead of finalization. IAB Tech Lab will continue working with members to support implementation and encourage adoption of both the guidance and the CoMP API.

IAB Tech Lab invites the industry to participate in the public comment period until June 25, 2026. To review the guidance, https:///iabtechlab.com/botmanagement/.

LOS ANGELES—In a notable example of how major Hollywood studios are embracing AI-powered production tools, Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the GenAI Creators' Fund and its first green-lit projects.

The initiative aims to give creators of all styles and backgrounds access to professional-grade AI tools and funding, bringing together established filmmakers, digital creators, and technology startups to produce high-quality cinematic entertainment.

Amazon MGM Studios also revealed three green-lit animation projects originating from the fund: “Cupcake & Friends” from BuzzFeed Studios; “Love, Diana Music Hunters” from creator Albie Hecht, now chief content officer at pocket.watch; and “Punky Duck” from creator Jorge R. Gutierrez. All three series will premiere on Prime Video at a future date.

The production will use Project Nara, Amazon MGM Studios' purpose-built AI production platform for cinematic storytelling, built on AWS.

Project Nara is used exclusively by Amazon MGM Studios and by creators selected for the GenAI Creators' Fund.

As a collaborative production workspace in which creative teams can generate video, make edits, provide feedback, and track progress in real time, Project Nara supports both animation and live-action production workflows. Amazon MGM Studios says the the technology reflects one of the company’s core beliefs: human creativity leads, and AI supports.

“Creative breakthroughs happen when visionary storytellers are given access to transformative tools,” said Albert Cheng, head of AI Studios, Amazon MGM Studios. “The GenAI Creators’ Fund and Project Nara position human creativity at the center of our efforts to integrate generative AI into our production processes at Amazon MGM Studios. We’re proud of the work that these filmmakers have accomplished and look forward to sharing these creators’ visions with the world.”

The fund is backed by Amazon MGM Studios and AWS to assist professional filmmakers in developing GenAI workflows. It provides grants for proofs of concept and shorts from creators who have built massive audiences on digital platforms but have not had access to professional production tools. Finally, it also gives startups building production solutions access to expertise from Amazon MGM Studios and AWS, who can judge the technology’s usefulness in actual cinematic workflows.

Amazon MGM Studios describes the first round of greenlit projects originating from the fund as follows:

• “Cupcake & Friends”: A relatable cupcake and her friends face the hilarious and thrilling challenges of a sleepover, with unexpected twists at every corner. Created by BuzzFeed Studios.
• “Love, Diana Music Hunters”: Based on pocket.watch creator partner Diana, the most-followed girl in the world on YouTube, this young band of K-pop space-traveling musicians races to Planet Goo, where they must perform a concert to restore the music and save the aliens. Created by Albie Hecht at pocket.watch, former president of entertainment at Nickelodeon and developer of  “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
• “Punky Duck”: A lovable punk duck and his best friend, Smiley Cat, tear through a wildly exaggerated Los Angeles, hilariously stumbling into alien invasions, giant monsters, robot criminal conspiracies, telenovela-style family drama and supernatural mayhem—all while trying (and usually failing) to do the right thing. Created by Emmy-winning Jorge R. Gutierrez, writer/director of the animated feature “The Book of Life” for 20th Century Studios and creator of “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” for Nickelodeon and “Maya and the Three” for Netflix.

Project Nara is an end-to-end collaborative workspace that integrates AI production agents with professional tools already used by creators, such as Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Adobe Suite, Amazon said. It combines best-in-class third-party video models with a proprietary model portfolio trained on Amazon MGM Studios' existing IP, solving complex cinematic challenges like character consistency, smooth motion between shots, and cross-shot continuity that no single model can address alone. AWS’s cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities enable storytelling at scale, according to Amazon.

Project Nara’s key features include: a model-agnostic architecture that routes each task to the optimal AI model; compounding intelligence that makes every subsequent production faster and more efficient; production-aware AI agents that carry full creative context across titles; a camera-to-cloud data bridge preserving on-set data end-to-end; and complete provenance tracking for IP protection, Amazon said.

AWS provides Amazon MGM Studios with global cloud infrastructure and services that enable end-to-end AI content creation.

"Amazon has quietly and methodically assembled the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry, spanning from infrastructure to creative tools to distribution and funding of creative content,” said Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports, AWS. “Project Nara illustrates how AWS can help filmmakers of all kinds bring AI to the full creative pipeline, from concept to screen, using a wide range of familiar models and tools on a cloud trusted by the entertainment industry. With investments like the GenAI Creators’ Fund, our collaboration with Innovative Dreams around hybrid filmmaking, and partnerships with leading generative AI providers like Luma and fal, AWS is building an ecosystem for human creativity powered by AI.”

MILAN—Streaming tech providers Brightcove announced two new capabilities in its AI Suite for video advertising: AI Contextual Ads and Smart Ad Breaks.

Both features are now available to customers.

"AI has transformed a lot of the video workflow over the past two years, captions, transcripts, metadata generation," said Facundo Alvarez Morales, product lead at Brightcove. "With AI Contextual Ads and Smart Ad Breaks, we're bringing it to a different layer: the decisions inside the platform that decide what a video earns. That's where we believe AI should be working hardest in this industry."

The two capabilities join a Brightcove AI Suite that has seen improvements relating to captions, transcripts, metadata generation, and content discovery in the past year.

Brightcove is also reporting that it plans twenty major releases in the last twelve months, including Prism, a fully redesigned interface launched in the past weeks.

The launch arrives at a moment of structural change in the advertising market, Brightcove executives said in making the announcement. The global contextual advertising market is on track to reach $258 billion in 2026 and $379 billion by 2030, driven by the deprecation of third-party cookies and the demand for brand-safe environments.

In addition, connected TV is the fastest-growing premium ad format, with the US market reaching $33.5 billion in 2026, a 28% year-over-year increase that outpaces every other established digital channel.

The rapid growth of both contextual advertising and connected TV put pressure on the ability of platforms to maintain the quality of the contextual signal feeding the ad call, and the precision of the moment the ad is placed, Brightcove explained.

The two new features are designed to help users overcome those problems.

AI Contextual Ads reads video content scene by scene and categorizes it against the IAB contextual taxonomy at both the video and scene level. The resulting signals are passed into the ad server at the moment of the ad call, giving advertisers contextual targeting at the resolution of the individual scene rather than the asset as a whole, a single video can pass different signals to different ad breaks. The ad selection mechanism itself does not change; what changes is that scene-level contextual becomes a real input alongside the dozens already weighed by the ad server.

Smart Ad Breaks analyses each video and recommends mid-roll cue point positions based on natural pauses, scene transitions, and brand safety signals. Editorial teams review and approve the suggestions before they go live.

"Scene-level contextual targeting at scale runs into one practical problem: the manual effort it takes to produce the signal." said Janpaul Pescollderungg, product manager at Brightcove. "AI Contextual Ads removes that bottleneck, and Smart Ad Breaks lets editorial teams scale their judgment across the library rather than the slice they have time to watch. The result is the heavy lifting comes off the team, and the judgment stays where it belongs."

OTTAWA and IROQUOIS, Ontario—Ross Video said it will invest C$122.5 million ($90 million) to expand its manufacturing and research and development (R&D) capacity across its facilities in Ottawa and Iroquois, creating 125 new high-skilled jobs over multiple years in engineering, manufacturing and R&D.

Ross Video reported that the investment will help the company advance AI-enabled media processing, more scalable live-production workflows, software-defined broadcast infrastructure, modular deployment options for customers, next-generation processing performance and other capabilities.

The expansion is being made with the support of Invest Ontario, which is providing a combination of financial support, including a conditional grant of up to C$6 million ($4.43 million) from the Invest Ontario Fund and other services.

In addition to the financial support, Invest Ontario will provide strategic guidance connecting Ross Video with key players in media technology and advanced manufacturing across Ontario, while helping the company navigate workforce and training opportunities.

In a separate announcement, Ross Video said that the expansion of its manufacturing and research and development operations in Ontario will also accelerate the next generation of Ultrix, the company’s flagship hyperconverged media processing platform.

More specifically, the expansion will help advance development of new Ultrix capabilities, including AI-enabled processing, modular standalone deployment options and a redesigned architecture built for greater scalability and future innovation. The enhanced platform is expected to significantly expand processing capacity while enabling more flexible and efficient live production workflows for broadcasters and media organizations worldwide.

The announcement was made at Ross Video’s Ottawa facility alongside representatives from the Government of Ontario and Invest Ontario, including Minister Vic Fedeli, Minister Stan Cho, and Invest Ontario CEO Khawar Nasim.

“Ross Video is a true, homegrown success story that speaks not only to the high caliber of Ontario-made technologies but to the resilience of our workforce and investment landscape,” said Vic Fedeli, Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, Ontario. “Through their expanded footprint in Ottawa and Iroquois, Ross Video will continue to unlock new opportunities for Eastern Ontario’s highly skilled workforce and reinforce the province’s global leadership in advanced manufacturing and tech innovation.”

Ross Video said it began discussions with Invest Ontario at an important point in the company’s growth as it evaluated how best to continue scaling its Ontario operations while investing in innovation, manufacturing, and talent.

Ross Video’s expansion reflects its commitment to growing in Ontario while scaling the delivery of next-generation tools to customers in more than 110 countries. Generating approximately 93 per cent of its sales through exports, the company is a major contributor to Canada’s global media-technology presence and is leveraging the Ottawa-to-Cornwall corridor’s deep engineering talent pool, research strength, integrated manufacturing supply chains and digital media network to support its growth.

“Ontario has been an important part of Ross Video’s growth and innovation story for decades,” said Troy English, Ross Video chief technology officer and senior vice president. “This investment will help accelerate the next generation of Ultrix with expanded AI-enabled capabilities, greater flexibility, and increased processing performance, while continuing to invest in Ontario talent, innovation, and manufacturing.”

Ross Video says the project reflects long-term confidence in Ontario as a place where advanced technology companies can continue to innovate, compete globally, and create meaningful opportunities while remaining rooted in Canadian communities.

Ultrix has become a core platform for broadcasters and live production teams by consolidating multiple traditionally separate media processing functions into a single software-defined system. The next phase of development is focused on helping customers simplify increasingly complex production environments while supporting emerging requirements around AI, cloud integration, and distributed workflows.

“Ross Video represents the kind of Ontario innovation that competes and succeeds on a global stage,” said Khawar Nasim, CEO of Invest Ontario. “Through the Invest Ontario Fund, we are proud to support the company’s continued growth and the advancement of leading-edge media technology being developed and manufactured here in Ontario.”

In announcing the expansion, Ross Video also highlighted the strength of Ontario’s broader technology ecosystem, including skilled talent, post-secondary institutions, government partners, and industry networks that continue to support innovation and advanced manufacturing across the province.

“What’s exciting about this project is the opportunity to continue building for the future while staying rooted in Ontario,” added English. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work with partners across the province as we grow our capabilities and continue developing world-class technology here at home.”

Ross Video’s Ontario operations bring together engineering, software development, and advanced manufacturing capabilities that support customers in more than 110 countries worldwide.

For more information about Ross Video, visit its website.

NEW YORK—As more government regulators and digital platforms start to require disclosure of AI-generated content, a new study from MediaScience found that labeling a video ad as AI-generated does not hurt how it performs.

The results showed no decline in any performance measure and increase in AI creation awareness across all four labeling conditions tested. For well-made ads, disclosure is not the threat the industry assumed it was, the researchers reported.

The study comes at a time when the regulatory pressure around AI in video advertising is ramping up.

New York's AI Transparency in Advertising law takes effect June 2026. The EU AI Act introduces binding disclosure obligations in August 2026.

These developments raised important questions for advertisers, who have been wondering if compliance and labelling would impact ad performance.

To address those issues, the study tested four labeling approaches across 900 U.S. respondents, reflecting frameworks under active consideration by U.S. and EU legislators: a text label in the first three seconds of the ad, a delayed text label from seconds four through six, a full-duration text label and a full-duration icon. Each was tested against a control with no labeling.

The data shows no adverse change in ad performance across any of the labeling conditions. Brand choice, ad memory, brand recognition, brand attitude, ad liking, and perceived production quality all showed no significant difference from the no-label control, the MediaScience survey found.

"There has been a lot of anxiety in the industry about what happens when you tell people an ad was made with AI," said Dr. Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience. "The data gives us a clear answer: if the creative is good, disclosure does not hurt it. Advertisers do not need to be afraid of the label."

Displaying a disclaimer during the first three seconds increased viewers' awareness that the content was AI-generated by 28%. Running the label continuously throughout the ad increased awareness by 36%.

While 42% of respondents preferred the visual icon, it was the least effective at increasing AI awareness. On ad memory, text labels outperformed the control score of 36 across all conditions: 46 for the 3-second label, 40 for the delayed label, and 49 for full-duration. The icon scored 38, near the control.

The study also found that audiences feel the strongest need for AI labeling when it generates humans (60%), followed by animals (46%), product placement (45%), and voices (45%).

The study was conducted by MediaScience in collaboration with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at Adelaide University, a marketing science academic center, and MediaPET.ai, an AI video content platform developed by MediaScience.

LEXINGTON, Ky.—Viamedia.ai has released a major upgrade to its Geo-Graph advertising and marketing service that turns geography into an intelligence layer that helps advertisers plan better campaigns and improve performance in a post-ID world.

A key component of the upgrade is the integration of Uber’s H3 hexagonal grid system.

Viamedia says that Geo‑Graph with H3 transforms geography from a static filter into an intelligent planning, activation, and insight layer, unlocking neighborhood‑level precision, consistent cross‑channel execution, and privacy‑first targeting at scale.

Unlike traditional geo‑targeting, which varies by channel and platform, Geo‑Graph with H3 uses a single, shared spatial framework for planning, activation, and measurement. This reduces guesswork, increases buyer confidence, and improves performance outcomes before dollars are spent.

“Agencies are being asked to guarantee performance with fewer signals and more fragmentation,” said Evan Rutchik, president & chief strategy officer at Viamedia. “Geo‑Graph with H3 gives them something they don’t get today: a shared geographic truth across planning, activation, and measurement. It’s how geography finally becomes reliable enough to replace IDs, not just supplement them.”

Another key feature of Geo‑Graph is pre‑activation audience validation. This allows media planners and buyers to see estimated reach, audience density, and the final LFID footprint, using Viamedia’s proprietary identifier. All of this is possible within each geo before a single campaign dollar is spent, thereby shifting optimization upstream in the planning process. In doing so, Viamedia said that Geo-Graph reduces wasted spend and increase advertiser confidence in campaign outcomes.

“As advertisers adjust to signal loss, they need new ways to accurately target their ad campaigns and still deliver the performance that helps grow their revenue,” said Joel Hall, Chief Product Officer at Viamedia. “The shift to H3 modernizes geographic targeting, bringing the capabilities more in line with how brands and agencies want to plan and activate campaigns today. This helps advertisers see performance where people actually live—not just where impressions landed.”

Geo-Graph maps billions of data points into a highly granular, location-based audience intelligence platform. By mapping data to the most precise micro-geographic levels, the Geo-Graph enables detailed audience analysis and campaign planning. This service provides the foundational dataset and visual tools needed to execute targeted marketing strategies at any scale—from hyper-local to national and beyond. Advertisers and agencies are already realizing these benefits in managed service campaigns, and will soon have access to the same features in programmatic guaranteed efforts.

Geo‑Graph is designed to scale from local to national, intelligently adapted based on the size of the market selected. The platform automatically adjusts so that performance remains fast, insights remain usable and browsers and workflows don’t break.

For more information, visit www.Viamedia.ai.

The French advertising giant Publicis Groupe has entered into an agreement to acquire San Francisco-based  LiveRamp, a global data collaboration platform, for $2.167 billion in an all-cash transaction, based on an acquisition price of $38.50 per share.

LiveRamp, which has over 1,300 employees, offers a data collaboration network for AI-powered marketing that enables companies to unify, manage, and activate data across the digital ecosystem. 

Currently, it connects over 25,000 publisher domains and 500+ technology and data partners across 14 markets, and enables thousands of brands, retailers, media platforms, and data providers to collaborate and connect their data.

"LiveRamp joining Publicis Groupe is the latest demonstration of our commitment to investing in new talent and innovation, ahead of market shifts,” said Arthur Sadoun, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe. “After acquiring Epsilon in 2019 in the name of personalization at scale and enabling​ our clients to take back control of their data from the walled gardens, by shifting from cookies to identity, once again we are looking ahead to what’s next. By building the future of data co-creation, we’re empowering our clients to generate new, exclusive and proprietary data, to build the smartest, most differentiated AI agents on top of the leading LLMs.”

This, he added, “will be valuable for our clients’ business growth” and create “a new addressable market for Publicis.”

“With LiveRamp, Publicis will become a leader in data co-creation, an important capability in the age of artificial intelligence and an enabler of agentic business transformation,” added Carla Serrano, Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis Groupe. “With this acquisition, for a total enterprise value of $2.2 billion, the Groupe furthers its investment in technology, data, and AI-services to unlock new opportunities for the agentic era. In doing so it will  expand its addressable market, allowing it to raise its 2027-2028 objectives on net revenue and headline EPS growth at constant currency.”

The purchase price represents a 29.8% premium to LiveRamp’s closing share price on May 15th, 2026, the last trading day prior to the announcement of the agreement. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Board of Directors of both Publicis Groupe and LiveRamp.

Following the acquisition, LiveRamp will continue to be led by CEO Scott Howe, who will report directly to Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun. LiveRamp will continue to operate as a neutral, interoperable platform.

The transaction is expected to close before year-end 2026, subject to regulatory approvals, approval by LiveRamp's shareholders and other closing conditions.

NEW YORK—In what could be its last upfront as a separate company, Warner Bros. Discovery’s annual upfront presentation showcased an expanding portfolio of advanced advertising capabilities and several new ad tech innovations, including shoppable pause ads, scene-level moments that allow advertisers to contextually targeting individual scenes in WBD’s premium programming and new AI tools for dynamic creative and agentic experiences.

It also unveiled a new “Always-On Measurement & Attribution Dashboard,” and “Unbreakable,” a cross-platform, solution that connects brands with audiences through participatory experiences on linear, digital and social platforms.

Company executives said that these enhancements and the company's expanding embrace of AI technology, are designed to deliver audiences a more relevant and engaging experience, while empowering brands to better connect with viewers through the iconic shows and films they enjoy across the WBD ecosystem.

“Our premium programming commands attention, and its cultural relevance is what further elevates us across the industry,” said Bobby Voltaggio, president U.S. Ad Sales, Platform Monetization, Warner Bros. Discovery. “By pairing our world-class content with these dynamic tools, we’re unlocking new and effective ways for brands to maximize their value and spend across WBD’s portfolio, all while enriching the viewing experiences for our audiences.”

The company described those new capabilities as follows:

• Scene-Level Moments. Scene-level Moments delivers unmatched precision in the market, contextually targeting individual scenes in WBD’s premium programming. This technology, powered by KERV.ai, matches brands to the right opportunity allowing viewers to discover greater product relevance during every moment of every show. In addition to HBO Max, Scene-Level Moments will be expanding to discovery+ and across the full WBD Stream footprint.
• Shoppable Pause Ads. This brand-new format is viewer-controlled, with unlimited time to engage. Every pause becomes a moment of relevance based on what's on screen, creating an opportunity to purchase, discover, or act, all without ever interrupting the viewing experience.
• This format takes standard creative and makes it actionable, opening shoppable advertising to an entirely new universe of brand categories that couldn't take advantage of it before.
• Dynamic Creative — Now Powering Brand Block. Dynamic Creative now powers Brand Block, our proven ad-lite creative. Messages now adapt in real time to what audiences are watching, as custom headlines and visuals shift the message dynamically, curating a brand's message in real time based on what's happening on screen. Headlines and visuals are tailored to the scene right before the break, informed by WBD’s proprietary contextual metadata, ensuring the right message, in the right moment, is delivered every time.
• Agentic Experiences. Brands will soon be able to be directly embedded inside the moment of intent, with AI-powered brand agents responding to what target audiences want to know in real time, and optimized to the outcome a brand wants to achieve, in the context of the content the viewers are already engaged with.

In addition the company launched Always-On Measurement & Attribution Dashboard, which is designed to accelerate the shift from conventional post-campaign reports to real-time insight and business outcomes for in-flight campaigns.

Built through direct integrations with leading measurement and attribution partners, the dashboard provides a continuous data loop between exposure and outcomes that offers:

• On-demand visibility into campaign performance across linear, streaming, and digital
• Direct matching to business outcomes, including brand lift, site engagement, and sales conversions
• Actionable insights and analysis delivered in-flight, enabling optimization while campaigns are still running

“Measurement is no longer a backend, post-campaign reporting exercise,” said David Porter, Head of Advertising Research, Data, and Insights, Warner Bros. Discovery. “With the Always-On Measurement & Attribution Dashboard, clients will better understand performance while the campaign is still running, combining the speed they expect with the independently verified outcomes they trust. That’s a powerful shift from reporting on performance to actively shaping and maximizing it.”

Another major ad Tech announcement was the launch of “Unbreakable,” a suite of new cross-platform ad solutions from Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising designed to connect brands with audiences through seamless, participatory experiences.

This fan-first approach is designed to move easily between linear television, digital environments, and social platforms, ensuring that brand experiences remain consistent and impactful regardless of where fans engage.

From real-time polling during live events, to fan-driven debates on social and on-air integrations that spotlight audiences, WBD executives said that “Unbreakable” turns single moments into immersive, ownable experiences that drive both engagement and cultural relevance.

“At Warner Bros. Discovery, fans are at the center of everything we do,” said Ed Romaine, GSVP, Head of Revenue Marketing, Warner Bros. Discovery. “Unbreakable is built to meet audiences in the moments that matter most to them—whether that’s watching live, reacting in real time on social, or continuing the conversation across platforms. For brands, it creates a powerful new way to be part of those moments in an authentic, scalable way.”

While sports programming will serve as the initial launchpad, “Unbreakable” is designed to be applied across WBD’s entire portfolio. It can incorporate real-time audience sentiment during town halls and debates in news, influence outcomes through live polling and bracket-style competitions in lifestyle programs, and power creator-led activations and fan participation in entertainment.

More information is available here.

When most people talk about artificial intelligence (AI), they usually mean Generative AI (GenAI). While this has brought a great deal of flexibility and freedom to video, audio and text creation, it is also responsible for a substantial amount of ill-conceived or poor-quality material. This has not only sullied the reputation of AI but also overshadowed the potential of a more practical form of the technology, agentic AI.

More of a background technology than GenAI—which has also been around a lot longer, the modern iteration being formalized between 2014 and 2017—agentic AI is less generally known, even though it began to appear around three years ago. The crucial difference between the two is that while GenAI reacts to prompts or triggers to create content, agentic AI is intended to autonomously establish and control a function or situation.

AUTONOMOUS WORKFLOWS
In the context of broadcasting, agentic AI is regarded as key to the development of applications—known as “agents”—to run specific technical tasks, such as monitoring, dealing with system faults or failures, and manage a variety of functions across production and distribution chains.

"Unlike GenAI, which creates content on demand, agentic AI orchestrates entire content workflows autonomously," explains Stephanie Lone, global leader of solutions architecture, Media and Entertainment, Games and Sport at AWS. "This means systems can coordinate complex multi-step processes without constant human intervention at each decision point."

The basis for this, Lone adds, is multiple "specialized agents" working together proactively to natural language requests. This combination—and simultaneous operation of applications— forms the basis of systems from other developers, including Witbe's Agentic SDK, which was launched in February this year. Intended as a "test automation framework" to run and scale monitoring, testing and validation over video workflows, Witbe chief executive Mathieu Planche describes it "a suite of different agents" designed to automate test processes.

"Test automation used to be a script that people had to develop," he says. "We have moved away from this manual process into something that is, while not human-less because we still have [a] human to control what the Agentic SDK is doing, but it's a process that is largely simplified."

The first of the agents in the suite is Test Designer, which was developed to understand the testing strategy of the video service being analyzed and then write test cases based on that. "Agentic AI technologies can observe inputs, plan… actions and do most of the heavy lifting in different workflows that are otherwise taken care of by people," Planche adds.

As with previous methods of automation, the developers of agentic AI systems are quick to emphasize that the aim is not to replace human operators. Fares Birke, principal practice lead for Applied AI at Qvest, comments that the goal is to enable people to "work better, faster and with fewer interruptions" by automating tasks that are either repetitive or require a lot of coordination.

"Agentic AI is about achieving outcomes, while GenAI is primarily about creating outputs – text, audio, video—in response to prompts," Birke says. "This makes agentic AI far more relevant for complex media environments where speed, reliability, compliance and coordination matter as much as creativity."

‘ENRICHED METADATA’
Agentic AI-based systems are now proliferating in the broadcast sector for a variety of applications. These include: searches of archives, transcripts and live feeds; managing ingest, logging, review and delivery; triggering MAM, newsroom, post-production and distribution systems; and ensuring operational and editorial rules. This can be seen in the number of recent system launches, including ThinkAnalytics' ThinkMetadataAI. Launched at IBC 2025, with a U.S. debut at last month’s NAB Show, it uses agentic AI to automatically create "enriched metadata" for content catalogs.

ThinkAnalytics co-founder and chief technology officer Peter Docherty comments that over the past 20 years the company had focused on deep metadata enrichment for personalization and viewer engagement but in the last three to four years has moved into targeted advertising.

"A lot of agentic processes enable automation and operational efficiencies that weren't there before," he says. "That's obviously quite different from GenAI because agentic AI helps streamline operations. What we've done with our Metadata AI is combine GenAI with Agentic and other capabilities to automate processes that were previously manual. This enables huge automation at scale but with intelligence behind the decision-making."

At the NAB Show last month TVU Networks 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.”

KEEPING QUALITY—AND THE TRUTH IN CHECK
A crucial area of broadcast and streaming distribution that has undergone a high level of automation and streamlining in recent years is compliance and Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring. AI—and agentic in particular—is now offering the potential to take this further through new systems such as Bitmovin's Observability, which was introduced last October.

"We're leveraging AI in different areas of our product range, including the Observability product for looking at sessions, playback, QoS metrics, root cause analysis and error debugging," explains Jacob Arends, product manager for playback at Bitmovin. "AI is really good at summarizing data, for example, so we are using that in our Observability products to make it easier for customers to understand complex datasets [and] what actually went on in a session."

In the last year or so, doubts have arisen surrounding GenAI chatbots, especially with systems “hallucinating”—basically making things up— or just agreeing with a question. Because compliance monitoring is a crucial failsafe in the broadcast distribution chain, there can be no such doubts; any automation technology must be 100% trustworthy.

"Our Agentic SDK is not creating bugs within our customers' platforms," states Witbe's Mathieu Planche. "They detect errors and flag them for people to review and analyze. Then people decide if they are escalating them internally or if they just discard it."

As for the future, Planche acknowledges that agentic AI technology for broadcast is still "new for everyone" and that media control rooms, staffed by operators, are "not going away right now."

At AWS, Lone observes that the potential for Agentic AI in media production "is massive" but says the broadcast sector does have to be careful with it. "The industry still needs to establish strong guardrails around data governance, transparency, content provenance and responsible automation practices," she comments. "Once these are firmly in place, companies can have more confidence in AI-driven decisions and feel comfortable deploying the technology on a broad scale."

Standards and oversight are absolutely necessary for such an autonomous technology as agentic AI could be. But, right now, the broadcast sector appears to be weighing up whether there is already enough automation in key processes or if these new agents are the key to more efficient and fault-free operations.

Broadcasting are among the industries hit hardest by the increasing use of artificial intelligence, according to a new report from Wiingy.

The research firm, a worldwide provider of professional tutoring services, ran a test based on three years of post-ChatGPT data—search trends, keyword volumes, government wages, employment records—and compared them to predictions made by Oxford (2017) and WEF (2025) about the potential of task automation and future hiring.

The Oxford Future of Employment study (2017) ran 702 U.S. occupations through a machine learning model that looked at the tasks each job involves and calculated an automation probability from 0% to 99%. Meanwhile, WEF's Future of Jobs report (2025) asked 1,000-plus employers across 55 countries what they expect to hire more of—and less of—by 2030.

The two studies broadly agreed that physical, hands-on, interpersonal, and creative-performance skills are hard for AI to replace, while text processing, data handling, and routine digital tasks are very easy for AI to replace.

To arrive at these numbers, Wiingy used Google Trends to track how much people searched for each of 29 defined skills every month from January 2020 to March 2026—covering more than two years before ChatGPT launched and more than three years after. The researcher wanted to know whether search demand for a skill would go up or down once AI tools became mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Job numbers are U.S. only for radio and TV.

“The number we use to measure this is called the Temporal Resilience Score (TRS). It is simply the average search interest after ChatGPT divided by the average search interest before ChatGPT,” the researcher said.

Predictably, the professions expected to be the most AI-proof for the foreseeable future were labor-intensive, hands-on work like yoga and fitness at +21% and massage therapy at +11.3%, along with artistic professions such as professional dancers and musicians.

But when it came to jobs that included text processing, data handling and routine digital tasks, the outlook was more negative.

Topping the list was broadcasting, which, based on Wiingy's research, saw 36.2% job loss between May 2022 and May 2024 and real wages down 19.5% during the same period.

“This is the largest real wage decline of any occupation in the study,” Wiingy said. “AI content tools are visibly restructuring media employment at both the wage and headcount level simultaneously.”

Following, but far behind in comparison, were data entry with 14% of jobs eliminated between 2022 and 2024 and copywriting at 11.5% and web design at 11%.

But it wasn’t all bad news for media production. Wiingy noted that AI is not killing video editing jobs, just changing it. While some roles are shrinking, the report suggests a "barbell effect" for technical creative skills like video editing. Despite AI tools like Runway or Sora, search demand for learning video editing remains high, the researcher said.

“Someone learning video editing in 2025 is not competing with Runway or Sora,” the researcher said. “They are learning to direct AI video tools, understand what good editing looks like, and supervise AI output. The skill is changing, not disappearing. Search demand persists because the human oversight role persists.”

The full report is available here.

GHENT, Belgium—Limecraft has released Limecraft 2026.3 featuring improvements to make production and post-production workflows more structured and reliable as well as easier to automate at scale.

Limecraft, an AI-powered production platform, enables content creators to store, manage and share projects from initial rushes to thousands of masters. Limecraft workspaces can be customized for specific formats, such as scripted TV, documentaries and non-scripted entertainment, and can manage massive volumes due to finetuned AI services at its core.

The third platform update in its 2026 release cycle, Limecraft 2026.3 focuses on three key areas: file verification with ASC Media Hash List (MHL) support, extended AAF export configuration and faster transcription with broader language coverage.

Ingest workflows now support ASC Media Hash List files using Limecraft Edge. MHL files are created upon card offloads, establishing a persistent, interoperable record of file integrity. As part of this enhancement, users can choose the checksum algorithm employed for file verification. In addition to legacy MD5, Limecraft now supports xxHash64 and xxHash3 64-bit algorithms.

To improve interaction with the editorial workflow, Limecraft 2026.3 extends AAF export templates introduced in the previous release. Users can now define more precisely which material lands on which track in the resulting edit sequence.

Advanced track mapping automatically composes the intended sequence track by track, including master clips or auto-generated group clips, camera and audio device selection, auto-select camera angles, custom labels and per-subtrack labels for multi-channel audio. This is particularly relevant for multicamera, multitrack and high-volume productions where manual timeline preparation is repetitive and prone to errors.

Additionally, Limecraft 2026.3 introduces improvements to automatic transcription. Processing performance has been significantly improved, now accurately transcribing one hour of audio to text in less than a minute. This helps journalists, researchers, editors and subtitle operators use timecoded transcripts more quickly.

The release also broadens transcription language and locale support. Limecraft 2026.3 adds 35 newly supported languages and locales, including Latin American Spanish, Pashto, Somali, Maori, Luxembourgish, Belarusian and Kyrgyz, as well as a broad set of African languages, including Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Wolof, Lingala, Shona, Sepedi, Nyanja, Ganda, Oromo, Kamba and Luo.

Limecraft 2026.3 also offers a range of smaller improvements across the platform. These include workspace-level metadata, improved performance for bulk uploads via shared links, the addition of metadata changes in the Workflow & Activity pane, refinements to configurable AAF export templates and fixes relating to custom status display, table sorting, comments in shares, clip detail URLs, DNxHR transcoding and card offload job visibility in Limecraft Edge.

Limecraft 2026.3 is available now. Limecraft will host a live webinar on May 7 demonstrating the new features and their impact on production and post-production workflows. RSVP at https://us02web.zoom.us/.

See Limecraft at the Media Production & Technology Show, May 13-14, at Olympia London in stand F70.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEW YORK—Major League Soccer (MLS) has announced the 2026 list of companies that will be participating in its MLS Innovation Lab.

The initiative, which is focused on identifying, deploying and scaling the next generation of sports technology and is now in its third year, brings together leading startups from around the world to actively test and prove cutting-edge solutions in three areas of focus: player performance, fan engagement, and media production.

This year's cohort is focused on testing AI solutions that league said are pushing the boundaries of how soccer is played, analyzed, and experienced.

"With each new cohort, MLS Innovation Lab continues to surface technologies that have the potential to meaningfully impact how the game is played, experienced, and consumed," said Chris Schlosser, MLS senior vice president of Emerging Ventures. "This group represents a strong mix of real-world AI technologies that can have immediate impact across athlete performance, television production, and fan-focused innovation, and we look forward to working with each of them to drive important outcomes for our players, fans and Clubs."

The MLS Innovation Lab aims to give participating companies the opportunity to build and test their technologies in real-world MLS environments such as the 2026 MLS All-Star Game presented by Chime, as well as elite youth competitions like MLS NEXT Fest and Generation adidas Cup and premier events including MLS NEXT Cup and the MLS NEXT All-Star Game presented by Allstate.

This real-world testing gives MLS an early look at emerging AI technologies that can shape the future of the industry for years to come.

After a competitive global selection process, the five companies chosen for the third MLS Innovation Lab cohort will deploy solutions designed to address real challenges across the soccer ecosystem. The league described the companies as follows:

• Springbok Analytics: Springbok Analytics uses AI to transform MRI data into detailed 3D muscle analytics, enabling the precise tracking of muscle health, performance, and injury risk which supports data-driven decision-making for teams, leagues, and clinical research.
• Orreco: Orreco is a global leader in sports bio-analytics, using AI, computer vision, and biomarker data to optimize athlete performance, predict injury risk, and accelerate recovery, trusted by elite teams and athletes across major leagues worldwide.
• Fit:match: Fit:match.ai is a player identification and assessment platform that uses mobile devices, AI, and computer vision to capture detailed body data. It generates a full 3D avatar with measurable physical insights in seconds, providing clubs with standardized information to support talent evaluation, inform development decisions, and enable more consistent comparisons across players.
• Advanced Image Robotics (AIR): AIR makes broadcast-grade sports video production radically more accessible. Their AI-powered robotic camera systems combine automated tracking with remote operator control — enabling leagues, teams, and broadcasters to capture dynamic game and player footage at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional production.
• WMT AI Ticketing: WMT AI Ticketing optimizes pricing and distribution in real time by analyzing fan behavior, demand and market dynamics. These capabilities help sports and entertainment organizations move beyond static pricing, maximize ticket revenue and make faster, data-driven decisions.

For more information on MLS Innovation Lab, or to be considered for future cohorts, visit MLSSoccer.com/InnovationLab.

NEW YORK—XR (Extreme Reach) has announced what it is billing as a first-of-its-kind solution for paying AI-generated performers in ads.

At a time when advertisers are increasingly using AI replicas of actors or AI created characters, the payments system is designed to offer ethical, compliant AI talent payments aligned with the SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract, XR reported.

XR's platform is built to support AI performances in advertising without disrupting the underlying systems that govern celebrity and talent rights and compensation. While AI performances such as de-aging and likeness recreation have historically been reserved for big budget film and television series, their rapid adoption in advertising introduces new operational and compliance challenges.

To address those trends, XR has innovated its platform to fully support two new SAG-AFTRA performer categories, Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers, giving brands and agencies the compliant, scalable payment infrastructure they need to move fast and stay ahead.

“AI is going to fundamentally change how celebrities and synthetic talent are portrayed in advertising, and agencies, brands, and talent agents must be ready to support this shift,” said Tim Hale, managing director, XR Pay. “The rules around Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers are new territory for everyone in advertising and XR is here to help our brand and agency clients navigate this complexity, ensuring celebrity rights are protected, everyone gets paid correctly, and that all SAG-AFTRA obligations are met.”

For Digital Replicas, which SAG-AFTRA defines as AI-generated or AI-modified performances tied to a real performer, XR's platform will handle payments to performers or their estates under existing SAG-AFTRA structures, just as if they had appeared in the ad in-person. This covers a wide range of emerging use cases: from living celebrity actors whose performances are enhanced or remixed by AI, to iconic performers no longer with us whose estates have approved their Digital Replicas for use in advertising.

By contrast, for Synthetic Performers, AI-generated performers with no connection to a real person (living or deceased), XR ensures that equivalent compensation is directed to the SAG-AFTRA Pension and Health funds, in accordance with union requirements.

XR’s platform addresses the rapid adoption of AI in production by embedding AI performer classification and payment logic directly into existing workflows, enabling brands, agencies and production partners to scale AI usage with confidence. Additionally, XR Metadata will classify Digital Replicas and Synthetic Performers accordingly, ensuring talent rights are tracked from production to ad delivery.

New capabilities include:

Broadcast workflows in every industry are under pressure from a simple reality: more content is being created than ever before.

Today’s production environments are generating massive volumes of high-resolution media. At the same time, expectations for speed, accessibility, and content reuse continue to increase. Traditional Media Asset Management (MAM) systems, while foundational, were not built for this level of scale.

The result is a growing gap between what organizations produce and how efficiently they can manage and use that content. MAM is no longer a storage system. It is becoming a media supply chain.

Where Traditional MAM Workflows Break Down
In many environments, MAM still relies heavily on manual processes:

• Metadata is entered by hand
• Content is organized based on folder structures or naming conventions
• Finding specific clips depends on knowing where to look or who to ask.

These approaches can work at smaller scales, but they break down quickly as content libraries grow. Search becomes slower and less reliable, duplicate content accumulates, and teams spend more time locating assets than using them.

In live production environments, where turnaround times are measured in minutes rather than days, these inefficiencies directly impact output. If the team's metadata is manual, the workflow is already broken.

The Role of AI in Modern MAM Workflows
AI is not replacing MAM. It is making it work better.

The biggest difference is that AI reduces the manual effort required to manage and find content. Instead of relying only on file names, folders, or memory, teams can use systems that automatically generate metadata, making content easier to search.

Automating Metadata and Improving Search
One of the most immediate impacts of AI is in metadata generation.

Speech-to-text transcription allows spoken content to be indexed and searched. Object recognition can identify people, logos, or scenes within video, while scene detection breaks long-form content into usable segments.

This reduces the need for manual logging and significantly improves how content is searched. Instead of relying on file names or folder structures, users can locate assets based on what actually appears in the video. For broadcast teams working under tight deadlines, this can reduce search time from minutes to seconds.

Supporting Content Reuse and Faster Turnaround
AI also changes how content is reused. As organizations place greater emphasis on digital distribution and near-real-time publishing, the ability to quickly identify and extract relevant moments becomes critical.

AI-assisted workflows can surface key segments within longer recordings, making it easier to generate highlights, cutdowns, and supporting content without having to review hours of footage.

This is especially valuable in live production environments, where content often needs to be repurposed immediately across multiple platforms.

Operational Impact on Production Teams
The impact of these improvements is operational.

Teams can manage larger volumes of content without a proportional increase in staffing. Content is easier to access, share, and repurpose, improving collaboration across locations and departments.

Post-production timelines are shortened, and workflows become more predictable. When metadata is generated consistently, and assets are structured reliably, teams spend less time searching for content and more time using it.

What AI Doesn’t Solve
While AI addresses several challenges within MAM workflows, it does not replace the need for a well-designed system.

Storage architecture, signal flow, and overall workflow design still determine how effectively content moves through an organization. AI enhances these systems, but it doesn’t compensate for gaps in infrastructure or poorly defined processes.

Successful implementation depends on integrating AI into a broader production environment, rather than treating it as a standalone solution.

If you’re reviewing your own workflow, a MAM readiness assessment may help highlight where manual processes are still creating bottlenecks.

Takeaways
As content volumes continue to grow, the ability to manage and use media efficiently is becoming a defining factor in broadcast operations.

AI-powered Media Asset Management is helping close the gap between content creation and content usability. Automating metadata, improving search, and enabling faster content reuse allow teams to work at the scale modern production demands.

For many organizations, the question is no longer whether AI should be part of the workflow, but how effectively it can be integrated into the systems that support production from capture through distribution.

As the entire media sector, from broadcasters and streamers to emerging content creators, faces another year of rapid change, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering a wide variety of demos, solutions, educational sessions and hands-on training at NAB Show that it says will help attendees capitalize on rapidly changing consumer habits.

Many of these AI- and cloud-based tools are designed to help broadcasters, creators and streamers address some of the thorniest challenges they face, said Stephanie Lone, global leader, Solutions Architecture, Media, Entertainment, Games and Sports Industry at AWS.

“We’re at this amazing inflection moment” of rapidly changing consumer habits that are roiling the M&A sector, she said. “There is research showing that 88% of the streaming content consumed by Gen Z viewers is on their phone” and “users are spending more time watching vertical video than the time they spend time watching Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video on their phones … That puts pressure on broadcasters and streamers to reach these viewers on the devices and with the formats they want to see.”

One example of how AWS helps companies adapt rapidly to a “mobile-first” world, she said, is AWS Elemental Inference, being demoed in the AWS booth (W1701).

This fully managed service applies AI in parallel to live video encoding so that broadcasters and streamers can automatically deliver a vertical feed of live action with only a six- to 10-second delay. “We already have customers like Fox and NBCUniversal that are benefiting from those real-time creation capabilities,” she said.

AWS is also addressing technologies and workflows for the creator sector, which has a much-expanded presence this year.

“Every live broadcast isn’t just competing with their traditional competition; they are also competing with TikTok, Instagram and YouTube,” Lone said, citing a February study from Omdia that found global microdrama revenue will hit $14 billion this year and top $20 billion by 2030.

At the same time, AWS is showcasing technologies to help creators.

“We will have demos in the Builder Space [at the back of the AWS Theater, W1333] where people can go and get hands-on experience with various models,” she said. In addition, AWS is leaning into the creator space with an “AI Studio Startup Spotlight” at the AWS Theater on Wednesday (April 22).

Partnerships on Exhibit

AWS is also providing a host of demos from partners like AMC Networks, Sinclair, FanDuel, the NBA, Graham Media Group and Amazon’s Prime Video, as well as sessions where executives from Fox, Gray Media, Sky and others discuss how they use AI and cloud technologies in their operations.

“Most of our demos at the show are what I call the art of the real, not the art of the possible,” Lone said.

Other practical experiences include the new Builder Lab at the back of the AWS Theater, a place where attendees can see how easy it is to deploy these tools and play around with some of the AI models.

AWS is also hosting the Cloud Court Challenge, a collaboration with Toronto Raptors parent Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) that lets attendees put their basketball skills to the test while they learn how the cloud and AI can influence athletic performance and fan engagement.

Participants in the challenge, located in the West Hall lobby, will receive performance insights through detailed data analysis and computer vision and take home their own player card and social video.

Visitors to the Amazon Entertainment Loft (W235LMR) can see how emerging AWS technology powers Amazon Luna, Prime Video and Fire TV under the hood. The loft also offers opportunities to network, play the latest games, and talk with Amazon subject-matter experts.

The AWS Theater (W1333) is offering more than 20 sessions showing how companies are using Amazon’s cloud and AI solutions to improve operations.

© 2026 NAB

“For the past year, the media industry has asked, ‘What is possible with AI?’” says Google Cloud’s Global Managing Director, Strategic Industries, Anil Jain. “Now the conversation has shifted from experimental pilots to production-scale execution. And as we enter the era of agentic AI, the distance between a creative spark and a finished frame is shrinking even further.”

Whereas generative AI helps people produce content, Jain said, agentic AI goes further, “reasoning through multistep processes and using specialized tools to solve complex problems, always with human oversight.”

At NAB Show, Google Cloud is discussing its holistic AI strategy and highlighting the use of its technology by companies like Adobe, Dailymotion, Globo, Fox Sports, Sphere and Paramount to remove production bottlenecks from the creative process.

For instance, Brahma AI uses Google’s AI stack to deploy and scale high-fidelity digital likenesses that help humanize data sets.

Groupe CANAL+ is applying generative media models to extract value from its archives. Using Gemini’s multimodality, it can process video, audio and text to automate asset categorization.

GETTING PERSONAL

Media companies are also using AI to personalize audience experiences, as with Major League Baseball’s new Scout Insights in the MLB Gameday app. It uses Gemini to provide AI-powered color commentary based on millions of Statcast data points.

And AI is enhancing enterprise productivity. For example, Cadent uses custom AI agents built on Gemini Enterprise to automate complex tasks, leading to an increase in campaign return on ad spend and saving thousands of hours of manual internal work.

Global Director, Telco, Media & Technology, Albert Lai said Google’s tools are used by broadcasters and studios, social networks, streamers, news publications and pay TV operations, and noted that using agentic AI at production scale in such applications requires specialized infrastructure.

He said Google Cloud provides multimodal intelligence that understands and generates text, audio and video natively. Its DeepMind research has enhanced the capabilities of Gemini, Veo, Nano Banana and Lyria. Google’s infrastructure also offers custom chips that match media workloads, all protected with enterprise-grade security.

“Media companies are integrating agentic AI into a supply chain that they themselves describe as ‘AI in the loop,’” Lai said. “It means creatives are being deliberate in their application of agentic AI into their workflows to augment human creativity and storytelling.”

In just two years, Jain said, AI has moved from experimentation and pilot projects into production and now into the realization of business value across the media supply chain.

Companies are using it to create storyboards, extract metadata, automate the logging of clapperboards, generate subtitles and dubs, turn text into animation, identify ad breaks, change aspect ratios, create multiple pieces of content for highlight reels and personalize that content.

REPLUMBING THE PIPELINE

At a time when the creator economy has exploded and a platform like TikTok can create cultural change, Jain said media companies must reshape their content pipelines to meet consumer demands.

“We believe AI is a much larger and more impactful, transformative technological shift than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. But it’s also a time of tool fragmentation, which is a nightmare for CTOs, CIOs and chief data officers,” he said.

“Our mission is to help organizations think through and implement new ways of working. You can think about us as the AI cloud now, and we’re here for the long game.”

Google Cloud is in booth W2731. It also will participate in several sessions, including one on the Main Stage (N141) Tuesday afternoon.

Jain and Google’s Márcia Mayer will discuss “The Augmented Studio: Supercharging Creativity With the Power of AI,” along with Dustin Myers, executive vice president of production operations and technology for Fox Sports.

LAS VEGAS—Ross Video CEO David Ross kicked off 2026 NAB Show with an opening keynote that unveiled a broad portfolio of innovations designed to simplify workflows, increase flexibility, and enable high-impact live production across broadcast, sports, corporate, and live event environments.

Building on advances in routing, cloud, and audio, Ross demonstrated how its unified technology stack continues to evolve into a fully integrated, end-to-end production ecosystem.

During the keynote, Ross also highlighted the launch of Indigo, a new unified platform for video production workflows, ingest, editing, workflow automation, asset management, editorial and playout.

“The way audiences consume content keeps changing, not once in a decade, not once every few years,” Ross said during the keynote. “Constantly you're being asked to move faster, to create for more platforms, to do more with fewer resources, and to adapt without rebuilding everything you've already invested. We've spent a lot of time listening to customers about that challenge, about the friction of disconnected tools, about the need for workflows that are simpler, faster and more flexible. At Ross we believe the answer isn't just another tool, a better foundation, more connected way to create, manage and deliver content.”

That foundation, he added, is Indigo.

Indigo provides a browser-based platform for fast-turn, digital-first content production and is designed to simplify ingest, playout, and transcode with scalable, all-in-one systems.

“This powerful enterprise software represents an exciting new chapter for Ross,” he said. “Indigo is a pivotal product at a pivotal time in our industry.”

In addition, Ross highlighted significant advancements in infrastructure and control:

• NRG delivers next-generation SDI routing with UHD support and optional software multiviewer, reducing system complexity and cost
• Ultricore BCS NDI Control enables seamless discovery and control of NDI alongside SDI and ST 2110 workflows
• Ultricore-SVR provides high-performance, enterprise-grade routing control in a compact form factor
• ULTRIX-MOD-JXS extends ST 2110 connectivity across bandwidth-constrained environments
• UltriGPI bridges legacy GPI systems with modern IP workflows
• Ultrix Flexible Licensing and Ultriformat improve efficiency with dynamic resource allocation and built-in signal conversion
• openGear continues to offer a trusted, open ecosystem with expanded 12G SDI capabilities

Ross also continues to redefine live production switching:

• TouchDrive 5 introduces a powerful new control surface with expanded access and customization
• Carbonite HyperMax delivers scalable production with flexible licensing and resource sharing
• Carbonite Code Solo makes professional switching accessible through a software-based, NDI-native solution

Ross showcased tools that elevate visual storytelling:

• XPression enhances real-time graphics creation with browser-based monitoring and previsualization tools
• XPression.cloud enables scalable, on-demand graphics for live sports and events
• Ross Virtual Solutions (Voyager) leverages Unreal Engine for photorealistic virtual production
• PIERO brings AI-powered sports analysis and telestration
• Raiden streamlines weather storytelling with integrated newsroom workflows

Ross outlined a number of innovations in the area of camera movement and control:

• SmartShell v8.1 introduces real-time robotic visualization for improved studio awareness
• spidercam delivers cinematic aerial coverage across venues and environments
• X650 PT Head supports higher payloads with modernized control and AR/VS tracking
• Canon PTZ integration brings premium UHD imaging into Ross workflows with automation and AI tracking

Other new improvements and solutions included:

• Rio Replay delivers intuitive, operator-driven replay workflows with reliable, high-performance operation
• Lama Mix delivers professional-grade audio mixing in a flexible software environment
• Lama Connect enables seamless routing and protocol conversion across IP and cloud workflows
• Lama AutoMix uses AI-driven processing for consistent, high-quality speech mixes
• AudioEdge bridges traditional and IP audio systems with unified control
• OverDrive expands accessibility with new Studio and Omni tiers
• Quorum simplifies integration of remote contributors into live productions
• Quorum One offers an all-in-one production system for modern communication environments
• Ross Platform Manager (RPM) enhances operational control with centralized logging, analytics, and remote management

For more information, visit Ross Video at 2026 NAB Show 2026 in the North Hall at booth #N2005, or online at: https://www.rossvideo.com/go/events/nab-2026/

Sports producers battling rising costs amid audience fragmentation have much to explore at this year’s NAB Show, where an extended four-day Sports Summit complements an unprecedented display of tech innovations aimed at building fan engagement.

Across exhibit halls and in meeting rooms and hotel suites, visitors will find an AI-driven potpourri of ever-expanding options that portend a wild ride ahead for sports producers.

“Ideas can come from anywhere,” said Mike Davies, Fox Sports executive vice president of technical and field operations. “You just need to utter an idea, and it can be turned into reality in a matter of weeks or months.”

The AI impact can be seen wherever equipment and software solutions used in live sports production are on display, including exhibits featuring:

• Next-generation cameras.
• Automated production workflows.
• Real-time data applications supporting feature personalization and insights into user behavior.
• Advances in immersive audio and video.
• Innovations in user experience like multiviewing involving sports program or play-action multiviewing.

AI Abounds

“There’s more and more AI, not just in postproduction, but using AI for camera tracking and image capture within the event,” said Duane Yoslov, senior vice president at Diversified, known for its role in designing and building experience-rich sports and other environments.

“Some of the AI camera robotic tracking technology is really impressive.” He said many shots covering competition at the Winter Olympics “have never been done before.”

Indeed, the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics offered an especially dramatic demonstration of the transformation in live sports coverage enabled by advanced production technology, in this case supplied by Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS).

From its suite at the Encore Las Vegas, the company is explaining how “Comcast Sports360 from Comcast Technology Solutions enables us to deliver the speed, quality and reliability that Olympics coverage demands, supporting seamless, multiformat delivery across a wide range of platforms,” said Darryl Jefferson, senior vice president of engineering and technology for NBC Sports and Olympics.

NBC chose Sony Electronics, exhibiting in the Central Hall at C8401, to deal with the challenges posed for capturing the action in the widely dispersed, geographically diverse regions of the Milan-Cortina games.

As described by Jefferson, the game plan leveraged “high-quality monitoring, color grading tools and highly customizable remote production workflows” with the “use of 2110 transport, teams of color experts shading Sony’s HDR cameras from a distance, enhanced PTZ robotic cameras and support for our end-to-end BT-2020 HDR Workflow through production and our facility in Stamford.”

The many approaches suppliers of cameras and related gear are taking to address these new performance demands are on display across the Central Hall.

For example, as reflected in the long-distance Winter Olympics production operations, one response to the new requirements involves support for operators’ shift to IP-based production workflows. Because it often happens incrementally, the shift requires support for seamlessly switching camera feeds between SDI output and IP transport over ST 2110 or alternatives like Network Device Interface (NDI) or Secure Reliable Transport (SRT).

“We’re seeing a shift to IP-based workflows, especially in the high-end broadcast space,” said Peyton Thomas, a product manager at Panasonic.

At booth C3509, Panasonic is displaying 4K Studio and 4K Multipurpose Cameras supporting selection of multiple transport options without the use of an external camera control unit (CCU). Live IP feeds into production workflows can include hybrid workflows anchored in Panasonic’s KAIROS IT/IP software system to enable live A/V production processing with an unrestricted number of media effects utilizing SDI baseband or IP signals formatted to ST 2110, NDI or SRT.

Live Tech Gets Versatile
As for the suppliers focused on live production workflows, multiprotocol versatility is just part of what’s in play to add efficiency, remote operational flexibility and enhanced feature output to their platforms.

There’s also a widespread focus on fostering interoperability to address producers’ objections to vendor lock-in as they move to cloud-based software solutions.

One case in point can be found in the Central Hall, where Grass Valley (C2408) is promoting the GV Media Universe as a multivendor environment in which its virtualized Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP) operates as a single control layer, seamlessly integrating live production workflows across its own and other hardware and software solutions.

Similarly, TVU Networks, exhibiting in the West Hall (W1717), has responded to broadcasters’ migrations to cloud production by opening its MediaMesh-based remote production ecosystem to access by competitors.

An emerging force behind vendor interoperability, as well as virtualized cloud efficiency in live sports production workflows, is the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) software development kit (SDK), managed through the Linux Foundation-backed MXL Project and supported by industry organizations and vendors worldwide.

The open-source MXL SDK provides a commonly shared approach to working with packetized video, audio and data essences as individual microservices in container-virtualized datacenters.

“It is a way of breaking down the barriers, not having to encapsulate 2110 every time you want to do another bit of processing in the workflow,” said Daniel Robinson, product manager for MXL at Matrox.

Robinson says the company, exhibiting in the North Hall at N2451, is one of about six vendors “that have actually got it working in our product and have since the beginning.”

Another trend in full bloom at NAB Show involves two approaches to enabling multiviewing by sports fans, one that allows them to track multiple parallel games through a single, immersive viewing experience and the other enabling access to multiple camera feeds.

Multiviewing of one kind or another is now supported by several vendors at the show, including MediaKind (W1743), Harmonic (W2831), Techex (W2267) and Red5, which is running a live multiview display of camera feeds from the show floor at Nomad Media’s booth (W2357).

Marking another new development with much broader implications, Red5 is also one of a growing coterie of streaming platform providers, including Bitmovin (W3323), CacheFly (W3129), Cisco (W2633), Cloudflare (W2300G), Synamedia (W2851) and others, who are in the process of enabling real-time interactive streaming of sports and other live content via the emerging Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard known as Media Over QUIC (MOQ).

Red5 is demonstrating MOQ at the Nomad Media booth in conjunction with global CDN supplier CacheFly and in a display with Amazon Web Services (W1701), showing how a live-streamed sports production distributed in real-time over MOQ and at higher latencies over Low-Latency HLS and conventional HLS can be managed from a single browser.

© 2026 NAB

LONDON—Vizrt will showcase its newly launched AI Keyer, which expands the possibilities and accessibility of virtual and extended reality (XR) scenarios, during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The Vizrt AI Keyer enables background switching and augmented reality (AR) graphics insertion in every space, whether indoors or outdoors. The secure, proprietary solution is trained extensively on real-world footage across environments and lighting conditions to recognize human shapes as foregrounds and to separate backgrounds seamlessly so talent can move around while being locked into the virtual scene.

“Creating XR environments typically demands large infrastructure investments and requires specialized skills for daily operations. The Vizrt AI Keyer removes all these constraints so high-quality virtual scenes and AR graphics become a reality for live productions of every size,” said Edouard Griveaud, Senior Product Manager at Vizrt.

The Vizrt AI Keyer brings AR into any environment, whether it’s inserting remote speakers into a global town hall environment, switching the visual location of a presenter in a news segment or creating a completely virtual ad wall behind a player in a post-match interview.

Without needing green screens, complex lighting setups and time-consuming chromakeying, production teams can find new ways of engaging audiences and maximizing sponsorship value from anywhere.

“AI is transforming the world, and the creative industries are no exception. At Vizrt, we have been on this journey for years, embedding intelligence into our solutions, empowering storytellers, and delivering real, measurable impact for our customers,” said Rohit Nagarajan, CEO of Vizrt. “That is not a vision for tomorrow. That is happening today. The Vizrt AI Keyer is the latest proof point of our relentless commitment to innovation. Putting breakthrough technology in the hands of every creative, at every level, everywhere in the world.”

See Vizrt at 2026 NAB Show booth N2161.

More information is available on the company’s website.

DENVER—Wowza has announced the general availability of Wowza Video Intelligence Framework, a new solution that enables media and sports organizations to apply AI directly inside live streaming workflows, generating real-time metadata, clips, alerts, and machine-readable event signals while a stream is still live.

Built to run alongside Wowza Streaming Engine, the framework connects live video to AI inference and converts what happens inside a stream into outputs downstream systems can immediately use. A single moment in a stream can simultaneously generate metadata for ad targeting, trigger a clip, fire a webhook, and update a downstream system without a separate pipeline, manual handoff, or delay, the company reported.

Rapid delivery of clips and highlights could boost revenue, the company said. Research from StreamLayer's 2026 live sports monetization analysis found that event-triggered, contextually aware ads deliver 40% higher CPMs than standard ad breaks but only if broadcasters have real-time signal about what is happening in the content. When Messi scored his first MLS goal, over 4 million people watched the clip in the hour after it happened. A clip that surfaces the next morning is a different asset entirely.

"Live video is the most valuable, most perishable asset in media and sports, and most of it still goes unused," said Krish Kumar, CEO of Wowza. "The moment passes before anyone can act on it. Video Intelligence Framework puts AI inside the live workflow, where the value actually is, so teams can detect what's happening and do something about it while it still matters."

Wowza Video Intelligence Framework extracts frames from live streams, routes them to AI models for inference, and converts the results into structured outputs that downstream systems can immediately consume - including webhooks, JSON, ID3 tags, stream overlays, timestamped clips, and event logs.

Because the framework operates within the live video pipeline itself, the same detected moment can support multiple outcomes simultaneously, generating ad targeting metadata, triggering an editorial clip workflow, surfacing a production alert, and updating a scouting platform in a single pass.

The framework supports deployment on-premises, at the edge, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments, allowing organizations to run inference close to the source rather than routing all workloads through the cloud. Teams can bring their own AI models and tailor detection logic to their specific use cases, evolving their workflows over time without rebuilding the streaming infrastructure underneath.

In launching the solution the company laid out a number of use cases for media and sports:

• Contextual Advertising and Monetization. Generate real-time content signals, including sponsor-relevant context, natural break points, scene-level metadata, and route them into ad decisioning and dynamic insertion workflows while inventory is still live. The result is more targetable, higher-value ad placements without added latency or manual effort.
• Live Content Tagging, Metadata, and Clip Generation. Identify meaningful moments inside live streams and generate timestamped clips that feed automatically into editorial tools, clip libraries, and distribution pipelines. Content teams produce more usable inventory from the same event, without the manual review process that erodes timeliness and scale.
• Sports Highlights, Scouting, and Performance Analysis. In sports, the framework helps organizations surface the exact clip a scout or analyst needs before the next game, generate player- and event-specific highlights for distribution, and convert live feeds into structured data that flows into coaching, analytics, and performance systems.
• Camera Health and Operational Monitoring. Detect degraded image quality, obstructed lenses, and misaligned feeds in real time, routing alerts into monitoring dashboards and operations workflows before a broadcast is disrupted or a subscriber notices.
• Built to Fit Existing Infrastructure. Wowza Video Intelligence Framework is designed to work with existing Wowza Streaming Engine deployments, allowing organizations to begin applying AI to live workflows without a large-scale infrastructure rebuild. As models, use cases, and business needs evolve, organizations can adapt the intelligence layer without reworking the streaming foundation underneath.

Wowza Video Intelligence Framework is generally available beginning April 19, 2026. Wowza will be showcasing the framework at NAB Show 2026 and in dedicated media and customer briefings focused on live video, sports, and streaming innovation.

For more information, visit wowza.com/video-intelligence-framework

LAS VEGAS—swXtch.io has announced a new brand, swXtch.ai, and the swXtch AI Router, a platform that brings AI into live media production through a simple chat-driven interface.

The AI Router acts as a virtual broadcast engineer by translating operator intent into fully deployed, production-ready AI pipelines without requiring AI or networking expertise. The platform integrates with Microsoft Fabric and NVIDIA AI infrastructure to connect enterprise data and real-time AI inference directly into live workflows.

"With the AI Router, we remove the hardest parts of deploying AI in live production," said Brent Yates, CEO of swXtch.io. "Operators can describe what they need, and the platform teaches, guides, and builds the solution. The AI router leverages models from any provider, with enterprise data connected through integration with Microsoft Fabric."

In launching the new brand and production, the company noted that the gap between AI experimentation and production deployment remains the central challenge for media organizations and that the AI Router is designed to solve that challenge.

Using a natural language prompt, operators can route live audio and video from on-premises or cloud environments into AI models from any provider and deliver processed outputs globally in the formats their workflows require.

At the center of the platform is an AI Marketplace. The marketplace is a curated catalog of video and audio inference models across providers, with off-the-shelf integrations ready to plug into live workflows. Operators can test multiple models within the same pipeline, compare performance in real time, and optimize for accuracy, latency, or cost without reconfiguring infrastructure.

The platform integrates with NVIDIA NIM microservices for real-time AI model access and NVIDIA Holoscan for Media to bridge on-premises environments with cloud-based AI pipelines.

Through integration with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft 365 Copilot, the AI Router incorporates enterprise data, like Microsoft Teams communications, email, and operational context directly into live workflows. This enables context-aware pipelines that combine live media with business intelligence for real-time decision-making.

"Live media moves fast, and AI has to keep up," said Simon Crownshaw, CTO & worldwide strategy director, media and entertainment at Microsoft. "swXtch.io is putting the power of Microsoft Fabric directly into the broadcast workflow so media teams can act on data and AI in the moment, not after the fact.”

swXtch.ai will demonstrate the AI Router at NAB Show 2026 within the Microsoft booth (West Hall, Booth W1731) and in private meetings.

BURLINGTON, Mass. and SUNNYVALE, Calif.—Avid and Google Cloud have announced a multi-year strategic partnership to integrate generative and agentic AI into creative tools from Avid.

By embedding Google’s Gemini models and Vertex AI directly into Avid’s solutions, the two companies reported that they aim to transform video editing from a mostly manual process into an intelligent, AI-assisted experience, significantly reducing the time required for media discovery and production.

The integration will be on display during the 2026 NAB Show between April 18 and 22.

“Customers are asking for intelligent tools that plug into existing workflows and scale with their creativity,” said Wellford Dillard, chief executive officer, Avid. “This partnership with Google Cloud strengthens our ability to deliver secure, AI-driven innovation–while keeping Avid interoperable and adaptable across the broader production landscape. Through our collaboration with Google Cloud, Avid is redefining what’s possible in modern media production by expanding intelligent capabilities across our products.”

"By embedding agentic AI directly into the tools video editors live in, we’re moving beyond simple automation," added Anil Jain, global managing director, Strategic Industries, Google Cloud. "With Avid Media Composer and Google Cloud, an editor can now collaborate with an intelligent agent to create assets on the fly and handle the heavy lifting of matching styles and filling timelines, enabling them to focus on storytelling instead of infrastructure."

In announcing the integration, the two companies noted that as global demand for content increases, production teams face growing pressure to manage massive volumes of high-resolution media, while overcoming the limitations of legacy on-premises hardware.

To address these challenges, Avid is integrating Google Cloud’s AI and data analytics capabilities into two key areas of its technology stack: Media Composer, the industry-standard nonlinear editing system for professional film and TV; and Avid Content Core, a new cloud-native SaaS platform that serves as a unified, intelligent data layer for global media assets.

By leveraging Gemini and Vertex AI, these platforms can now analyze and understand media context automatically, allowing production teams to query content using natural language. It also enables agentic AI workflows – digital assistants capable of autonomously managing complex tasks, such as matching visual styles, identifying emotional cues in raw footage, and streamlining metadata logging.

Other key highlights include:

• Avid Content Core general availability: Now commercially available, this cloud-native platform acts as a unified data layer for global media. By leveraging Google Cloud’s BigQuery, Vision Warehouse, and Vertex AI Search, it transforms passive storage into an active library, allowing global creative teams to access and manage video files from anywhere.
• Gemini integration in Media Composer: Avid’s industry-standard editing system now features a multimodal extension powered by Gemini. This integration allows editors to streamline post-production – from intelligent metadata enhancement and automated logging to generating B-Roll –reducing the manual burden on creative teams.
• Agentic search and discovery: With Vertex AI and multimodal Gemini models on both platforms, the systems can understand the context of every file. Searching becomes a natural conversation where users describe what they need – based on visual actions, dialogue, or emotional cues – turning weeks of manual archive discovery into seconds of automated insight.

Avid and Google Cloud will demonstrate these new workflows at the NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 18-22, 2026). Visit the Google Cloud Booth (West Hall, #W2731) and the Avid Booth (North Hall #N2226) to see advanced media search and metadata management in action.

At the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas, LiveU will mark the U.S. debut of its new LU900Q, encoding platform. Powered by native LiveU IQ (LIQ), advanced eSIM technology, optimized 5G modems and a MIMO antenna array, LU900Q offers reliability and future-ready live transmission from virtually any location.

As a smart multi-tool, the compact platform offers advanced capabilities, such as 4:2:2 encoding and dual-camera support that enable high-quality production of news and sports applications ranging from field reporting and live events to drones and emerging workflows.

In a recent interview with TV Tech, Gideon Gilboa, LiveU’s chief product officer and general manager for Americas, discussed the new features of the LU900Q and the impetus behind its development.

Founded 20 years ago, LiveU started out as a company focused primarily on live contribution technology, particularly via bonded-cellular field units that were revolutionary for their time. But Gilboa said the company soon expanded its outlook to cover content workflows.

“There are more and more content sources coming into broadcast today; there are more and more content distribution pipelines going out, more workflows and 24x7 digital distribution,” he said. “And of course, there's less budget and less people to do all of that, so our customers are looking for workflows to handle all of that complexity.”

Intelligence driven by advances in artificial intelligence are helping to quickly evolve those workflows, Gilboa added.

“We believe the next few years are all about automating those workflows, and this has been and will be our focus from this NAB and onwards into the next few years,” he said. “So what does it mean for us? It means that we are taking this ecosystem that spans contribution, ingestion, production, distribution, and evolving it further in order to support these automated workflows.”

Although LiveU started out as a “closed ecosystem,” according to Gilboa, the company has opened up its platforms to encourage more integration.

“LiveU has evolved from a product company to more of a workflow company,” Gilboa said, adding that in the past few years the company has focused more on integration of third parties.

The LU900Q represents the next stage of LiveU’s workflow solutions, bringing a new focus on AI to help improve connectivity and workflows, especially in congested RF environments.

“The LU900Q is the first intelligent production unit that we're putting out on the market,” Gilboa said, adding that the product marks the first time that LiveU’s IQ intelligent cellular bonding technology is being integrated natively.

“The LU900Q has native eSIM, which means that you never have to worry about configuring your mobile data,” Gilboa said. “It's all built inside and we can change the profile of the eSIM and the operator that is on that eSIM, depending on where you are located and it supports two cameras.”

LiveU IQ uses AI to analyze all the historical data that LiveU has on cellular usage and the real time analytics from the encoder, and makes decisions on which models should be in which cellular network. It does not exist in any other mobile encoder, according to Gilboa.

“It basically looks at all the cellular networks that are available in your location, and knows how to move modems from one cellular network to another and manage them in a smart way to get the most out of it," he said. “In the Milan Winter Olympics, we saw units with LiveU LIQ delivering maybe 30% more bit rate, more bandwidth than standard units, because they know how to choose smartly in real time and move between the most robust seller network of those at that particular moment.”

That’s not the only area where LIQ is taking advantage of advances in AI, according to Gilboa.

“This unit has edge AI setting capabilities, and we'll show a few simple scenarios of how you could start transmitting with just clapping your hands and how you can recognize more objects to create more metadata,” he said. “But we have further plans to enhance the use of that edge AI, to make the lives of our photographers easier, and also to reduce costs of cloud processing, for AI, for object detection and metadata creation.”

Gilboa says he’s heard from numerous LiveU costumers who are looking forward to getting their hands on the LU900Q.

“[We’ve packed] the experience of the last 15-20 years into this product that we've been working hard on for awhile,” he said. “So we have customers who are very excited to receive the first units."

LiveU will be in Booth N1740 in the North Hall of the LVCC.

MELBOURNE, Australia—Mediaproxy will demonstrate its newly unveiled suite of AI-powered tools designed to transform how broadcasters and media organizations track the presence of brands in different forms of content over multiple platforms during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The new feature set, which has been integrated into the company’s LogServer compliance logging and analysis platform, is based on advanced machine learning models that can automatically detect logos and visual identifiers associated with companies and products. It allows customers to gain deeper insights into brand exposure and sponsorship performance while also ensuring that the accuracy and integrity of the digital information connected to the content or production does not change during distribution.

Key to the feature is an AI-driven detection engine that identifies brands as they appear across multiple channels and regions. Broadcasters can now streamline reporting and reduce manual reviewing and ensure more comprehensive compliance coverage. The solution scales effortlessly and seamlessly to support high-volume environments where rapid, reliable analysis is essential.

As the media landscape becomes increasingly complex, the ability to identify and track brand elements automatically gives organizations a powerful tool for understanding audience engagement and allows them to verify contractual obligations.

See Mediaproxy at 2026 NAB Show booth W1423.

More information is available on the company’s website.

OTTAWA—Ross Video and HighField AI have announced a partnership that they say will streamline graphics creation for news and sports production teams by offering "intelligent graphics creation" in the Ross Video production ecosystem.

“Broadcasters don’t need AI that forces them to rebuild their operation,” said Tehseen Akhtar, Senior Director of Product Management at Ross Video. “They need intelligent tools that support the workflows they already rely on.”

The integration between Ross and HighField AI solutions enables broadcasters to move from story context to on-air graphics faster, while maintaining brand consistency and the workflows operators already rely on.

The two companies say that this will help broadcasters who are under increasing pressure to produce more content across more platforms, often with smaller teams. By introducing AI-assisted graphics generation inside existing workflows, Ross Video and HighField AI aim to reduce manual production steps while keeping operators firmly in control.

More specifically, HighField AI analyzes story context within Ross Inception, identifies the appropriate Ross XPression graphics templates, and assists in generating production-ready graphics by assembling relevant content, including text, quotes, visuals, and data, while applying editorial and branding rules. Content assets can be retrieved through Ross Streamline, with graphics rendered and deployed through XPression.

For news and sports production teams, the workflow accelerates the creation of graphics such as lower-thirds, matchup screens, player profiles, and full-frame visuals, helping production teams deliver more compelling storytelling at the speed of live production.

“HighField AI turns story context into production-ready graphics in seconds,” said Ofir Benovici, CEO and co-founder of HighField AI. “With Ross, we’re introducing a conversational workflow for live production, making graphics creation as simple as asking for what you need. A producer can request a matchup graphic or player comparison, and the system builds it instantly using the broadcaster’s own templates and assets. With HighField AI, production teams can create graphics faster, maintain consistency, and keep full brand control, without changing how they work.”

The initial integration focuses on Ross XPression, Inception, and Streamline, with Ross Video. In the future, HighField AI is planning to expand AI-assisted workflows across additional Ross production tools.

Ross Video and HighField AI will demonstrate the integration at 2026 NAB Show between April 18 and 22.

Visit Ross Video at Booth #N2005 or learn more at https://www.rossvideo.com/go/events/nab-2026/.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid is launching new integrated newsroom capabilities for Avid for News at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18–22 in Las Vegas.

The company said it plans to demonstrate how Avid Content Core connects planning, production, and publishing across MediaCentral, Wolftech News, iNEWS, Avid NEXIS and Stream IO, enabling news organizations “to produce and deliver content within a single, coordinated workflow across multiple digital and linear platforms—without disrupting existing operations.”

With Avid for News now powered by Avid Content Core, Avid says the integration allows its News platform to now connect the full production lifecycle – linking newsroom systems, creative tools, and media infrastructure into a unified, story-centric environment. This approach enables news teams to develop and deliver stories in parallel across real-time digital platforms and scheduled broadcasts.

“Avid Content Core is an intelligent layer that sits across the entire newsroom production lifecycle, linking stories, workflows, and teams – helping organizations get more value from their media assets, while ensuring continuity as they transform their operations,” said Wellford Dillard, Chief Executive Officer at Avid. “With Content Core now available commercially, Avid has delivered a unified foundation that makes news and media organizations faster, more efficient, and better aligned.”

Avid for News provides real-time visibility into content, context, and progress as news stories develop. Unlike point solutions that operate in isolation, Avid integrates stories, teams, and workflows within Avid Content Core’s shared platform. Built with an API‑first approach, Avid Content Core provides an open platform that integrates with existing newsroom systems and third‑party technologies, allowing organizations to evolve workflows while still leveraging current infrastructure.

By linking editorial systems with professional media creation and storage, Avid for News enables:

• Coordinated planning, scripting, editing, and publishing within a single environment
• Visibility into content and story development throughout the production lifecycle
• Faster creation of platform-specific versions for broadcast, digital, and social
• Reduced duplication and fewer manual handoffs between teams
• Streamlined review and approval workflows within a unified workspace
• Advanced browser-based editing and multi-platform publishing for fast content creation and versioning across broadcast, web, and social formats

“At NAB Show 2026, we’re showing how news teams can move from siloed workflows to a unified, story-centric approach – without adding complexity,” said Arne Berven, SVP of Broadcast Strategy at Avid and CEO of Wolftech. “The future of news is not digital-first or linear-first – it’s both. With Avid for News, teams can now work from the same core story, collaborate in real time, and deliver platform-specific versions in parallel.”

Accelerating Production with AI-Powered Content Intelligence
Avid will also demonstrate how AI-enabled content intelligence within Avid Content Core enhances how teams discover, manage, and develop content—leveraging Avid’s deep understanding of media assets and workflows.

Key content intelligence capabilities include:

• Faster content discovery with AI-powered semantic search across newsroom systems, creative tools, and media storage
• Deeper content context by connecting scripts, media, versions, and outputs across the production lifecycle
• Improved access to related content to surface assets, versions, and previously produced materials across systems
• Reduced manual effort through AI-assisted workflows that automate repetitive tasks while keeping teams in control

Connecting Cloud and On-Prem Production Without Disruption
Designed to operate in hybrid environments, Avid for News enables teams to work seamlessly across on-premises or cloud-based systems—without requiring costly migrations or workflow changes.

At the show, Avid is demonstrating how organizations can extend their current environments with cloud-enabled capabilities, including integrations with the Avid NEXIS storage solution and Avid Stream IO—the recently updated video ingest and playout solution. These integrations enable more flexible, distributed production while maintaining the performance, reliability, and control required for professional news operations.

Stream IO also now includes content sub-clipping and trimming, giving operators more control and accelerating fast-turnaround workflows.

Previewing Newsroom Tech Advances

• Visitors to the Avid booth (N2226) will see previews of key Avid for News technology innovations, including:
• Advanced web-based editing with Avid Content Core (powered by CuttingRoom)
• Newsroom and rundown workflows integrating Wolftech News and iNEWS for efficient story-centric collaboration
• A next-generation, web-based Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) with Rundown powered by Wolftech

Avid also announced earlier this month that it will demonstrate Avid Content Core running on AWS, providing a “cloud native” foundation for connected media workflows built on AWS for news organizations, broadcasters, studios, and streaming services. At the same time, Avid said it is “renewing its focus” on Avid NEXIS and Avid Media Composer on AWS.

As UHD, HDR, live sports streaming, immersive audio and even 8K experimentation move into the mainstream, encoding has become a core business strategy. Broadcasters and streaming providers must elevate the viewer experience while reducing bandwidth and infrastructure costs.

Advances in AI-driven optimization, content-aware encoding and next-generation codecs enable operators to deliver higher-quality video at lower bitrates — fundamentally reshaping the delivery of premium video experiences.

Encoding as a Strategic Business Driver
Every additional megabit per second carries a cost — in CDN fees, transport, storage and processing power. At scale, even marginal bit rate reductions translate into substantial operational savings. Conversely, any visible drop in video quality risks churn, particularly in today’s competitive market where viewers can instantly switch services.

The challenge is inherently complex. Service providers must optimize three compression variables simultaneously: video quality, bitrate efficiency/processing power and latency. Improvements in one area often affect another. For example, reducing latency can come at the expense of the bit rate efficiency. Improving video quality by keeping bit rate low can increase computational load. Adding immersive formats increases complexity across the pipeline.

Modern encoding strategies recognize and treat compression as part of the overall delivery strategy, not just a codec setting.

The Rise of AI and ML Encoding Innovations
One of the most significant encoding developments in recent years has been the integration of machine learning into the encoding workflow. Several key enhancements are enabling broadcasters and service providers to deliver higher video quality, lower latency and greater efficiency.

Content-aware encoding
An advanced technique, content-aware encoding identifies visually important regions within video content — such as faces, text overlays or high-detail textures like grass — and prioritizes them for perceptual quality, (Fig. 1). Rather than treating every frame equally, content-aware encoding analyzes content characteristics in real time and allocates bits where they matter most.

Less critical areas receive fewer bits, preserving overall bandwidth while maintaining viewer satisfaction. Sophisticated rate-control algorithms can deliver significant bitrate savings, in some cases up to 50% without visible quality loss.

Real-time VMAF prediction
Today’s advanced encoding solutions can estimate perceptual quality metrics such as Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) during live encoding, enabling service providers to detect potential degradation before it reaches viewers. Real-time VMAF prediction models can achieve high correlation with offline measurements, up to 95%, allowing accurate quality assessment in live workflows and preventive encoding adjustments.

Automated quality analysis
Embedding AI into quality monitoring shifts service providers from reactive troubleshooting to proactive quality management. AI-driven regression testing and automated quality analysis enhance reliability by identifying deviations across nightly and weekly test streams. The result is a more resilient encoding pipeline where quality is continuously optimized. Service providers benefit by delivering better perceptual quality at lower bit rates, reducing distribution costs.

Intelligent node rebalancing
AI-driven algorithms assess system load, content complexity and processing demands to guide dynamic node rebalancing. This encoding approach enables more consistent resource allocation and stable video quality across distributed deployments.

GPU enhancements
GPU-accelerated enhancements play a pivotal role in the next generation of encoding. By integrating AI-driven pre-processing (like superscaling, denoising or deinterlacing) and GPU-enabled encoding control (like fine-grained Quantization Parameter -QP- control into the GPU pipeline), modern encoding platforms can deliver significant gains in performance and efficiency.

Preparing for the Next Generation of Codecs
While AI optimizations improve encoding efficiency within existing standards, broadcasters and service providers must also prepare their workflows and infrastructure for next-generation codecs.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) promises up to 50% bitrate savings over HEVC while maintaining exceptional visual quality and is the selected codec for next-gen broadcasting standards like DTV+. Historically promoted as a royalty-free codec alternative, AV1 continues to gain momentum in OTT ecosystems with an improved efficiency compared to legacy codecs. And Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) offers a scalable enhancement layer that can improve compression efficiency without requiring full codec replacement.

Audio codec innovation further expands the scope of modern encoding platforms. Object-based formats such as MPEG-H and Dolby AC-4 enable immersive, personalized experiences. Dialog separation and accessibility features enable broadcasters and service providers to deliver personalized audio experiences to audiences. Moreover, support for object-based metadata for both MPEG-H and AC-4 enables precise audio rendering and personalization.

To accommodate for all these changes, a key strategic consideration for encoding is flexibility. Broadcasters and service providers cannot afford disruptive, large-scale infrastructure replacements every few years. Scalable encoding pipelines — capable of supporting multiple codecs, base layers and enhancement layers — allow gradual transitions aligned with market and business demands.

Powering Next-Gen Video with High Density, Low Latency and Immersive Readiness
Delivering next-generation video experiences requires broadcasters and service providers to handle intensive workloads with precision and reliability. Advanced encoding architectures are being designed for high-density and error-resilient performance. This, in turn, is laying the foundation for higher resolutions, lower latency, immersive formats and emerging viewing experiences.

Certain applications such as live sports streaming highlight why high-performance encoding architectures are essential. For instance, live sports streaming and interactive applications require high quality and a low degree of latency. Optimized pipelines reduce glass-to-glass delay while maintaining compression efficiency. This is essential for betting integrations, synchronized second-screen experiences and social engagement.

At the same time, experimentation with 8K and immersive video formats is accelerating. Encoding technology providers like Harmonic are trialing OTT profile ladders derived from an 8K source stream, processed in the cloud using both CPU and GPU resources. The profile ladder showcased in Figure 2 was processed in the cloud and would have been cost prohibitive two years ago. These trials illustrate the industry’s move toward higher resolutions delivered efficiently through hybrid compute architectures.

Even if 8K remains niche in the near term, the underlying engineering advances — high-density processing, scalable cloud-native workflows and error-free multi-profile generation — lay the groundwork for spatial computing, VR and headset-based experiences.

The New Compression Imperative
Ultimately, the latest encoding innovations enable broadcasters and service providers to deliver superior video quality at lower bitrates while reducing costs. Content-aware encoding, AI advancements and emerging codecs all have a role to play in helping service providers deliver premium experiences with the utmost efficiency.

In an era defined by subscriber churn, cost cutting and relentless viewer expectations, video compression remains a strategic necessity. Service providers that treat encoding as a core priority will be best positioned to thrive in the next phase of video evolution.

MURRIETA, Calif.—DigitalGlue has announced it will be taking a different approach to AI applications during the 2026 NAB Show that is designed to help users overcome the confusion and complexity surrounding AI tools.

As part of an effort to simplify the use of AI applications, it will be showcasing the creative.space Platform, introducing creative.space Intelligence (CSI) for the first time and demoing its established creative.space Storage solution.

These solutions form a unified creative operating system designed to replace the fragmented workflow tools that slow down video teams, DigitalGlue reported.

The creative.space Storage solution is available today. CSI is currently in beta and is being introduced to customers, with broader availability planned following NAB Show 2026.

Instead of adding another subscription to manage, creative.space delivers what DigitalGlue calls Outcome as a Service. It replaces the mix of tools most teams rely on with one system that handles storage, collaboration, and AI-powered insight in a single workflow, helping teams reduce software spend, eliminate duplicate storage, and turn unused footage into usable creative assets.

“Creative teams are buried under tools that do not work together,” said Tim Anderson, CEO/CTO at DigitalGlue. “creative.space removes that complexity. With creative.space Intelligence, we are making content not just accessible, but actually usable in a way that fits how teams already work.”

The creative.space Storage solution serves as the foundation of the platform and is already used by video teams who want a more streamlined way to manage their media.

DigitalGlue said that with creative.space Storage, teams can:

• Store media once and eliminate duplicate copies across drives and cloud
• Edit locally or remotely without setting up separate systems
• Review and approve content without exporting, uploading, or relinking
• Transfer files without paying for third-party services
• Keep every collaborator working from the same, up-to-date media
• This allows teams to collapse their Frankenstack of tools, cancel overlapping subscriptions, and remove the manual work of managing files across multiple systems.

Making its debut at NAB Show 2026, creative.space Intelligence addresses one of the biggest challenges in video production: teams have more footage than they can realistically use because finding anything inside it takes too much time. CSI automatically analyzes footage and turns everything inside it into searchable, organized information. Instead of scrubbing through timelines or relying on memory, teams can simply ask for what they need using natural language and get instant results.

Users can search for a person, a quote, a topic, a logo, or even a type of moment, and CSI will return exact matches across entire media libraries in seconds.

Unlike traditional AI tools that require technical prompting or training, DigitalGlue said that CSI is designed to understand how creative teams naturally think and speak. It provides a conversational interface on top of its video analysis, so users can interact with their content the same way they would brief an editor or producer.

Beyond search, CSI acts as an iteration engine. It can automatically generate rough cuts, stringouts, and alternate versions of content, helping editors reach a first draft with less manual assembly. It also provides AI-driven feedback and second opinions, allowing teams to evaluate and refine content before presenting it to stakeholders.

The result is a more efficient and collaborative workflow where less time is spent searching, organizing, and transferring files, and more time is spent shaping and delivering content.

NAB Show attendees can see the creative.space Platform in action and schedule a live demo at booth N3152.

NOVI, Mich.—ENCO has announced a major evolution of its aiTrack dynamic content insertion technology for NAB Show 2026, transforming the original aiTrack workflow into a fully cloud-native, automation-agnostic platform designed for modern broadcast environments.

The company will demo the new features at Booth C2116 in the Central Hall of the LVCC during the show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas.

Built to meet the growing demand for timely, localized and engaging content, aiTrack enables broadcasters to instantly generate, customize and schedule AI-driven audio segments for live and automated programming.

Accessible through any web browser for the first time, aiTrack allows on-air and production teams to create broadcast-ready content in seconds using advanced generative AI models and natural-sounding synthetic voices. From breaking news, entertainment, weather and sports updates to sponsored segments and localized content, the platform delivers seamless insertion into live broadcasts or scheduled playlists across terrestrial and streaming platforms.

“aiTrack represents a fundamental shift in how broadcasters approach content creation and delivery,” said Ken Frommert, President, ENCO. “By removing infrastructure barriers and simplifying AI workflows, we’re giving stations of all sizes the ability to produce high-quality, real-time content that connects with audiences in more meaningful and personalized ways.”

aiTrack's architecture combines large language models, real-time data integration and advanced prompt engineering with high-quality synthetic voice technology. A unique “foundation prompt” framework streamlines complex AI processes into intuitive templates, allowing users to generate consistent, on-brand content simply by entering key variables such as location, format or sponsorship details, according to the company.

The platform’s automation-agnostic design ensures compatibility with any broadcast system, enabling seamless delivery of generated audio files into existing workflows from anywhere in the world. Its role-based interface supports collaboration across teams, while integrated scheduling tools allow users to plan and automate content delivery through a centralized calendar.

aiTrack also introduces significant advancements in audio realism and flexibility, including multi-voice capabilities, language localization and voice cloning technology derived from ENCO’s SPECai platform. These enhancements bring AI-generated audio closer than ever to human performance, enabling broadcasters to maintain a consistent and authentic on-air sound.

As broadcasters navigate staffing challenges and increasing content demands, aiTrack provides a scalable solution that reduces production overhead while expanding creative and revenue opportunities. Stations can deliver more frequent updates, personalize content for local audiences, and incorporate branded or sponsored segments—all while maintaining operational efficiency, according to the company.

“By combining dynamic content generation, flexible scheduling and cloud-based delivery, aiTrack redefines what’s possible in live broadcasting, empowering organizations to do more with less while enhancing audience engagement,” said Frommert.

NEW YORK—Amagi has launched Newspulse, an Agentic AI platform that automatically creates social-ready clips, vertical videos, and news bulletins by watching live news broadcasts and scanning VOD libraries.

"The newsroom's historical hesitation around AI has centered entirely on the fear of losing editorial control and brand integrity," said Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO at Amagi. "With Newspulse, we are changing that equation. Our policy engine ensures the AI acts strictly within the newsroom's defined guardrails, autonomously handling the heavy lifting of multi-platform formatting. This liberates journalists to focus on the story, and allows broadcasters to aggressively capture younger digital audiences without inflating their baseline production budgets."

The launch comes at a time when 93% of young adults (ages 18–29) get their news via digital devices, and 76% rely directly on social media for news (Pew Research Center), making it increasingly important for traditional broadcasters to either reach those audiences on digital platforms or risk losing them entirely. Yet most newsrooms still stitch together a patchwork of point solutions to repurpose broadcast content—a workflow that inflates costs and burns out editorial teams.

Newspulse eliminates this fragmented approach with a single, unified platform that handles the full pipeline—from broadcast ingest to social publishing. It scans live feeds in real time, identifies individual story segments, and converts each one into publish-ready content for digital channels.

For example, when breaking news unfolds, Newspulse instantly captures the moment and the story. Rather than applying a static centre-crop, the AI dynamically tracks on-screen subjects, lower-thirds, and graphics to intelligently reframe the video into multiple aspect ratios (16:9, 9:16, 4:5, 1:1). In parallel, it generates platform-specific captions., and post information, and publishes the tailored clips directly to the newsroom's digital end points —all within minutes, without an editor touching the timeline. The platform offers human-in-the-loop checkpoints for greater editorial control. Beyond individual clips, Newspulse can seamlessly sequence a series of these stories to generate comprehensive news bulletins of varying lengths.

Crucially, Newspulse places editorial control, brand integrity, and compliance at its core through policy-driven Agentic AI. Newsrooms define their brand voice, stylistic rules, and content priorities—such as focusing heavily on specific regional updates or local sports teams. The AI operates entirely within these guardrails, ensuring that autonomous formatting perfectly aligns with the network's overall mission.

Amagi Newspulse is currently in limited availability testing with select newsroom partners, with general availability expected in June 2026.

To learn more, visit https://www.amagi.com/products/newspulse

LONDON—Synamedia has announced that during the 2026 NAB Show, it will demonstrate AI by Quortex, a new set of just-in-time AI-capabilities for its Quortex portfolio that reduce costs and resources.

Synamedia reported that AI by Quortex is designed to identify opportunities to create value and activate capabilities "just-in-time" to support specific workflows, events, or other business needs, saving unnecessary spend and resources for video processing, distribution and delivery. This approach challenges the traditional model of always-on AI processing by applying intelligence only when it delivers measurable value.

"The difference between AI hype and real-world use cases comes down to measurable value creation," said Gwendal Simon, senior director of technology, Video Network, Synamedia. "AI by Quortex is a natural extension of our 'just-in-time' philosophy that eliminates the traditional wasteful approach of constantly using resources when the real value is only achieved at specific points in time. These new innovations pinpoint exactly when AI is needed across video distribution, processing and delivery – eliminating waste and enabling more impact."

Synamedia provides real-time intelligence and processing at scale, leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Bedrock and AWS Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). The Quortex smart sampling technology dramatically improves the efficiency of live video understanding by identifying the moments that matter — before invoking foundation models through Amazon Bedrock.

Rather than continuously processing fixed frame batches, AI by Quortex triggers AI only when meaningful changes or events are detected in the video or audio stream. This just-in-time approach can reduce live video understanding costs by up to ten times, while powering applications including content moderation, clipping, metadata enrichment, and enhanced searchability. In parallel, AWS EFA enables AI-based region-of-interest detection without impacting video processing instances, improving visual quality in critical areas while optimizing bitrate efficiency.

Synamedia said the AI by Quortex innovations could be categorized into three areas. It described those three areas as follows:

• Content Understanding comprises plugins that transform video into intelligent assets by automating chapters and highlights, enhancing discoverability, and enriching metadata. In real-time, Six Floor Solutions generates the metadata tags required for deep content understanding along with live automatic clipping and highlights. AWS powers the metadata enrichment and content detection capabilities, with Amazon Bedrock enabling advanced AI-driven content understanding and automated tagging.
• Real-time Processing tools improve video quality, enhance accessibility, and enable real-time enhancements such as captioning, translation, and content adaptation by applying intelligence directly into the video workflows. Third-party tools such as Lingopal for AI-generated, accurate real-time translating and dubbing for livestream and VOD, and Yuzzit for live clipping and automatic content verticalization are prominently featured within this pillar.
• Operational Simplicity capabilities reduce complexity with AI-assisted deployment such as natural language workflow configurations or automated report generation, proactive monitoring, and guided operational insights.

Synamedia's Quortex portfolio comprises: Quortex Link, a pay-as-you-use, self-service multi-tenant SaaS distribution platform; Quortex PowerVu, a secure, cloud-native video distribution solution; Quortex Play, a just-in-time, direct-to-consumer streaming platform; and Quortex Switch, the industry's first standards-based CDN switching solution for enhanced multi-CDN management.

AI by Quortex will debut in the Innovation Corner of Synamedia's booth, W2851, at The 2026 NAB Show. To schedule a NAB Show demo, visit this website.

NEW YORK—Versant Media Group, Inc. has acquired StockStory, an AI-powered platform delivering financial analysis, market insights, and stock recommendations, in a deal that will expand the company’s offerings in business news and personal finance.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

StockStory’s AI-driven technology will strengthen CNBC’s ability to provide data-driven insights with faster, more actionable analysis to help investors make informed investment decisions in real time.

“At Versant, we’re focused on extending our core brands into new platforms and services to drive growth across our portfolio,” said Deep Bagchee, chief product and technology officer for news at Versant. “This acquisition builds on that approach, adding capabilities that will enhance how we deliver insights and deepen engagement among retail investors across CNBC’s digital offerings.”

"We’re proud of what our team has built at StockStory - a platform combining AI and data-driven insights to help investors make better decisions," said Adam Hejl, founder and CEO of StockStory. “We’re excited to join CNBC, a defining and deeply respected global brand, and contribute to its next chapter of digital growth."

StockStory’s technology focuses on scalable analysis of public companies, combining data, machine learning, AI, and editorial frameworks to generate investment insights. These capabilities will further enhance the depth and quality of CNBC’s coverage.

As part of the transaction, Adam Hejl will join Versant and report to Deep Bagchee.

StockStory’s team will support ongoing product and technology initiatives, with an initial focus on enhancing CNBC’s digital investing capabilities.

LOS ANGELES—Allen Media Group (AMG) will deploy Anoki ContextIQ across AMG’s streaming portfolio, spanning live news, weather, sports and premium entertainment.

The move introduces scene-level intelligence across live and on-demand programming, enabling scalable, brand-suitable advertising in high-attention environments. The partnership establishes a modern framework for activating live and premium programming on CTV, supporting responsible scale for advertisers while strengthening the viability of trusted and community-driven content.

As streaming has become the primary destination for live news and premium programming, legacy brand safety approaches have not evolved at the same pace. Broad exclusions and static keyword filters can block entire categories of high-quality inventory, leaving trusted news and community environments under-monetized, while also limiting advertiser access to high-attention audiences, Anoki said.

By applying AI-powered, scene- and segment-level analysis across live and on-demand programming, AMG and Anoki are replacing static exclusions with structured suitability signals designed for dynamic news environments.

For live news, Anoki evaluates topic sensitivity and context in real time, tracking story continuity and transitions to ensure decisions stay aligned with what is actually on the air. Advertisers can extend reach in premium news, weather and community programming with greater clarity while protecting brand equity.

The deployment includes AMG’s Local Now news streams across key Designated Market Areas, including Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla.

“Local news and weather coverage are essential services for viewers across the country,” said Byron Allen, founder/chairman/CEO of Allen Media Group. “Our partnership with Anoki enables brands to invest in our content with confidence, strengthening the economic foundation that sustains trusted journalism, diverse media ownership and the communities we serve.”More information is available on the AMG and Anoki websites.

Deepfake images can be easily manipulated to remove ‘AI fingerprints’ making it difficult to conclude if an image has been AI generated, a study has found.

It is also possible for hackers to change an image’s AI fingerprint so it falsely appears to come from a different model. This could be used to wrongly blame legitimate tech companies for harmful images their systems never actually created.

Experts say improvements in AI fingerprinting techniques combined with watermarking of AI-generated images would strengthen the detection of deepfakes.

Generative AI is now capable of creating images nearly indistinguishable from real photos, raising concerns about the use of these technologies for scams and misinformation campaigns.

Hinder Investigations
One promising approach to mitigate these risks is AI fingerprinting—a group of techniques that detect unique, invisible traces that AI models leave in their images, which helps identify the specific generator that produced them.

Removing fingerprints would hinder forensic investigations into deepfakes. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh have found that these fingerprints can be removed or manipulated using various modes of attack.

In the first part of the study, a security evaluation of fingerprinting techniques for generative AI was performed. Adversarial attacks were then developed that aimed to remove or forge fingerprints across a range of threat scenarios.

These scenarios ranged from powerful attackers with full access to the inner workings of the image generator to low-resource attackers with no special access.

The scientists simulated these attacks on 12 image generators and 14 fingerprinting methods in the largest evaluation of such techniques to date.

Many fingerprinting methods were found to achieve high accuracy in detecting unaltered deepfake images, but performance drops dramatically once the image is attacked.

'Smudging Fingerprints'
Fingerprint removal was found to be highly effective, often achieving more than 80% success for attackers with full knowledge of an image generator and just over 50% for simple attacks with no knowledge of the generator’s inner workings.

In several cases, simple changes to an image such as JPEG compression, resizing or blurring are enough to 'smudge' the fingerprints.

Fingerprint forgery—misrepresentation of the AI model used to generate the image—was less effective than removal overall, but half of the image generators evaluated were vulnerable to this kind of attack.

All attacks were imperceptible to the human eye, leaving no visible evidence on the images. None of the evaluated fingerprinting techniques delivered both high accuracy and resistance to attack across all threat scenarios.

By pinpointing where and why current approaches fail, it should be possible to build stronger methods of deepfake detection, especially when paired with watermarking – the process of embedding a hidden digital signature into AI-generated content.

The findings from this work were peer reviewed and will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) in Munich this week. A copy of the final version of the paper is available here.

This work was supported by the Edinburgh International Data Facility, the Data-Driven Innovation Programme and the Generative AI Laboratory, all at the University of Edinburgh.

Kai Yao, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics and author on the paper, said: “We were surprised to find just how fragile these AI fingerprints truly are. We expected that sophisticated attacks would be effective, but seeing that simple, everyday image edits could effectively ‘smudge’ the forensic evidence was a real wake-up call. It suggests that many of the deepfake detection methods based on image fingerprinting might fail the moment an image is shared or edited in the real world.”

Dr Marc Juarez, Lecturer in Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh and also an author on the paper, said: "Deploying these techniques without considering the threats they face could give a false sense of security. If fingerprinting is to be used to hold bad actors accountable, it must ensure that fingerprints cannot be easily removed or forged, as any accountability tool will itself become a target for attack. The community must therefore move beyond optimising for performance alone and incorporate adversarial robustness into their evaluation methodology."

NEW YORK—Witbe will demonstrate how artificial intelligence is changing how streaming services are tested and monitored with the introduction of an AI-powered infrastructure that replaces traditional script-based automation with real-time execution, analysis and operations on real devices across real networks during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The company will unveil an infrastructure in which AI is embedded across every layer of the platform —from real devices to automation, operations and observability. The solution actively drives how streaming services are tested and monitored.

Built on proprietary technology developed over more than 20 years, including MOS-based video quality measurement and intelligent device control, this infrastructure connects four layers into a single system: real-device execution (Witbox), AI-driven automation (Agentic SDK), operational control (REC) and intelligent analysis (Smartgate).

At its foundation is a global network of thousands of Witbox robots deployed across ISPs, telcos and streaming platforms and the Agentic SDK, introduced in mid-February as part of Witbe Suite 41—an automation framework that lets teams generate and execute tests through natural language, hybrid pre-built workflows or full code-based customization.

Together, they enable testing and monitoring workflows that adapt to application changes, scale across environments and remain resilient across releases without constant script maintenance.

Through Remote Eye Controller (REC) —Witbe’s virtual Network Operations Center— teams can now interact directly with their testing infrastructure using natural language.

They can:

• Instantly trigger tests across one or hundreds of real devices.
• Launch ad-hoc validations without scripting.
• Organize devices and streams dynamically by service, region or use case.
• Monitor execution in real time across global environments.

Instead of managing tools, writing scripts or coordinating environments, teams instruct the system, and execution happens immediately. This introduces a new operational model where testing becomes interactive, continuous and operational.

Witbe’s AI-driven analysis and issue detection intelligence layer is powered by the company’s Smartgate observability platform, which continuously analyzes test results at scale.

Instead of waiting for teams to investigate issues, Smartgate identifies, explains and prioritizes them proactively. It:

• Identifies and categorizes issues automatically.
• Compares failed and successful executions to determine root causes.
• Detects quality degradation across devices, ISPs and regions.
• Surfaces patterns across large volumes of executions.

This shifts teams from reactive troubleshooting to continuous quality control.

See Witbe at 2026 NAB Show booth W2051.

More information is available on the company’s website.

CYPRESS, Calif.—FOR-A will focus entirely on software-defined, AI-driven solutions, marking a dramatic shift with its hardware-centric foundation during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The FOR-A booth will feature all solutions as interactive demos, accessible via touch screen at any kiosk. Visitors will be able to view demonstrations and drive operations from the kiosks. Video demonstrations will also be shown on FOR-A partner Alfalite’s LED wall for a more immersive viewing experience. FOR-A personnel will be on hand to discuss how the company’s new solutions help overcome today’s live video production challenges.

“This will be a momentous NAB for FOR-A,” said FOR-A America president and COO Satoshi Kanemura. “This year’s offerings demonstrate our commitment to developing the best future-facing tools that enable software-defined and AI-driven live production workflows across a range of budgets and applications.

“Our 9:16 real-time auto cropping and tracking AI tool can instantly unlock revenue streams with mobile phone viewers while reducing current workload and cost. AI-powered, visual-based, mix and effects creation with automatic system diagram generation enhance creativity while dramatically improving operational efficiency.”

To support vertical display, the company will highlight the expansion of viztrick AiDi’s GoVertical!, an on-device AI solution developed by Nippon TV and delivered globally by FOR-A.

While many current solutions introduce a delay of five to 10 seconds, this AI-powered technology operates at true broadcast speed, enabling near-real-time processing. Powered by NVIDIA’s high-performance GPUs, it enables true live streaming, ensuring that audiences experience every moment as it happens and that broadcasters maintain the immediacy demanded by live production.

GoVertical! AiDi delivers 9:16 autocropping for immediate live streaming to mobile platforms. It also tracks objects—including players and the ball. It is in heavy use by NBC Sports, marking its first commercial deployment and signaling a broader expansion into AI-enhanced live-production markets worldwide.

Seamless use of AiDi with FOR-A partner ClassX’ graphics software solutions is planned and will enable rich graphic presentation.

The software-defined FOR-A IMPULSE live production platform is another highlight of this year’s FOR-A NAB booth. Best described as a “studio in a box,” FOR-A IMPULSE consolidates all software tools necessary for broadcast incorporated on servers with high-speed GPU processing.

It features signal processing, multi-view, switching, graphics, audio mix and media player as software functions. Operators create production pipelines within the platform’s highly intuitive graph editor. Because it’s a software-based solution, it’s easy to reconfigure the pipelines depending on the application.

Configurations can be set manually or with AI guidance, which is planned for future implementation.

FOR-A will also spotlight its MixBoard, a software-based switcher that enables users to create complex compositions with unlimited layers. Powered by ClassX, MixBoard switches between cameras, presentations and multimedia sources, using professional 2D/3D transition effects. Key innovations of the MixBoard include new video input types, such as the Media Engine for seamless playout of video clips, stills and playlists as well as the Compositor for creating complex layouts and transitions with greater control during live productions.

The company will also show its HVS-Q12 video switcher. Available for immediate delivery, the video switcher is a 2 M/E 3G switcher that is software upgradable to 12G. It provides 3 M/E equivalent operation with MELite technology.

Designed for broadcast control rooms and live event production, it is a compact 4RU switcher that provides up to 60 inputs and 30 outputs in 3G mode and up to 42 inputs and 21 outputs in 12G. Up to 8 keyers are available per M/E at HD/3G. Four keyers are available for 12G transmission. The HVS-Q12 has an IP interface for both Dante and NDI support.

FOR-A will host the FOR-A Connect event, April 18 4-5 p.m. at the Las Vegas Convention Center, West Hall, Level 2, Room W220-W221.

See For-A at 2026 NAB Show booth C4920.

More information is available on the For-A website.