Notwithstanding ongoing tariff-related economic uncertainty, tv broadcasters were finding a lot about what was happening at the midway point in 2025 to justify surprisingly optimistic commentary about their near- and long-term prospects.

Of course, with the tariff threat escalating in mid-July, there was no way to count on the first half of the year as an indicator of what’s in store for the larger economy. But at least industry results to date were cause for relief compared to what might have been.

Exceeding Expectations
While TV station and network owners attested to an overall softness in the local ad market stemming from the tariff situation, outlooks for the rest of the year were buoyed by results exceeding expectations, including the fact that year-over-year ad revenue declines were relatively mild in the 5-10+ percent range, which improved on the usual fluctuations following a national election year.

Addressing analysts in May, major TV station groups predicted continuing gains from technology-driven cost efficiencies, expanded local news coverage through digital outlets, the return of many major sports teams to local OTA distribution, and a strong pace in distribution contract renewals. In comments typifying the industry state of mind, E. W. Scripps president and CEO Adam Symson touted an outlook based on Q1 results that “beat expectations across the board due to strength in networks revenue, especially for connected TV, and due to strong expense control across the enterprise.”

On Sinclair’s May Q1 conference call, president and CEO Chris Ripley noted that “Sinclair delivered solid financial results in a challenging environment,” reflected by the fact that “adjusted EBITDA exceeded the high end of our range guidance.” Confirming Ripley’s description of Sinclair’s core advertising trends as “among the best in the industry,” Sinclair executive vice president and CFO Lucy Rutishauser said Q2 would see local ad revenue tracking “lower by approximately 2 percent at the midpoint of our guidance range.”

Projecting the pace beyond Q2 is hard, she added. “We believe the current macroeconomic and tariff-related uncertainty is causing our advertisers in several key categories to have significantly reduced visibility and is therefore driving a wide range of potential outcomes in the second half of the year,” Rutishauser said. “In fact, several of those advertisers have pulled their own financial guidance.”

On the brighter side, she noted, “distribution revenues are expected to be 1% higher year over year as we begin to cycle through some of the larger distribution renewals from a year ago.“

And “sports on broadcast have seen record highs,” added Rob Weisbord, Sinclair chief operating officer and president of Local Media. “So even with the economic times’ uncertainty, what we know for certain is that there is a demand for top-tier sports.”

Looking at the tariff situation, Nexstar Chairman and CEO Perry Sook contends, at least in Nexstar’s case, there’s little cause for concern. As to whether tariffs might result in ad sales “falling off the cliff,” Sook says, “The answer is no.” While uncertainties might be causing some hesitation in ad buys among auto makers and other sellers of goods that could face higher tariffs, “only about 40 percent of our non-political ad revenue is tied to goods-based businesses that could be impacted by tariffs,” he says.

Tegna, in a release describing Q1 performance exceeding expectations, said the results, with just a 5% ad revenue drop from the politically charged 2024 ad pace, showed the company’s “resilience despite facing macroeconomic headwinds.” Amid anticipated ongoing softness in the overall local ad market, the growth rate on the digital side was making a big difference, leaving the company “in a strong position to drive profitable digital growth through 2025 and beyond,” Tegna Chief Financial Officer Julie Heskett says.

Conservative Analysts
How all this plays with investors remains to be seen. But Justin Nielson, principal analyst and head of S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan, suggests a few silver linings in the many clouds overhanging the broadcast TV industry haven’t changed his group’s conservative outlook on the sector’s long-term prospects.

Accounting for election-related ups and downs in ad sales cycles, S&P Kagan projects a 0.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for TV station ad revenue through 2035, with a 1.3% CAGR for core local spot ads and 2.0% CAGR for streamed video and website ads slightly outweighing a 4.1% decline in the national spot CAGR.

These projections account for the many upsides cited by station group executives, Nielson says, including likely consolidation, strong sports schedules, digital content expansion, NextGen TV, and other factors. But in each case, he says, there are trends that appear to set limits on the potential.

For example, as station groups emphasize the work they’ve done to provide their audiences more local news coverage through digital outlets, Nielson says S&P Kagan has seen “a bit of a plateau in terms of what stations are putting on line.” When it comes to winning viewers who stream content to connected TV sets through station streaming services or participation in FAST channels, stations are up against a “lot of competition,” he adds.

Such hard-nosed reality checks on industry optimism make clear there’s another way to look at things, but, given the volatility intrinsic to every trend line, it’s never been harder to judge where things are going. Beyond TV broadcasters’ take on what’s happening, there’s ample evidence for “the momentum shifting in favor of broadcasters,” as Nexstar President and COO Mike Baird puts it.

One clue in that vein can be found in MoffettNathanson’s newly released Q1 Cord Cutting Monitor, which tracks trends in the pay TV industry with a direct bearing on the broadcast TV segment. Notably, “we’ve now had three consecutive quarters of improvement in the decline rate of traditional Pay TV, co-authors Craig Moffett, Robert Fishman and Michael Nathanson report. “That’s the first time we’ve been able to say that since the decline began.”

At the same time, while virtual MVPDs, including sector leader YouTube TV, Hulu Live TV, Fubo TV, Sling TV and DirecTV Now, are still growing, “collectively they just reported what was by far the worst quarter in the short history of the category,” according to MoffettNathanson. A key but still nascent factor in the trend shifts that could have a growing impact over time is the bundling strategy employed by Charter in the wake of the 2023 agreement with The Walt Disney company, which has made all content from Charter’s programming affiliates available to the MVPD’s subscribers via streaming as well as in linear TV mode.

With Charter set to acquire cable MVPD Cox Communications, the strategy is likely to impact a bigger share of TV viewers, whether or not Comcast and other MVPDs pursue the model, the analysts say. “What all this really points out is the ridiculousness of the current model; some content on linear, some on streaming, with separate subscriptions for both and no way to know in advance which content will be where. It took Charter, a distributor, to save the content providers from themselves,” they add.

One upshot of these new developments is they may invalidate the longstanding assumption that Disney’s decision to make ESPN available as a streaming service “will sound the death knell for linear TV.” Subscribers who want to include ESPN in whatever assembly of streaming services suits their tastes will find it’s “much cheaper to subtribe to a linear package that already includes ESPN. And it will be a whole lot simpler, to boot,” the analysts assert. “A quarter that saw traditionally delivered pay TV —led by Charter—do better, while vMVPD-delivered pay TV did worse, could maybe, just maybe, be the beginning of a trend.”

Regulatory Relief
Near-term considerations aside, the cause repeatedly cited by broadcasters for renewed optimism about the future is their confidence they’ll be getting regulatory relief on ownership caps, ATSC 3.0 spectrum availability and other issues. Nothing looms bigger than expectations the FCC will soon be issuing a new notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on national and local station ownership caps.

“I’d think a NPRM is the most likely way to kick off a revision of rules, local and national, as they relate to ownership,” Perry Sook said during Nexstar’s Q1 call in May. “I’d think that would be one of the first moves chairman [Brendan] Carr would make.”

Optimism about what’s in store in Washington is fueled by the fact that, as noted by Sook—who’s also the current chairman of the NAB’s joint board of directors—“this is the first time in history that the entire board voted unanimously that the national cap elimination and in-market ownership restrictions be eliminated.” It’s certainly “impactful at the regulatory agencies and on Capitol Hill that the industry is speaking in one voice as it relates to this issue.”

Describing what the upsides would be for Gray Media if much-anticipated loosening of station ownership caps are adopted by the FCC, Gray Chairman and CEO Hilton Howell told analysts on the company’s Q1 call, “The consolidation allows us to compete with the really huge tech giants that are actually taking about 80% of the local ad market.” Consolidation, he added, “is an all-in-all positive for the entirety of the broadcast business.”

One of the loudest voices in this choir belongs to Sinclair’s Ripley. “Regulatory optimism remains buoyant with expectations for loosened M&A restrictions and next-gen spectrum relief among other potentially favorable changes that could lead to a strengthening of local journalism,” he says.

Still, beyond the generally upbeat expectations on the ownership front, there are potential flies in the ointment related to FCC responses to NAB-supported station group calls for rules shifting control over retransmission fee negotiations with vMVPDs from broadcast networks to stations—as is the case with how MVPD negotiations are managed. Adding urgency to the matter, the long-running battle between network and station owners on this issue recently entered the Paramount-Skydance merger discussion at the FCC.

As previously reported, CBS station affiliates represented by the CBS Television Network Affiliates Association asked the commission to impose conditions on the merger protecting affiliate interests regarding this and other issues. More broadly in the case of how that merger is weighed by regulators, Paramount’s agreement to a $16 million payment to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over “60 Minutes” handling of the pre-election interview with Vice President Kamala Harris underscored industry sensitivities to the pitfalls of crossing the administration politically.

Of course, any big bottom-line impacts resulting from regulatory changes won’t be felt until new rules go into effect in 2026 and beyond. But, as Tegna CEO Mike Steib notes, there’s a lot about what’s already in play on the efficiency side of improving performance that will move to center stage when the next round of consolidation kicks in.

“A real driver of value in the consolidation opportunity is around local costs,” Steib says. Noting what consolidation would mean in contrast to “three, four, five, six TV stations performing the same tasks in a market,” he adds, “If you look at the potential sort of back office and support takeout costs across markets and across the country, it’s many billions of dollars of potential savings for the ecosystem.”

Tariff Impact
It's clear that broadcasters are putting real money behind these ambitions. Uniformly, suppliers we queried for this article sounded more upbeat than they did at NAB a few months ago when everyone was concerned about how looming tariffs and general economic conditions would affect buying decisions.

So far, they said, tariffs have been a non-issue in their sales performance, though they acknowledged that could change. But with industry investments in operational efficiency, digital development and advanced advertising solutions surging, they said they were confident 2025 will turn out to be a good year.

One bird’s eye view from the cloud perspective on industry transformation comes from Chris Blandy, director of strategic business development for M&E and games and sports at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is seeing “continued momentum across the media and entertainment industry as companies migrate their existing archives and new workloads to the cloud, while also exploring new generative AI tools to support their productions and create more personalized experiences for audiences,” Blandy says.

For example, broadcasters are faced with a “need to manage petabytes of video content and prepare assets for different downstream distribution channels, which must be organized and tagged with appropriate metadata for cross-platform distribution.” As a result, he adds, “our customers are turning to agentic AI to deploy media operations agents for specific tasks, such as celebrity detection, synopses and quality and compliance control.”

Business for Bitmovin, long a leading beneficiary of the video streaming revolution, continues to surge as ever more service providers look to consolidate and streamline video processing.

“It’s all about efficiency,” Bitmovin Co-founder and CEO Stefan Lederer says. “We’re seeing customers really take a hard look at their technology stacks to unlock cost savings through smarter, more streamlined workflows. That’s true across our entire product portfolio, from better encoding efficiency and CDN savings, to switching to commercial platforms or analytics tools like ours that are built to drive efficiency and results.”

As a result, Lederer says, “we’re on track to double our growth goal for this year. By the end of the first half, we had already achieved the full growth target originally set for 2025.”

The trends are just as impactful for longtime traditional TV providers who have evolved their technologies to fit the new market dynamics. Noting that Appear is building on a 46% revenue increase in 2024, Matthew Williams-Neale, Appear vice president of marketing, echoed the common refrain.

“Broadcasters and media operators remain focused on deploying technologies that boost efficiency, support distributed production, and enhance audience engagement,” Williams-Neale says. “We see this reflected in strong customer interest around hybrid workflows, cloud migration, and open software ecosystems.”

As for the tariff threat, Norway-based Appear “has taken proactive steps to reinforce our supply chain and manufacturing strategy,” he says. “By maintaining a flexible, geographically diverse approach to sourcing and production, we’re able to mitigate regional risks and respond quickly to customer needs.”

Even U.S.-based suppliers with stakes in hardware sales find themselves taking precautions to avoid fallout from tariffs. Austin, Texas-based Media Excel, for example, is “paying close attention to the tariffs,” says CEO Narayanan Rajan, who asserts the outlook for the rest of 2025 is positive for his company, “despite the ongoing pressure on spending across different industry segments.”

As a supplier of encoding appliances as well as software-based encoding and other solutions, Media Excel understands tariffs could “impact the appliance side of our business, as our products are manufactured in South Korea.” Noting “the situation is very dynamic,” Rajan says in the event of outcomes unfavorable to Media Excel’s interests, “we will respond accordingly to ensure that we maintain our long-standing and successful relationships with our client base.”

The Advanced Advertising Push
Demand for advertising solutions that can maximize returns in the digital domain is another big driver behind broadcaster spending. “At the mid-point of 2025, we’re seeing broadcasters double down on the technologies that are driving revenue in OTT, of which dynamic ad insertion with one-to-one addressability is a key component,” says Paul Davies, head of marketing at dynamic ad platform supplier Yospace.

“In under a year,” Davies adds, “we have seen the amount of ads stitched increase substantially, from 6 billion in July 2024—which was a record at the time and was helped by a major sports tournament—to over 8 billion as normal everyday traffic by May 2025. This increase is due to several factors, but mainly that streaming audiences are growing and broadcasters are meeting that demand by investing in dynamic ad insertion across more of their content.”

He cites several advances in industry standards that are improving monetization in the digital realm, including the Common Media Client Data standard (CMCDv2), which will enable IAB-compliant measurement across a greater array of endpoints. “That will add a lot of value for advertisers and hopefully increase their investment in CTV,” he says.

Demand for advanced advertising solutions varies widely across the station owner, broadcast network and larger media company ecosystem based on each company’s unique business models, notes Dave Dembowski, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Operative, a supplier of ad order and other media management solutions.

“Everyone knows that AI and cloud deliver the efficiency and agility they need, but they are also aware that it will be difficult to rip out legacy tech, so some are making bold moves to start clean while others are taking a more modular approach,” Dembowski says.

But he stresses the case is building for the more aggressive approach. “Media companies that are already ahead on implementing multichannel cloud solutions have the power and control to make really sophisticated decisions about their business because they have the confidence that comes from a unified view,” he says.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand Radio World.

With the U.S. economy in a state of flux as the Trump Administration tightens — and subsequently laxes — the flow of imports into the country, tariffs have been top of mind for many manufacturers, including those in the broadcast industry.

At the 2025 NAB Show this past April, as the Radio World team wandered from booth to booth, we asked exhibitors how they might be impacted by these ever-changing tariffs.

Their answer was simple: “We’re not sure, yet.”

For some broadcast manufacturers that import many of their materials from other countries like China, the situation looked rather bleak as the U.S. levied a 145% tax on Chinese goods.

For other U.S. companies that manufacture most of their materials in-house, the outlook is much sunnier. Broadcast equipment manufacturer Wheatstone is one of those companies, building all of its products at its factory in New Bern, N.C.

Wheatstone says 99% of all its metal extrusions were made in the U.S. Additionally, the company does all its own painting and uses powder coat paint that it buys from other U.S. companies. Finally, all the machinery Wheatstone has for fabricating, metal and surface mounting components are supported by U.S.-friendly companies, according to Wheatstone CEO and Founder Gary Snow.

“It took years and years for us to build all that here in the USA,” said Snow, “and I’ll admit there were times when I wondered if it was such a smart thing to do, but I don’t question it now.”

While Snow told Radio World that Wheatstone largely remains unaffected, that doesn’t mean his company isn’t aware of how these “reciprocal tariffs” have been affecting the industry as a whole. Snow specifically references the strain put on container shipping and the freight industry.

“Companies that build offshore could be paying two and a half times more for containers of finished goods. That’s hundreds of thousands, possibly a million dollars more than what they had set aside — just to open the container,” said Snow. “This could very well threaten the stability of those companies if all their cash reserves are going to containers instead of to business as usual.

“At the very least, it will cost broadcasters more without any real benefit added to the products they buy, or worse, make it harder to get parts and support when they need it,” he said.

It’s important to note that, as previously mentioned, the state of global tariffs remains in great flux, with manufacturers scrambling to keep updated about ongoing changes. To that point, these quotes from Wheatstone executives were obtained by Radio World on May 9, just prior to an unexpected announcement made a few days later.

On Monday, May 12, the United States and China announced that they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days. Under the agreement, the U.S. would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30% from its current 145%, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10% from 125%.

When asked which of Wheatstone’s necessary components could be subjected to these tariffs, Snow only listed one product: semiconductors.

“Semiconductors are excluded from excessive tariffs at this time, but even a 145% tariff on a 10-cent transistor is not much in the scheme of things,” said Snow. “As a manufacturer that makes just about everything except the semiconductors that go into our products, we are far more concerned with price fluctuations and the availability of components than the tariffs on those components, which is why we doubled down on parts inventory.”

Wheatstone Purchasing Manager Pattye Bagshaw said, even before the tariffs kicked in, she began padding inventory so Wheatstone would have more than enough parts to last through next year.

Snow told Radio World that this practice of keeping a spare supply of stock in-house is a holdover from the pandemic, and the desire to not be caught shorthanded.

“We are a well-oiled machine when it comes to ordering and stocking parts,” said Snow. “We buy from parts distributors in the U.S. that we’ve known for years and have direct relationships with all our major semiconductor manufacturers. In fact, Xilinx (which makes a critical FPGA used in Wheatstone products) put us on their priority list during Covid when it was hard to get parts because a lot of people were buying them up and scalping them.”

Even with extensive preparations, Wheatstone hasn’t been totally exempt from hiked prices. Bagshaw said they recently received a shipment from China and were hit with a 170% tariff.

(Read: Optimism Clashes With Tariff Anxieties at 2025 NAB Show)

“This was for printed circuit boards,” said Bagshaw. “Wheatstone outsources the printing of circuit boards but designs and surface-mounts components in-house. We have since been able to move that business to vendors that we know of elsewhere and have worked with in the past.”

As for changes to product pricing, Wheatstone Senior Sales Manager Jay Tyler said, well, there is none.

“We have finished products on the shelf and are ready to ship at the same price now as before tariffs began,” said Tyler. “Although, tariffs here can have a snowball effect on our international customers especially because they’re already paying import tariffs on top of the price of products coming into their country.”

At the most recent NAB Show, Tyler said he heard about several manufacturers handing out new price lists with price increases spurred by the tariffs.

“I also heard that people who are rolling out new automation systems or other PC-centric systems were gobbling up computers while they could to avoid tariffs, and that could affect the supply chain,” he said.

Stressors on the supply chain, and potential increased costs on consumers continue to be a concern for manufacturers and buyers alike.

Per the Yale Budget Lab’s latest report on May 12, consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 17.8% — the highest since 1934 — which is estimated to dent households’ annual purchasing power by $2,800.

For Tyler’s customers, however, he isn’t worried.

“My customers want the same things they’ve always wanted. They want to be able to afford to move their studios if the rent goes up in their old building. They want to be able to pay for a new console to replace that older board that’s long overdue for retirement,” he said.

“From our perspective, tariffs should have very little effect on whether they can still do those things.”

While much of the coverage of President Donald Trump’s proposed 100% tariffs on imported films has focused on the theatrical industry, the levies on imported movies would also have a negative, though indirect, impact on TV production.

“While Trump has not commented on the television production business, tariffs on overseas production would have an equally chilling impact on TV production,” Lightshed Partners partner and media and technology analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a research note.

Concerns over how the proposed tariffs might affect the Hollywood studios, streamers like Netflix and other media companies sent the share prices of Netflix, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery down in early trading on Monday. Following the negative reaction from financial markets and some Hollywood studio executives, the White House seemed to walk back from the proposal.

“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made,” a White House spokesman told The Hollywood Reporter, the “administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again.”

While Trump did not mention TV or streaming services in his Sunday social media post proposing the tariffs, the potential impact of such a move is worth considering. That’s because television is so important to the Hollywood studios.

Even if the proposal is not expanded to TV programming, it would likely cause foreign governments to implement tariffs on U.S. content exports, threatening the multibillion-dollar market for U.S. movies and TV.

In 2023, the U.S. movies racked up $22.6 billion in export revenue, creating a trade surplus of $15.3 billion. U.S. television exports are harder to track, but U.S. shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,“ “NCIS,” “Law & Order,” “The Simpsons“ and many others produce significant international revenue.

A 2013 study by the U.K. group Digital TV Research estimated that U.S. studios generated some $5.4 billion a year in selling drama series to European television, according to THR.

Because the Hollywood studios typically package their TV shows with their blockbuster films, any tariffs imposed on U.S. film exports by foreign governments might hurt revenue for TV shows, which in turn could decrease production.

If the administration expanded the movie tariffs to TV, which employs many more people in production, the levies would have a direct, major impact on the production of bigger-budget, high-profile dramas.

Like movies, a growing number of these big-budget series are at least partly produced outside the U.S. in the U.K., Canada and other locales. Amazon Prime’s “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” was, for example, produced in New Zealand in its first season and then moved production to the U.K.

Beyond that, high-profile TV productions have for decades relied on international sales. For example, by the early 2000s, first-season U.S. broadcast shows were covering around half of their budgets from international markets in pre-sales and output deals, a practice that has made international programming confabs like MIPCOM extremely important for U.S. studios and producers.

More recently, Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video and other major streamers have been able to leverage their international footprint of subscribers to fund dramas like "Rings of Power", which reportedly had a record breaking $1 billion budget. That international presence has given these streaming companies a major competitive advantage over domestic U.S. broadcasters.

Even if the tariffs were not applied to TV production, any retaliatory tariffs by foreign countries could include TV programs.

Europe, for example, already has content quotes for European content that limit the amount of U.S. programming that can air on broadcasters in European countries. The retaliatory tariffs could harm sales, hurt co-production agreements with international broadcasters and disrupt the globalized production used on many high-profile dramas that now heavily rely on cloud-based editing and postproduction.

Such problems prompted Lightshed’s Greenfield to write: “Last night’s Truth Social post from President Trump has everyone in Hollywood scratching their heads. Movie production has been migrating overseas for decades, attracted by lower cost labor markets, sound stage availability and most importantly substantial foreign tax credits. If movie production was forced back into the US, the net result would be a dramatic reduction in the number of films made to absorb higher production costs. While Trump has not commented on the television production business, tariffs on overseas production would have an equally chilling impact on TV production.”

The note to investors also stressed that “it’s unclear how a movie tariff system would even work. Movies are often shot in multiple locations, with post-production in a different location. Given the substantial amount of digital enhancement to a film in 2025, if post-production occurs in the U.S., is it a U.S. film or does it only matter if some or all of the film was shot overseas? Would the tariff on movies be applied based on minutes of overseas footage that make it into the final film? Or would a tariff be based on raw minutes filmed, regardless of whether they made it into the ending film? Would studios have to submit their final production cost to the government for tariffs? … [W]ould streaming films be subject to the tariff as well? Would the tariff impact future windows of movie exploitation or only the first window?”

Greenfield concluded, “Nobody knows what the President’s Truth Social post means and we fear, neither does he.”

Whether you’re in the air or out for a swim, the last thing you do when you hit bone-rattling turbulence is slow down.

That was the state of mind at the 2025 NAB Show in the wake of the Trump administration’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcement. “It’s on everybody’s minds,” said one vendor CEO, speaking on background to express the widely felt anxiety. “But our customers and suppliers are all telling us the same thing: they’re staying the course with their budgeted plans until they have reason to do otherwise.”

It was anybody’s guess how long that “steady-as-you-go” attitude would guide M&E sector activity. With the sudden imposition of a 90-day delay on those “reciprocal tariffs” announced on the show’s last day—followed by conflicting messages on tech tariffs the following weekend—the heads-down focus on the business at hand was up against the head-spinning threat of a turbulence-induced global economic stall-out ahead of any resolution of the tariff questions.

As it was, the dominant goal on people’s minds heading into the annual Las Vegas gathering, April 5-9, was to mitigate the intensifying turbulence unrelated to tariffs that was at least partially responsible for a 10% drop in attendance from 61,000 in 2024 to 55,000 this year. Whether by way of regulatory relief or the potential returns on cost-saving and revenue-generating technology advancements, the need for new ways forward dominated exhibit hall and meeting room discussions.

Problem-Solving Supersedes Pure Sales Agendas
For industry suppliers, it’s no longer just a matter of selling good technology; it’s about helping customers work through the business challenges, Glodina Lostanlen, chief revenue officer at Imagine Communications, noted. “The challenge is to find the returns.

“If you look at the FAST channels and the investments made in digital set-tops, our customers—all the big brand names—are telling us, ‘We invested a lot in digital and we’re not seeing the returns,’ ” she added. “At the same time, the linear business is under pressure because of the fragmentation. We really have to help them make the most of everything they have.”

Imagine is pursuing that agenda on both the playout and monetization sides of its product portfolio. One recently implemented case in point entails how the company tailored its SureFire ad server and linear TV decisioning platform to help New Zealand’s state-owned commercial broadcaster TVNZ derive higher ad revenues from digital programmatic advertising operations utilizing the Google Ad Manager (GAM) supply-side platform.

Using SureFire, TVNZ can book contextually relevant ads from its linear inventory to fill empty ad breaks in digital streams. “Our SureFire solution understands the context of the linear, and it brings the linear broadcast rules into the ad decisioning,” Lostanlen explained. “So the GAM will propose several ads, and there is some intelligence with background on what the linear program is to tell GAM to pick the best ad.”

Across NAB Show exhibit halls, the pall of uncertainty was countered by an eye-popping array of cost-saving and revenue-driving vendor solutions impacting every facet of the business, from creation and production to distribution and monetization. Breakthroughs abounded on every front, many enabled by generative and other permutations of AI, which, along with machine learning, have gone from the hype-and-wonder stage to being baked-in components permeating the M&E landscape.

AI Messaging Gives Way to Touting Cloud Solutions
Indeed, despite the pervasive presence of AI, it didn’t come close to getting as much attention as it did last year. What mattered to sellers was getting across to buyers the ways their solutions were facilitating broadcasters’ shift to and use of the cloud.

Zixi, for example, was focused on communicating the role it is playing in the cloud transition beyond supplying low-latency contribution transport. “This show is an inflection point for us,” Zixi CEO Mark Aldrich said. Citing partnerships with AWS, Amagi, Ateme, Videon, Magnifi.ai, Red5 and many other suppliers, he added, “We’re an accelerant to helping the industry move from satellite to IP in an elegant way.”

Innovations enabling scalable, reliable and secure live video delivery with 4K/HDR formatting at the lowest possible total cost of ownership have contributed to diminishing resistance to the cloud, Aldrich noted, as customers experience the benefits firsthand.

OTT Support Moves Center Stage
Telestream, too, pointed to broadcasters’ transition to IP as the industry trend with the greatest impact on product development. “We’re seeing a lot more processing in the cloud and distribution on ABR [adaptive bitrate used with OTT streaming],” said Matthew Driscoll, Telestream’s vice president of product management, in areas related to quality control in postproduction, distribution and monetization.

AI support, as heavily promoted by Tele­stream last year, is a given component across much of the company’s product portfolio but was barely mentioned in the firm’s NAB Show messaging this year. “AI is a big factor in automating our workflows,” Driscoll said, noting the generative AI applications complement the firm’s use of machine-learning tools over the last 15 years.

Of course, normalizing AI in workflows only means there’s much more to come. For example, what can be done with AI-enabled speech-to-text “is incredible,” Driscoll said. Stanza, Telestream’s captioning software solution, at present only supports the generation of English captions from speech spoken in other languages, but an expansion to translation across multiple languages is on the road map.

As for new developments unrelated to AI, Driscoll pointed to several advances impacting the firm’s PRISM waveform monitors, SPG9000 sync pulse and test signal generators and iQ Intelligent Video Management System, all of which are facilitating use of SMPTE 2110 and the transition to HDR in mainstream production. For example, the SPG9000 sync pulse support for 2110 and SDI in one box has been enhanced with added redundancy, supporting automatic switchover to secondary timing resources when a primary source like the Global Navigation Satellite System malfunctions.

Advances impacting PRISM include color banding that ensures conversions from HDR to SDR don’t end up with major chromatic distortions. The iQ enhancements involved expedited troubleshooting through the centralized ARGUS live A/V, captioning and SCTE 35 ad-marker monitoring system.

Real-Time Multilingual Captioning
Many solutions in the multilingual captioning domain—much of it enabled by AI—were on display at the show. They included significant advances brought to light by ENCO, which exhibited a product line impacting automated broadcast and production workflows involving automated live translation, virtual production, audio compliance, playout, cloud-based web streaming and more.

“We’re lucky to have been playing in a lot of different markets since our inception, which gives us the ability to see how different markets capitalize on the same technologies,” ENCO Product Design and Solutions Manager Bill Bennett said. “For example, we’re able to see how generative AI used in writing advertising copy can be used to convert text to synthetic speech.”

Having introduced on-premises language translation from English to Spanish text last year, at this year’s NAB Show ENCO extended its enTranslate platform’s capabilities to support translating dozens of languages in real time, on-prem or in the cloud. The company also demonstrated a new version of its enTranslate mobile app, letting visitors who scanned QR codes on display in multiple locations view text translations of the on-stage commentary in seven different languages.

Now, ENCO is applying its R&D skills to turning those translations into audio output in real time, Bennett said. “We’re using the same processing-intensive GPU hardware acceleration we’re employing to perform the text translations for the AI re-speaking conversion to audio,” he noted.

NextGen TV Developments
Discussion among broadcasters rolling out ATSC 3.0 was dominated by current moves to get the Federal Communications Commission to set a date certain to sunset 1.0 by the end of the decade. The momentum towards this goal was best illustrated less than a week after the show ended, when the FCC issued a request for public comment on a 1.0 sunset proposal submitted by NAB earlier this year.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee booth in the West Hall had a more international theme after last year’s announcement that Brazil had adopted the physical layer standard of 3.0, ATSC President Madeleine Noland said.

“Our booth was a hub of energy and excitement, boasting a 30% increase in visitors over last year and showcasing the broad and growing support for ATSC 3.0,” she told members in her post-show memo. “It was also notable that Brazilians attended the show in force, as the second-most represented country at the show after the U.S. With the initial launch of DTV+, largely based on ATSC 3.0, scheduled soon for Rio [de Janeiro], excitement about the possibilities in Brazil continues to expand.”

In addition to new consumer products on display at the ATSC booth, tech demos revolved around advanced features including immersive TV and an increased emphasis on gaming.

Executives from the nation’s largest station groups also discussed the details behind the launch of EdgeBeam, a new 3.0 datacasting service, while technical discussions about using 3.0 signals as a backup to GPS (aka Broadcasting Positioning System, or “BPS”) took place during the four-day Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference.

As broadcasters move live production to the cloud, they’re discovering new ways to use streaming technology to address cost and monetization challenges. One groundbreaking development with major implications for maximizing streaming flexibility was quietly displayed by Dolby, one of many vendors offering ultra-low latency streaming solutions at NAB Show.

For the first time anywhere, Dolby was demonstrating how it is now possible through its OptiView platform to implement streaming at whatever level of latency and directional flexibility is required for any given live distribution scenario through point-and-click commands on a management dashboard.

“Dolby OptiView is a fully managed service that supports interactive streaming over WebRTC at sub-half-second latencies, High Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP) at 1 to 2 seconds or conventional HLS platforms at higher latencies,” Dolby Senior Product Marketing Manager Rose Power said.

In all cases, streams are managed through the OptiView Player software, which uses APIs that work with any browser or client software used by the chosen transport protocol. The managed service assigns streaming operations to the appropriate CDN infrastructure, including an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure network optimized for WebRTC and HTTP-based CDNs for HESP and HLS. Power said OptiView users can activate Dolby’s Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) technology to enable targeted full- or partial-screen ad placements in line with performance parameters of the chosen streaming technology.

Clearly, judging by everything on display at this year’s NAB Show, broadcasters entering the NextGen TV era have all they need to leave the limitations of the old OTA environment behind, with one exception: They need to see uncertainty giving way to coherency in U.S. trade policy.

President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered the imposition of a 100% tariff on films and TV shows produced outside the U.S., lamenting what he claims is the death of the industry and a “threat” to national security.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote:

"The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!"

Even though the order was posted on a social media platform and not signed at a White House ceremony, Hollywood and its investors are taking it seriously, with shares of major entertainment companies falling in premarket trading, with Netflix stocks down nearly 5%.

The American movie industry in 2023 generated $22.6 billion in exports, contributing to a $15.3 billion trade surplus. The industry supported 2.32 million jobs and paid out $229 billion in total wages that same year, according to the Motion Picture Association.

But Hollywood has increasingly taken its business overseas in recent decades. More shooting and post production is being done in Europe and particularly Canada, which has seen total film and TV production revenues increase 31% over the past decade to $10.4 billion in 2022-2023.

Like their manufacturing counterparts, the studios have been able to cut costs via production overseas, lured by lower wages and tax incentives; in a recent survey of studio executives, their top five choices for production locations in the next two years are all outside U.S. borders.

The impact could be devastating to the industry, resulting in fewer entertainment choices, particularly among top streamers such as Netflix and Prime.

“The problem is that pretty much all the studios are moving tons of production overseas to reduce production costs and leverage foreign credits,“ Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett told Reuters. “Raising the cost to produce movies could lead studios to make less content. There’s also a risk of retaliatory tariffs against American content overseas.”

Australia and New Zealand, also popular destinations for film production, have already responded to the threat, with Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, stating “nobody should be under any doubt that we will be standing up unequivocally for the rights of the Australian screen industry.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said they were waiting for more details, “but we'll be obviously a great advocate, great champion of that sector and that industry,” he said.

China, the world’s second-largest box office for U.S.-made films, has also stated that it will begin limiting the number of American films permitted for release within the country as a result of Trump’s imposition of a 145% tariff on imports from the country. That country is reportedly responsible for 25% of major studios’ annual worldwide revenue.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, also advocates more filmmaking in the state, but via tax credits instead of direct order. His goal, though, is to make the state more competitive within the U.S.

Last fall, he proposed to expand California’s Film & Television Tax Credit Program to $750 million annually, more than double the current $330 million annual allocation.

“California is the entertainment capital of the world, rooted in decades of creativity, innovation, and unparalleled talent. Expanding this program will help keep production here at home, generate thousands of good-paying jobs, and strengthen the vital link between our communities and the state’s iconic film and TV industry.”

Politico is reporting that Trump may have gotten the idea from actor Jon Voight, who—along with fellow conservatives Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone—are the president’s so-called “Ambassadors to Hollywood.”

WASHINGTON—The talk was mostly about high-tech innovation, with some veiled and unveiled references to tariffs, at the Consumer Technology Association's (CTA) 14th Annual Digital Patriots Dinner in Washington Tuesday night.

That was the same day CTA issued a warning about the impact of the Trump Administration's proposed 25 percent tariff on TV's from China, saying it would increase the cost of TVs to U.S. consumers by most of a billion dollars next year.

CTA CEO Gary Shapiro did not explicitly address the hot-button issue of edge-provider scrutiny, or at least by its most familiar name in Washington over the past couple of weeks: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but he talked generally about that D.C. climate for those innovators.

"Some of our headlines today, sadly, question the promise of technology," he said, "but the fact is this scrutiny of innovators is not new." He suggested it goes with the territory. "They're the ones who dare to pursue solutions that no one before has thought of." He said those new ideas challenge the status quo."

Among all that querying, he said, the fundamental question is how technology can improve the human condition and "harness technology as a force for good."

He encouraged governments to pursue policies that promote innovation.

Honored at the event were Reps. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.), a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Judiciary Committee member Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the former the co-founder of the 5G caucus and the Women's High Tech Coalition, the latter saluted for championing patent reform — he co-sponsored the Patent Litigation Reform Act — and promoting ride sharing.

Jeffries, whose district is home to Kickstarter and Etsy, told the crowd at the National Portrait Gallery that when he first came to the Judiciary Committee, he was unfamiliar with the term patent trolls, and thought the term was "a little bit rough. At least until he sat through a hearing with expert witnesses talking about the problem of patent assertion entities (PAEs), and they used terms like "blackmail artists," "extortionists," and even "terrorists." He said he realized "patent trolls" was actually a “kinder, gentler” phrase.

Jeffries emphasized the value of diversity, and said when that diversity is combined with the booming innovation economy, it is "a phenomenal thing to see."

He talked about protecting trade secrets from hostile foreign actors and the effort to "push the CLOUD Act over the finish line" in an effort to strike the right balance between protecting both privacy and innovation and competition.

Jeffries said patent disputes "should be resolved on the basis of the merits of the underlying claim, not based on the high cost of defending frivolous lawsuits," a comment that drew audience applause.

And, in a comment on the general tenor of Congress these days, said he hoped to be able to soon use the "thumbs up" emoji more.

Brooks said technology was about "making people happier." She said at the end of the day that is what her audience did.

She pointed out that she was from the generation that grew up with The Jetsons, and the fictional robot dog, Astro, that today is a reality — she saw it at CES last year. Brooks asked for patience from her tech-savvy audience and acknowledged that some in Congress still needed some schooling on tech issues, as last week's Facebook hearings in the House and Senate demonstrated. "We're catching up, so please bear with us."

She said that whether it is a biometric credit card or an IoT washing machine — tech she saw at the CES on the Hill event this week — "this is about making my life happy."

She also put in a plug for rural broadband deployment as key to not having a world of digital haves and have-nots. She said it is not just a rural issue. "We have to make sure this technology is not leaving anybody behind."

The Austrian ambassador Wolfgang Waldner — Austria was among a quartet of ambassadors in attendance, their countries saluted to their tech-forward policies — briefly brought up its trade surplus, then aveReps. Susan Brooks 

rred that perhaps "we should not brag about too much these days (one of those veiled tariff references).

Among the attendees was FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, fresh from her surprise announcement earlier in the day that she would be exiting the commission, though it was a surprise only in timing since her departure had a subject of speculation for months.

The proceedings were paused for a moment of remembrance for former First (and Second) Lady Barbara Bush, who died Tuesday at 92.