With cable operators rebranding themselves as “broadband providers,” the term “cable TV” has fallen out of favor in recent years. The impact of cord cutting, increasing retransmission fees, increased competition from streaming services and changing demographics have all contributed to an industry approach that now considers “video” just another service from the local operator.

While the larger providers can often protect themselves from the changes in consumer interests, smaller, independent cable operators have to continuously evaluate the rising costs and routinely ask themselves, “is it still worth it for me to offer a video service?”

That was the focus of a panel discussion, "Video is Evolving: How to Win in a Changing Video Ecosystem" at The Independent Show held by the NCTC at Disney World this week.

I moderated a panel that included Mark Rankin, CFO, of Summit Broadband in Orlando, Geoff Shook, President & GM, Buckeye Broadband in Toledo, Ohio, and Sandra Tilley, senior vice president of Brand Strategies, EPB, Chattanooga, Tenn.-based provider of broadband services.

‘Hard Conversations’
Providers now see offering video as a service as one of numerous options that will attract and keep customers rather than one that will automatically improve a broadband provider's bottom line, the panelists said.

“In and of itself, I don't believe that video is still a strategic product on its own,” Rankin said. “Having said that, though, I think you need to think about where you deploy it, how you deploy it, how it helps broadband, and certainly as a bulk provider in Florida, serving 55-plus communities, it's a strategic product for us in how we go to market and win business.”

Shook agreed that video is still essential, but with caveats.

“Our philosophy is there'll always be a video product as a part of our catalog, [but] I think that we continue to have the hard conversations over what that product looks like and how we make it affordable,” he said.

Shook acknowledged the importance of his shrinking list of “video-only” customers and said “we don't want to walk away from that,” but he also cited the growing costs that have forced Buckeye to reconsider what channels to carry on a regular basis.

“We've made some really difficult decisions regarding carriage because we just cannot afford to continue to take video rate increases from the programmers,” he said. “Our customers push back and when they get a change in their bill they don't just shop video, they shop everything and so we've walked away from several programmers, but we've also provided resources and options for those customers to find another way to to still get the video and still depend on us to help facilitate it.”

EPB’s customer base is primarily older, according to Tilley, so video still plays an important role. Nevertheless, she continues to look for new ways to partner with third parties to maintain and improve their services.

“We've been able to maintain our market share, and we haven't seen any decline in our broadband because of a loss of video,” she said. “But we do have a customer base which is primarily older that has a high value, and we're looking at how we can continue to offer a quality product. We're working with TiVo now to try to see how much cost we can get out of it by going managed, and we think that that allows us to hold our pricing, keep it at a value for our customers, and still make a short, small margin.

“We don't look at video as a big margin producing product, but I will say we are looking for anything that is the right next thing to bundle to protect our broadband market share,” Tilley added. “So we're going to continue to watch what happens with video and look at maybe broadband TV.”

Simple and Seamless
With increased competition from streaming services, particularly in live sports, panel members agreed on the importance of making it simpler for customers to navigate the increasing variety of sources as well as the complexity and fragmentation of the current scenario.

In response to this, Rankin said he isn’t as concerned about the fact that more big ticket sports are now only available on paid streaming services.

“We don't see that as the bigger problem; it's finding it that’s the challenge and the complexity that customers feel,” he said. “It's middleware that's hard to navigate that is a problem. So the more that our vendors can help us with middleware that makes it easy for customers, I think will make a big difference.”

Tilley cited a campaign by EPB to help their customers better understand the changing video landscape and provide the needed assistance, regardless of who they choose to sign up with—whether it’s their video service or a streaming bundle.

“About five years ago, we rolled out what I call our ‘cord-cutting campaign,’ but really the whole point of it was to say, ‘we want you to have TV the way you want it; we want you to have choice, and we're here to help you,” she said. “Whether it's ours that you want to buy, if you do, we want to sell that to you, and we want it to be a product you like. If it's not ours, we want to help you learn how to stream and find what you're looking for.”

Buckeye Broadband offers a program called “Brain and Stream Assist,” that helps its customers consolidate billing, passwords and navigation, according to Shook.

“We have a pay call center that is there to help those that need the help to figure out how to set up their billing and remember their passwords and connect through to the apps that they choose,” he said. “Our positioning is that we've heard from multiple generations that our video consumers wanted choice and control.”

Understanding how their customers consume TV is essential to a better overall experience, regardless of their age, Rankin added.

“The younger generations probably prefer an app-based search experience, and certainly the older demographic, they love the guide and the big remote,” he said.

Rankin pointed to the TiVo Manager app in helping Summit to “marry” those environments.

“TiVo Manager is doing that well for us,” he said. “We can give the grid guide experience and still create that app experience. And it brings deep search capabilities, such that if you are subscribing to Paramount or Netflix or something else, you know your search will present those options to you. And so, so we think that's the best of both worlds right now.”

Tilley summed up the panel’s philosophy by noting the delicate balance small independent operators need to maintain to continue to offer video while keeping an eye on the bottom line.

“We try to keep the price as affordable as possible while covering costs at a small margin,” she said. “That's our philosophy of how we approach video.”

T-Mobile was found to offer the fastest mobile network and fastest 5G network in Ookla’s latest Connectivity Report on the state of U.S. mobile and fixed networks in the first half of 2026.

Cellphone provider T-Mobile was deemed to have the Best Mobile Network, with a median download speed of 275.55 Megabits per second across all technologies combined, and the Best 5G Network, with a median download speed of 314.38 Mbps, Ookla reported.

The speeds have important implications for broadcast journalists and news organizations in the field who rely on 5G networks to deliver video feeds and stories to newsrooms.

To earn its top rankings, T-Mobile recorded a Speedtest Connectivity Score of 80.12, and a Speedtest 5G Connectivity Score of 73.52. Speedtest Connectivity Score combines key metrics to evaluate a mobile provider’s overall user experience offer. It includes Speed Score, indicators for web browsing performance and Video Streaming Score, Ookla said.

T-Mobile also offered the best gaming and video streaming experiences in the United States during 1H 2026, across all broadband technologies and 5G, according to Speedtest Intelligence data.

Ookla found that AT&T Fiber offered the Best Internet and was the Fastest Fixed Network in the U.S. during the first half, with a median download speed of 374.75 Mbps and a median upload speed of 320.65 Mbps.

Among the most populous cities in the United States, Lincoln, Neb., recorded the fastest median mobile download speed of 395.83 Mbps, while Durham, N.C., outpaced other cities to record the fastest median fixed download speed at 380.47 Mbps.

Ookla is a research firm best known for Speedtest.net, which tests and tracks global internet and mobile network speeds.

More data and the full report can be found here.

As broadcasters continue transitioning to IP-based workflows, industry leaders are exploring new approaches that could improve interoperability, collaboration and operational flexibility.

At the heart of these discussions is the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) and related Media eXchange Layer (MXL), emerging frameworks intended to help broadcasters determine how the next generation of software-defined workflows could work.

The topic was explored during a panel hosted by the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), in conjunction with the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), featuring moderator Steve Reynolds, CEO, Imagine Communications, and guest speakers Naveed Aslam, senior vice president of Production Technology and Engineering, CBS/Paramount; John Mailhot, senior vice president of Product Management, Imagine Communications; Willem Vermost, senior IP media technology architect, EBU; and Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear.

“Much of media processing now runs in software, in a combination of on-premises and in the cloud,” Reynolds said. “And so, if everything is now moving to software, we have to ask the question: are we still designing our facilities in the right way?”

Panelists said DMF was created to address this question, driving the industry forward while solving key business challenges such as how to improve efficiency and allow broadcasters and their partners to share “very expensive resources” amongst more productions.

“I think, from our perspective, SMPTE ST 2110 and IP-based workflows have largely been understood and embraced as being the next industry evolutionary step,” Aslam said. “From our perspective, the DMF initiative is truly the key to start unlocking the practical and technological benefits that we can derive from an IP infrastructure, the opportunities that arise from that, and it just truly starts to give us an opportunity to explore what IP workflows can be.”

The panel explained that neither DMF nor MXL are meant to replace SMPTE ST 2110, the technical standards that gives broadcasters a means to transport broadcast-quality signals over IP networks, enabling them to scale workflows and providing a foundation for interoperability.

Rather, all three are designed to work together: DMF provides a framework for the next generation of more dynamic, software-defined facilities, while MXL provides a specific mode for connecting applications and services, effectively enabling interoperability inside of a computing cluster.

“It’s really the goal of the DMF to organize those upper layers so that you can actually have a dynamic facility,” Mailhot said. “I think that 2110 and MXL will work together to achieve that, but there’s a lot of work to do to fill in all those blanks.”

“If we work in an asynchronous way, suddenly more media functions can be run than ever before. Within the same time frame, of a frame, multiple operations can be run,” Vermost said.

“If you look at it from that point of view, it seems like a revolution. But, if you look at it from your broadcast plant and how you operate it, it’s an evolution. We’ll get there step by step.”

Panel discussion is available on demand on NABA's YouTube channel.

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.— New research commissioned by Bango, a U.K.-based provider of subscription bundling platforms, finds that 43% of Americans would switch their mobile, broadband, or TV provider for a better sports streaming bundle, putting more than four in ten customers up for grabs.

That churn risk is the clearest signal yet that sports has become a frontline battleground for telcos fighting for customers. With sports rights fragmented across streaming platforms, telco providers are becoming a trusted way for consumers to consolidate sports content, according to Bango, which cites that more than half (52%) say they would trust their own provider above anyone else to pull all the live sports they care about into a single bundle.

This fragmentation is on full display right now. To follow the 2026 World Cup in the US, English-language viewers are split across Fox and FS1, subscription service Fox One, and free ad-supported Tubi, while Spanish-language coverage runs on Telemundo and streams on Peacock. Even the biggest event in world sport has fans hopping between apps and subscriptions to follow a single tournament: exactly the kind of confusion consumers are looking to their telco to solve, Bango said.

The findings also indicate that sports content now influences telco choice nearly as much as price, with 45% of respondents preferring a provider with a strong sports streaming bundle over one with a lower monthly price. In fact, 42% would pay more to their current provider if it included the sports they care about, according to Bango.

Sports bundles are also a strong driver of loyalty and growth; 46% of Americans say a sports streaming bundle would make them more loyal to their current provider, and 49% say it would be more likely to recommend them. On the other hand, if telcos remove access to sports, 48% of Americans would then consider switching to a competitor.

Bango notes that these findings highlight an ongoing shift in the telco sector, with providers moving beyond connectivity to bundle the subscriptions consumers value most.

“Just like on the field, telcos can win or lose with sport, and the numbers make that impossible to ignore,” said Giles Tongue, subscription expert at Bango. “More than four in ten Americans would switch telco for a better sports bundle, and almost as many would walk if their provider lost access to the sports they love. Connectivity alone has never held that kind of power over customer choice.”

"This is the clearest commercial signal telcos will get. Sports rights are scattered across a dozen platforms, and consumers are looking to their provider to pull them back together. They'll pay more, stay longer, and recommend whoever does it first. In this fight, bundling is the weapon. The telcos that move fast to bundle sports will win the customer, but the ones that hesitate will spend the next decade defending against churn."

The research, commissioned by Bango and conducted by an independent research agency, is based on a representative sample of 2,500 American consumers aged 18 and over and was conducted in May 2026.

Over the years we have all gone through numerous video content format introductions with new formats raising the bar as the world moved from black and white to color and then the subsequent format and technology increases in quality—sometimes major and at other times incremental—in resolution, frame rate, color sampling, dynamic range, overall color palette and so forth. Some have been easier than others depending on what is needed at each step in the path from content creation to viewing on the display at the end of the chain.

That said, they all involved a collection of components to hold up the advancement’s three-legged stool. One is the bucket of things needed to create content, including cameras, mixing/processing, post and editing. Another is the devices needed to display the content for audio and video; amps speakers and display screens and projectors.

The third leg is often overlooked, but without it the other two can’t hold things up. After all, even when the content is superbly created and devices are available to show it with pristine clarity, you have to have a means of distribution. Imagine farmers, bakers or ranchers with all the things needed for meals and a restaurant on other end ready to cook, prepare and a table to serve without the trucks and other transportation routes to get everything from one end to the other.

The Missing Link
That brings us to 8K. It’s not new. All the elements of the content side and display sides of the stool are there, but for the consumer market that middle segment has for the most part been missing: the delivery playback means to get the content to its end destination.

Now, that has changed with the introduction of the Kaleidescape Strato K Movie Player, the first consumer storage and playback product that can deliver 8K content as part of an ecosystem that will offer a wide range of content in resolution up to 4320/30p. Equally important, with Kaleidescape’s new 4K Cinematic format, this is the first consumer device capable of playing back content in 4K with full 4:4:4 chroma sampling and up to 2160p/60/12-bit delivery.

Fine, you might say, but you’re reading TV Tech from the perspective of a professional, and likely high-end, content creator, not as a home entertainment purveyor or installer so why should you care about this new device? Let’s go into the details before answering the question and hopefully the answer will reveal itself.

If you are not familiar with Kaleidescape they are a 25-year-old company that offers high-end content playback devices that deliver reference quality video and lossless audio with a huge library that includes movies, concerts, TV series and more that are downloaded to the device rather than played from an optical disc or streamed.

Using a “rental or purchase” model, once downloaded, the content is stored locally so there are no compression artifacts, no buffering, and course, no ads. Combined with a masterfully simple user interface, Kaleidescape products have become the de facto standard for content playback in high end home theaters.

The product in question is the new Strato K Movie Player from Kaleidescape.

The Strato K Movie Player’s ability to deliver two media playback formats to consumers that have not previously been available outside of your control and mastering suites is important as it helps justify the complaints about the added file size requirements for 8K and 4:4:4 versions of the content you are involved. It enables the Premium Large Format experience beyond specialized theatrical exhibition that we see with the likes of Dolby Cinema, PRIME and XL at AMC venues and PRX and PLF at Regal Cinemas. What is in large part is now driving the theatrical side of the distribution market is now available in the home.

The Details
As you will see going forward in my new “From The Other Side” articles in TV Tech starting next month, there is another important reason to bring this to your attention. As a content business professional you are someone that friends, relatives, co-workers and those C-Suite executives that depend on you will look at for expert knowledge on how they can get the best images and sound not only in the office and facilities you work in, but also in their homes. For that reason, some additional details on this breakthrough product are in order.

The Strato K is available now and 8K content will soon be available in SDR and HDR10. For the 4K Cinematic format there are already well over 150 movies already available, and it is worth noting that the 4:4:4 material is newly rendered out to 4:4:4 and is NOT interpolated.

The Player itself, can play out immersive audio formats as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X along with other lossless audio such as Dolby TrueHD and Dolby MAT, DTS-HD High Resolution and linear PCM at 96kHz/24 bit. On the video side there is HDR10 up to 8K (SMPTE ST 2084 and ST 2086) and Dolby Vision up to 4K (of course, all formats are dependent on the specific content). Color spaces up to BT.2020 are supported as are a variety of aspect ratios including 1.78:1 and 2.35:1 with automatic or user interface selectability.

For those already familiar with Kaleidescape, while the 4K Cinematic 4:4:4 titles will obviously have a larger file size, the rental or purchase price is the same as the standard 4:2:0 versions. Even better, if a current Kaleidescape owner upgrades to a Strato 4K there is no extra charge to download the newer version. 8K titles will, however, require a new download at a higher price.

On the storage side, the Strato K has enough onboard storage to hold seven 4K Cinematic files or 10 standard 4K files on its internal drive. Additional storage may be added via the Terra or Terra Prime servers or previously downloaded movies that were purchased, rather than rented, from Kaleidescape may be downloaded again.

There is no front panel display as most installations will use Kaleidescape’s own control system over ethernet through the likes of Crestron, Control4 or other systems or with a smartphone app or an optional remote. From an installation standpoint note that the Strato K requires a wired Gigabit network connection drop for the main unit and any additional Strato K or other Kaleidescape players in a multi-zone system.

By providing the needed third leg of the 8K ecosystem stool as well as giving home viewers higher quality image reproduction thanks to the 4K Cinematic mode, professionals may now have yet another rationale for 8K or high-color sampling content creation as a means of playing it back in the home—or in your viewing rooms—is now available.

The price? At $5,000 US, with availability in Canada at $CN7,05, the UK at £4500 GBP or in Australia at $AUS $7,999. For applications that don’t require 8K or 4:4:4 content delivery/display, the price of the existing Strato V has been reduced to $3,995.

Since its introduction, 8K has been derided by some as having great pictures that can be displayed on large projectors, dvLED walls or the growing segment of 88-to over 100-inch flat panel displays but no way to get native or new 8K scanned transfers, not upscaled, content.

The arrival of the Kaleidescape Strato K puts that objection to rest once and for all as those displays now have viable, certified, way to have a library of that long sought after 8K content delivered. For you, as a TV professional, the excuse no longer holds water. 8K as an end-to-end ecosystem is truly complete and those beautiful displays and projectors will no longer be starved for feature content.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be one of the most-watched sporting events in streaming history. It will also be one of the most complicated for viewers to navigate.

For fans, the question sounds simple: where do I watch the match? But across connected TV, the answer is no longer as straightforward as turning on a channel. Viewers may encounter the tournament through a smart TV home screen, sports hub, streaming app, platform search, voice navigation, YouTube preview, or AI-powered recommendation.

With 104 matches and 48 teams, combined with multilingual coverage across multiple platforms, YouTube’s first 10-minute viewing window, and connected TV operating systems playing a larger role in content discovery, the tournament is shaping up to be a major test of the modern streaming experience.

The Home Screen Is the New Sports Guide
Today, the TV home screen is becoming the front door to live sports. The apps a viewer sees first, the events promoted in hero banners, the matches surfaced in live sports rows, and the results returned through search can all influence where audiences go and what they watch.

That matters because live sports discovery is different from entertainment discovery. A movie can be found later. A series can sit on a watchlist. But a live match has a start time, a halftime, and a final whistle. If fans cannot quickly find the right destination, the moment may be missed.

Because of that urgency, placement, timing, accuracy, and context all matter. A World Cup match prominently promoted on a TV home screen has a very different discovery advantage from one buried behind multiple clicks or unclear app navigation.

Live Sports Merchandising Is More Complex
The scale of the World Cup will make this even more complex. The tournament will include multiple daily matches, different kickoff times, national teams with varying levels of audience demand, and different viewing preferences across language, region, and platform. FIFA has predicted that 6 billion viewers will watch the tournament.

A fan searching for “Mexico live,” “World Cup highlights,” “soccer on now,” or “watch Argentina” may expect an instant answer. Whether that answer appears clearly will depend on how well platforms organize, tag, promote, and surface live sports content.

Apps still matter, but operating systems increasingly shape the path viewers take before they ever open an app. Sports hubs, recommendation rows, search tools, voice assistants, and AI-driven prompts can all guide fans toward one viewing path over another.

YouTube Could Reshape the Funnel
For the 2026 World Cup, match discovery could increasingly begin on YouTube, where official media partners will have the option to stream the first 10 minutes of every match on their YouTube channels.

That model adds an important new dimension to the viewing journey. By giving rights-holding broadcasters a way to showcase the opening minutes live on YouTube, FIFA is creating a new top-of-funnel entry point for fans who may encounter matches through previews, clips, creators, search, or algorithmic recommendations.

YouTube could become a powerful discovery channel, particularly for younger viewers and casual fans. But the real test will be the handoff: once the preview ends, can viewers easily find the full match on the correct app, language feed, or platform destination?

The more friction involved, the greater the risk that viewers drop off before reaching the full match experience.

Small UI Errors Can Create Big Problems
The 2026 World Cup will also expose the operational challenges behind live sports merchandising. At Looper Insights, our data has found an average of 1.3 user interface errors per live sports event. These can include incorrect tiles, incorrect start time listings, outdated promotions, missing event information, broken navigation paths, or inconsistent placement across devices.

For general entertainment, these issues are frustrating. For live sports, they can be costly. When a fan is trying to find a match already underway, even a small error can mean missed viewing time, confusion, or abandonment.

The impact extends to advertisers as well. If fans miss the opening minutes of a major World Cup match because the game is difficult to find, brands lose access to some of the most valuable live viewing moments: pre-game build-up, kick-off, early in-game attention, and the shared urgency that makes sports advertising so powerful. For sponsors and media buyers investing in marquee matches, discovery friction can weaken the value of campaigns that depend on audiences arriving on time and at scale.

That is why verification will matter as much as promotion. Broadcasters, streamers, rights holders, and platforms will need to know whether placements appeared as planned, whether event information was accurate, and whether issues were resolved before they affected viewers. At the World Cup scale, a missing tile, outdated promotion, or incorrect start time can affect tune-in, advertiser value, and the overall fan experience.

The Winners Will Make Discovery Effortless
The companies that perform best during the World Cup will not simply be those with the biggest campaigns. They will be the ones that make the viewing journey effortless: surfacing the right match at the right time, guiding fans from previews to full-match viewing, and ensuring promotions accurately reflect what is live now.

As streaming becomes more fragmented, visibility becomes more valuable. For live sports, visibility is not just about awareness. It is about access, timing, and conversion.

The match may start on the pitch, but for millions of viewers, the journey will begin on the home screen.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Despite current economic pressures, consumers are watching more video entertainment than in the previous five years, but in a more fragmented media environment, according to TiVo’s Q4 2025 Video Trends Report.

Consumers are watching more video daily than at any time since the 2021 pandemic era, with households returning to an average of more than 10 video services in Q4 2025, TiVo said. This represents peak media consumption following a brief decline in 2024. For the quarter, viewing surpassed five hours per day and monthly entertainment spending rose to $161, reflecting year-over-year growth after a post-pandemic dip.

Looking at consumed content, local programming accounts for nearly 30% of total viewing time, an increase of approximately five percentage points year over year. Sports also remain a key driver of engagement, with nearly 60% of sports viewers relying on pay TV as their primary source. Live and local content continues to anchor viewing behavior in a notably fragmented environment.

“The findings reinforce that video serves as a historically resilient, high-priority category, even as the entertainment landscape grows increasingly fragmented and competitive,” TiVo said.

As entertainment ecosystems continue to expand, viewing preferences remain relatively stable. About half of respondents prefer that streaming services release an entire season at once, compared to roughly 20% who favor a weekly episode rollout, underscoring continued demand for convenience and flexible viewing experiences.

“Consumers are watching more video than ever before, but they’re enjoying that content across an increasingly fragmented mix of platforms and services,” said Geir Skaaden, chief products and services officer at Xperi. “As the entertainment ecosystem continues to expand, helping viewers easily discover and access the content they want has become more important than ever. For advertisers and platforms alike, delivering simple, seamless viewing experiences will be critical to reaching audiences and keeping them engaged.”

While viewing continues to expand across platforms, content discovery remains a growing challenge. As households manage more services, viewers are navigating a complex content ecosystem, with 40% of consumers checking two to three different apps before deciding what to watch. Discovery is also shifting beyond the platforms themselves, with word of mouth (49%) and social media (40%) most often influencing viewers. This reliance on external inputs, combined with increased fragmentation, is making content discovery less efficient and more frustrating for viewers.

“The number of viewing options available to consumers continues to grow, but what is most notable is how audiences are responding to that expansion,” Alan Wolk, TVREV’s co-founder and lead analyst, said. “Consumers are becoming more selective about where they spend their time and money, and entertainment services remain a priority. Live sports and local programming serve as important anchors, while the broader market is shifting toward simpler, more value-conscious viewing choices. The industry is entering a phase where effective curation and discovery matter just as much as scale.”

Additional report highlights:

• Ad-supported growth: More than half of consumers (54%) now use ad-supported subscription tiers, while AVOD/FAST adoption rose to 70% in Q4 2025, up five percentage points year over year. AVOD and FAST services now account for 13% of total viewing time.
• FAST audiences are watching more: The average FAST user now watches 7.5 channels, up more than two channels year over year. Pluto TV, Tubi, Roku Channel and Amazon Prime Video remain the leading FAST destinations.
• Discovery extends beyond apps: Smart TV home screens are becoming increasingly important gateways for content discovery and advertising, with owners spending 57% of their non-viewing time on the home screen.
• Consumers are prioritizing value: More than 35% of consumers routinely reassess subscriptions and viewing choices to balance cost, access and content availability.
• Fragmentation fuels discovery challenges: As the number of services grows, 40% of consumers report checking multiple apps before deciding what to watch.

The latest TiVo Video Trends Report (available here) surveyed 4,493 adults 18 and older living in the U.S. and Canada during the fourth quarter of 2025.

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.

NEW YORK—A new study from S&P Global Market Intelligence is predicting that FIFA World Cup 2026, the first three-nation-hosted and expanded-format tournament, is projected to generate $9 billion in revenue, including $3.9 billion in media rights.

The record levels of revenue are being driven by an enlarged 48-team, 104-match schedule, premium US-hosted ticketing, and strengthened global media partnerships across major markets according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The researchers noted that FIFA World Cup 2026 introduces the first format expansion in 28 years, increasing participation from 32 to 48 nations and total matches from 64 to 104, while being hosted across 16 cities in the US, Canada and Mexico.

That will drive projected revenue of approximately $9 billion for FIFA in the 2026 World Cup year, anchored by about $3.9 billion in broadcasting rights and complemented by strong growth in marketing rights and a substantial uplift in hospitality and ticketing.

For the four year cycle between 2023 and 2026, total revenue will hit $13 billion, up from $6.5 billion between 2019 and 2022.

The report also predicts global viewership and engagement are expected to reach unprecedented levels, with FIFA forecasting 6 billion engagements across TV, streaming and digital platforms, building on the 1.5 billion viewers for the Argentina–France 2022 final and surging digital consumption. In addition, more than five million in-stadium attendees are anticipated.

Other key highlights include:

• Non-men’s World Cup properties significantly bolster FIFA’s commercial cycle, with the Women’s World Cup, youth tournaments and the FIFA World Club Cup elevated through deals such as a $1 billion rights contract with DAZN in 2025 and a new USA–Canada streaming agreement with Netflix from 2027
• Strategic four-year planning and tier 1 marketing rights allocation across cycles enable FIFA to lock in long-term commercial partners, while confidence in US, Canada and Mexico as hosts supports forecasts that ticketing and hospitality for 2026 will outperform Qatar 2022 and exceed World Cup 2030 ticketing by $950 million.

TVBEurope's latest ebook explores the rise of visual podcasts and the technology behind them.

In recent years, podcasts have evolved from audio-only to include video, and visual podcasts are an opportunity for creatives to engage with audiences without breaking the bank.

With major broadcasters such as BBC and streaming services like Netflix investing in visual podcasts (aka vizpods), their popularity looks set to grow even further.

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“All-IP” is often framed as a clean modernization: fewer cables, more flexibility, and infrastructure aligned with mainstream IT practice. Inside real broadcast facilities, the experience has been more complicated. As media moved onto shared network fabrics, complexity redistributed itself into configuration, timing, segmentation, discovery, and the places where engineering and IT overlap.

Modern facilities blend IP-native and legacy equipment, and their behavior depends as much on commissioning decisions and vendor maturity as on the standards themselves. The result is an environment that looks simpler from a distance but demands a different kind of day-to-day understanding.

When Wiring Disappeared, Complexity Found New Places to Live
In SDI facilities, physical layout expressed most of the design. Signal flow could often be understood by following a cable between devices. Routing was predictable, and faults left visible clues in the rack.

IP systems compress those visible paths into a handful of fibers capable of carrying dozens of HD streams plus associated audio and metadata. The environment looks simpler from a cabling perspective, but the design logic did not vanish — it moved into configuration.

Address plans, multicast ranges, naming rules, VLAN boundaries, timing hierarchies, and orchestrator behavior now determine how a facility behaves. Small inconsistencies in any of these areas can produce wide-ranging effects that are difficult to interpret without a shared view of the fabric.

Responsibility for that fabric now sometimes resides with IT. Security policies often restrict direct switch access, leaving broadcast engineers working at the edges of systems they once controlled end-to-end. Diagnosing issues now depends on both groups and on how well system behavior is understood across teams.

Hybrid architectures sit on top of this reality. Many endpoint devices still process video and audio internally as SDI or HDMI. Cameras, monitors, playback servers, and audio processors often add IP interfaces only at the perimeter. As a result, most modern facilities consist of an IP core surrounded by SDI-to-IP gateways.

Those gateways are long-lived elements — frequently FPGA-based and later repurposed as converters, multiviewers, or audio tools as the environment matures. Hybrid operation reflects endpoint maturity, available budgets, and legacy workflows, not a lack of commitment to IP.

How Modern IP Systems Actually Behave — and Why It Often Surprises
Once configuration becomes the design, system behavior depends heavily on vendor interpretation. Two facilities built on the same standards can still act very differently.

Traffic models provide a clear illustration. Some fabrics rely on IGMP joins initiated by endpoints. In these environments, an endpoint requests a multicast stream and the switch forwards it, often applying bandwidth expectations based on address ranges — for example, one block for 1.5 Gb/s flows, another for 3 Gb/s, and a third for 12 Gb/s UHD.

Other platforms lean on controllers that explicitly authorize flows before the fabric forwards anything, placing the logic in software rather than in address plans. Both approaches are valid, but they require different troubleshooting instincts.

Device maturity introduces further variation. Common patterns include HD-only ST 2110 support with UHD still on the road map, a lack of redundancy, or inconsistent HDR support across levels. Discovery and NMOS behavior can deviate from orchestration expectations, creating situations where advertised capabilities exist but cannot be used as intended.

Earlier IP deployments often worked around such limitations by having external devices subscribe to the desired multicast and translate it to a single address that a problematic endpoint device could statically subscribe to — a pattern that can still surface when systems rely on older discovery implementations. Many of these gaps first appear during commissioning rather than design.

Timing follows a similar pattern of divergence. Traditional SDI systems relied on black burst — a single, stable reference that kept everything aligned in a straightforward way. PTP, by contrast, distributes timing over multicast and depends on the placement of boundary clocks, redundancy models, and a GPS source.

A facility may appear synchronized even as timing asymmetries accumulate. When they finally surface, the loss of alignment can be sudden and broad. Understanding what happened depends on visibility into how the switches handle timing and on coordination between engineering and IT teams responsible for the underlying network.

Where Hidden Complexity Emerges: Audio, Metadata, and Security Boundaries
Many of the thorniest issues in IP environments arise in places that attract less attention in early planning. Audio and metadata are prime examples.

Under SDI, video, audio, and ancillary data traveled together. In ST 2110 environments, they are carried as separate essences. A single video stream is paired with one or multiple audio multicasts, each carrying multiple audio channels within the stream, while a workflow needs only a subset.

Isolating those channels typically involves mixers, routers, or audio shufflers. Some manufacturers handle this automatically, which reduces operator burden but can obscure the paths signals actually take. Metadata introduces comparable decisions: Captions, multiple languages, SAP, and descriptive audio often require timing adjustments or reinsertion points to keep everything aligned. Early design choices determine how manageable these relationships become later.

Security and segmentation introduce their own hidden dependencies. Production VLANs must support performance while limiting exposure. Some segments cannot reach the internet; others must stay isolated from corporate networks. Contribution devices — bonded cellular receivers, remote encoders, cloud gateways — often require dual network paths to keep external risk from crossing into internal workflows.

WAN circuits add another dimension. Multicast contribution may share bandwidth with monitoring or file‑transfer workflows, and bottlenecks often appear only under actual load rather than during design.

As equipment is brought online, these layers surface most clearly. Commissioning becomes the point where theoretical design meets real system behavior. Discovery issues, timing mismatches, unsupported combinations, and vendor‑specific patterns emerge only when systems are exercised in practice.

Engineers present at this stage gain insight into why certain exceptions exist; those who join later inherit decisions without that context. Once a facility is live, operational caution limits the ability to revisit early changes. A small adjustment made under deadline can shape behavior for years if not examined before launch.

The Human Impact at the Center of the Transition
The shift toward IP reshapes engineering roles in uneven ways. SDI’s deterministic behavior created expectations that do not always match IP’s conditional, policy-driven workflows. Some engineers adjust slowly as long-familiar tools behave differently in an IP environment.

Others anticipate continuity and then face situations that require new diagnostic habits. Engineers newer to the industry often adapt quickly, while experienced teams bring operational judgment that remains essential even as the foundations shift.

Experience continues to influence outcomes, though its expression changes. As environments grow more interdependent, responsibilities expand toward interpreting workflow needs, coordinating across vendors, mentoring newer staff, and explaining why specific design decisions matter. Familiarity with on-air requirements provides context that purely theoretical knowledge cannot replace.

Organizational structure also shapes how teams adapt. Some facilities place most control within IT, reducing the level of direct access broadcast engineers once had. Others rely on engineering leads who serve as system stewards and primary points of contact for IT and security groups. Clearly defined responsibilities help teams navigate the shift with fewer surprises.

The transition to IP continues to redraw familiar boundaries inside facilities, and engineering teams absorb much of that change. Tools, standards, and roles will keep evolving, but the work of making systems understandable and supportable still falls to the people who stand between design and day-to-day operation. That is where the real continuity lives.

Connected TV is already the most powerful format in advertising—and it’s about to become even more important.

That might sound counterintuitive. AI is reshaping every corner of digital advertising, and CTV has already gone through its “honeymoon phase” of rampant growth. But as the ecosystem becomes mediated by agents, the channels that shape consumer preference before agents will gain outsized importance.

That’s where CTV wins.

AI Is Compressing the Consumer Journey
Agentic commerce isn't a distant concept. It’s already emerging.

Consumers are delegating more decisions to AI: discovering products, comparing options, summarizing reviews, even completing purchases. What used to be a multi-step journey—search, click, browse, evaluate—is collapsing into a single interaction.

That has a direct impact on the mechanics of digital advertising. Fewer searches. Fewer clicks. Fewer pages viewed. Fewer opportunities to insert an ad into the process.

Search won’t disappear, but it is becoming abstracted. Display won’t vanish, but it is losing surface area. Commerce media isn’t going away, but it’s becoming more concentrated, with fewer, more decisive moments instead of a long trail of signals.

Performance marketing, as it stands today, is built on volume of impressions, clicks, and signals. That foundation is starting to erode. Not overnight. Not uniformly. But directionally, the trend is clear.

Influence Moves Upstream (and Becomes More Valuable)
As decision-making shifts to agents, the most valuable moment moves earlier in the journey, before the handoff.

Agents don’t watch TV. They don’t experience creative. They don’t build brand preference.

Humans do.

CTV remains one of the few scaled environments where brands can shape perception, create intent, and influence decisions before they’re delegated. While other channels face shrinking interaction surfaces, CTV retains (and expands) its leverage.

CTV Is Stuck in an Outdated Role
Despite its capabilities, CTV is largely treated as a branding channel. That no longer holds.

CTV has always had the ingredients of a performance channel: high-quality inventory, deterministic signals in logged-in environments, strong targeting, and the ability to connect exposure to outcomes. But still, advertisers have largely kept it in a branding box.

That is a structural mismatch.

Performance teams have spent years optimizing within environments built around clicks and direct response signals. CTV, while it has performance levers, doesn’t look or behave the same way, so it’s often held at arm’s length by performance teams.

The result is a split that no longer makes sense. As clicks and impressions become less reliable proxies for performance, advertisers can't afford to isolate CTV upstream while expecting downstream channels to drive outcomes alone.

As agent-driven behaviors reshape the advertising landscape, influence and conversion need to be connected, and CTV is one of the few channels that can bridge that gap at scale. It’s time for marketers to rethink and reprioritize CTV’s overall role within the broader marketing mix.

What Advertisers Should Do Now
The shift to an agent-driven digital ecosystem is already underway. Waiting for it to fully materialize before adjusting strategy will put brands behind. There are a few practical moves advertisers should be making now.

1. Reallocate a portion of performance budgets into CTV, not just brand budgets. If CTV is going to carry more of the load for driving outcomes, it needs to be funded accordingly. That means moving dollars out of lower-yield impression environments, not just adding incremental spend on top.
   
2. Hold CTV accountable to outcomes. Stop briefing CTV purely around reach and frequency. Define what success looks like in terms of business outcomes, whether that’s conversion lift, site engagement, or downstream revenue, and hold campaigns accountable to it.
   
3. Build creative that drives action, not just recall. CTV creative needs to do more than tell a story. It should create urgency, reinforce differentiation, and make the next step clear. That might mean rethinking pacing, messaging, and how calls to action are incorporated into the experience.
   
4. Integrate CTV into the performance loop. Don’t treat CTV as a standalone input. Use first-party data and signals from CTV exposure to inform targeting, sequencing, and optimization elsewhere. The goal is to turn CTV into a demand engine that other channels can capture more efficiently.
   
5. Reevaluate reliance on click-based signals. If your strategy depends heavily on large volumes of clicks and impressions, it’s worth modeling what happens as those decline. Identify where CTV can take on a greater role in influencing those outcomes earlier in the process. This is where view-through conversions will be impacted the most.

The Next Phase for CTV
As AI agents take over execution, advertising’s role shifts from capturing interactions to shaping decisions. That makes channels built around human attention more valuable, not less.

CTV’s next phase will belong to advertisers that stop treating it as a premium awareness channel and start using it as a strategic bridge between influence and action. In a world where agents may increasingly control the final mile of discovery, comparison, and purchase, brands must win earlier, with humans, in moments where attention still has depth. CTV gives advertisers that opportunity.

Mounting demand for a next-generation video streaming solution that surpasses the latency and unidirectional limitations imposed by the currently dominant streaming architecture is generating strong support for a new standard known simply as "MOQ" (Media over QUIC).

While by all accounts, it will take at least a few more months before the Internet Engineering Task Force finalizes the MOQ specifications, there are now multiple projects underway allowing producers to try out this new multidirectional, multi-latency approach to streaming.

“There’s a buzz and excitement in the air about MOQ we’ve never seen before,” says Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai and a leader in the IETF MOQ initiative.

HEIGHTENED INTEREST AT NAB
This was evident at the recent NAB Show where MOQ demos abounded on the exhibit floor and an overflow crowd filled the large meeting room devoted to the NAB’s first-ever session on the standard. Entities announcing infrastructure support for MOQ included public CDN operators Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare, and CDN77 as well as cloud compute platform providers Akamai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Streaming software system suppliers demonstrating delivery of payloads and advanced features over MOQ-enabled facilities included Ateme, Bitmovin, EZDRM, Nomad Media, Norsk Media, Oracle Media, Synamedia, Red5 and Wowza,.

While proprietary real-time streaming systems supporting video conferencing and a host of other applications have been around for several years, MOQ is meant to satisfy the need for a standardized, ubiquitously available two-way superhighway over which video flows in any direction at any scale with latencies attuned to specific use-case requirements. That’s why Red5, a successful provider of a highly scalable WebRTC-based streaming platform, is throwing its weight behind MOQ, says Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen.

“WebRTC was designed as a peer-to-peer protocol, which means there’s no standard for scaling the way we do by building out clustered cloud resources,” Allen says. “MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.”

The foundational set of MOQ specifications, known as MOQ Transport (MOQT), marks an incompatible break with conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As a so-called connectionless platform, MOQT employs a simple publish/subscribe approach to streaming by signaling the start and end points of a session while avoiding the thousands of request/response exchanges that transpire between clients and servers in HTTP streaming.

QUIC is a modern transport protocol built on UDP that is designed to make web connections faster, more secure, and more resilient. It was originally developed by Google and later standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 9000

Moreover, the new standard provides a way to automatically tune end-to-end latencies to whatever levels meet user requirements, including real-time 200-400ms latencies that are imperceptible to humans as well as what Law calls “interactive live” at 2 seconds for use in sports betting, online casino gambling, banking and similar applications and “conservative live” supporting ironclad HD, 4K, and, eventually, 8K quality persistency at 5 seconds.

ALL YOU NEED IS CACHE
With decoding and other device rendering processes managed through leading browsers, MOQ in most instances doesn’t require client plug-in software. And depending on how MOQ-ready CDNs are designed, MOQ can also support recording live content for short-term replay and catchup and long-term storage for VOD archives and cloud DVR applications. “VOD just means my cache is big enough to hold stuff that was live a while ago,” Law says.

Paralleling MOQT development, there are other initiatives within IETF and through the closely affiliated ad hoc organization known as the OpenMOQ Software Consortium that are aimed at creating a practical operating environment for the transport protocol. They include media layer streaming formats emerging from IETF, a new client player template developed by Red5 and endorsed by the consortium, and several ready-to-deploy players, , including a MOQ-based plug-in for Bitmovin’s new multi-purpose Player Web X platform.

“We have an array of features we enable, and each is treated as an individual plug-in,” says Bitmovin product manager Jacob Arends, who describes Player X as the latest, completely rebuilt version of its popular Web X player. “From a player [configuration] perspective there’s not much more to it than that,” but with MOQ playback departing from the HTTP norms, “it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the cloud side.”

While much of the focus on MOQ has to do with overcoming the limitations of conventional B2C streaming, the protocol also needs to be accommodated in post-production playouts to producers’ broadcast and OTT affiliates, notes Gwendal Simon, senior director for video network technology at Synamedia. “We’re bringing MOQ into our Quortex PowerVu multitrack contribution management system,” Simon says.

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.

July 2027 marks the next Upper C-band auction and a further reduction of satellite spectrum that has been the backbone for television distribution for decades.

This time, the challenge looks different. The previous C-band repack compressed services into a smaller slice of spectrum through more efficient encoding and additional satellite capacity.

But the next phase is unlikely to offer that same flexibility. Even under more conservative scenarios, with the FCC required by statute to auction at least 100 MHz of Upper C-band, many broadcasters now assume current distribution models will not be sustainable within the remaining C-band allocation.

That challenge sits against a deeply embedded infrastructure. Satellite has set the standard for decades, delivering consistent, predictable performance across vast affiliate footprints. Today, there are still over a thousand registered earth stations supporting video broadcast distribution.

For those who are carrying premium channels and live events, replacing satellite is being assessed and scrutinized around reliability, and more specifically, how to maintain broadcast-grade delivery as the underlying infrastructure changes.

Approaching the Transition
Broadcasters are no longer evaluating distribution options in theory. They’re testing them in live environments, where performance failures are visible, measurable, and have commercial impact.

These considerations play out differently depending on the type of service in play. Occasional-use contribution feeds and lower-risk channels are often the first to move, where flexibility and cost carry more weight. Higher-value full time channels, where disruption has immediate commercial impact, tend to follow a more gradual path, introducing IP alongside existing satellite capacity before making larger moves.

A managed IP solution that offers service level guarantees is increasingly forming a core part of the delivery model, either as a primary or a back-up pathway. Deep monitoring of both the end-to-end network connectivity, as well as the video, audio, and metadata payload is critical transparency that allows programmers and networks to know the state of their content as received by their partner platforms.

Where Alternatives Break Down
Ku-band satellite is one of the most immediate options open to broadcasters. It has the advantage of providing additional capacity and can be integrated into existing workflows, but it comes with a known trade-off: greater sensitivity to weather than C-band. For some use cases, that trade-off is manageable, but for high-value live services, it often means that another layer of protection is required.

A second option is public internet delivery, which presents a different set of challenges. Although it’s widely available and easy to access, video cannot always be transported consistently, and unmanaged internet paths do not give broadcasters the same confidence around performance and protection that they would expect. This is why content owners preparing for migration are looking into the architecture that is powering these services, focusing on how a provider handles redundancy, what level of service assurance exists, how issues are identified, and who is responsible when a feed is degraded.

One further pressure lies in the compression of the remaining satellite services. As more channels are packed into less spectrum, managing that environment becomes a lot harder. Planning early gives broadcasters greater scope to sequence migrations sensibly, maintain continuity and avoid unnecessary disruption as timelines tighten.

The Growth of Managed IP Distribution
In response to these challenges, purpose-built IP distribution is gaining ground because it addresses the areas broadcasters are focused on most closely: reliability and control. That includes fully managed networks designed for live video, with built-in redundancy, clear service-level commitments, and continuous monitoring from origination to hand-off.

Broadcasters and MVPDs do not want a replacement model that makes things more complex at the receive site or turns every new channel into an engineering nightmare. They need manageability, support, simplicity, reliability, transparency, and scale, all of which makes IP migration more manageable for programmers and platforms.

Reliability as the New Benchmark
When it comes to high-value content, premium channels and live events place tolerance on delivery problems is effectively zero. This reality is shaping how broadcasters plan their transition. Hybrid models will persist in the near term, with satellite continuing to play a role in certain markets and for some content. But as C-band capacity continues to contract, the direction of travel is clear.

The next phase of distribution will be defined by which solutions can deliver broadcast-grade reliability in an increasingly complex environment. In the post-C-band era, broadcasters will need the deterministic certainty offered by proven managed IP solutions with performance Service Level Agreements and backed up by 24x7 human and automation support that responds swiftly to remediate any issues with the network or the content.

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.

When you’ve spent enough time around broadcast systems, you start to notice a pattern: every facility grows in layers.

A new requirement comes along, so another piece of gear gets added. Then another. Over time, what started as a clean design becomes harder to follow, harder to maintain, and harder to change. Nobody plans it that way. It just happens. You solve the problem in front of you, then move on to the next one.

For a long time, that was simply how infrastructure evolved. And to be fair, it worked. Broadcasters built serious, dependable operations that way. But the downside always showed up eventually.

More hardware meant more cabling, power, cooling, and space which means more things to manage when something went wrong not to mention trying to sort your way through the additional cables that have accumulated on top of your neatly dressed cable bundles. A modest change could potentially have a large impact. That’s why the conversation around infrastructure has changed over the last few years.

The Consequences of Changing Focus
Reliability and speed are still the primary drivers in live production. However, there is a lot more attention on flexibility and efficiency, and for good reasons. Production teams are being asked to support more formats, take on more responsibility, all while dealing with more variation in how a show gets managed from one day to the next.

The production and audience changes, but the core need remains the same. Teams want systems that can handle change quickly without requiring significant downtime. That sounds simple, but it has real consequences for system design. It affects how much functionality can be tied to software and whether a system has room to grow without major changes to the tech stack.

And it affects costs in a very practical way. This is one reason software-defined infrastructure is getting so much attention. There is a steady interest in systems that can do more over time without demanding a new hardware investment every time the workflow shifts. That matters because most facilities are not static anymore.

A production may still be based on-site, but some of the people operating it may be somewhere else. A plant may still be centered on SDI, but some form of IP may already be part of the picture. A system may be installed for one main use case, then quickly be asked to support something broader once people see what is possible.

Infrastructure is Becoming Part of the Solution
That last part is important. In my experience, users almost always find applications and ways to use equipment that they did not fully predict at the start. Once they get comfortable, they push. They ask for more I/O, processing and monitoring. More ways to adapt the system to the work at hand. That is usually a good sign. It means the infrastructure is becoming part of the solution instead of something they must work around.

It also explains why software defined hardware keeps coming up in these discussions. When teams can reduce the amount of separate gear needed to accomplish the same job, the benefits are immediate. The system takes up less space. It draws less power. It is easier to deploy and easier to support and typically provides significant cost savings. The net effect is that the efficiency adds up.

That is really where broadcast infrastructure is today. Not aiming at a complete reinvention or some theoretical universal model that fits every operation. The smarter path is usually more measured than that.

Build systems that leave room to move. That may be the most useful lesson right now. Because the facilities that will hold up best over time are the ones that can adapt without becoming more complicated. That’s where the industry is headed. Not through a dramatic reset, but through smarter decisions made one practical step at a time.

A new report from the Reuters Institute shows the rapidly changing nature of news podcasts, with publishers pivoting to video as a response to audience demand and new platform features.

The report, based on a mixture of audience research and interviews with media managers, suggests this is an uneven shift, with some publishers creating multimodal versions of all their shows and others converting only chat formats to video and keeping narrative shows as audio-only productions.

Qualitative research shows that video podcasting audiences mostly overlap with audio ones, suggesting the same people access them in different contexts. But video is also reaching new audiences with different expectations, and this creates dilemmas for publishers in terms of distribution and monetisation.

While big titles (New York Times, The Economist and Die Zeit) are launching audio-only subscriptions, podcast-focused companies such as Chora Media and Goalhanger are adopting a “flywheel” approach, making money with events, merchandise, and bonus content to overcome resistance to pay.

These are some of the findings from The Changing shape and new economics of news podcasting, a report authored by Nic Newman, published by the Reuters Institute.

The report provides a valuable snapshot at a momentous time for the news industry, with audio podcasts being transformed into video ones, personality-driven chat shows squeezing out more traditional narrative series, and business models changing, with some shows going behind paywalls. It explores how audiences feel about these changes and how publishers are responding to them.

The report draws on qualitative audience research conducted in the U.S., the U.K. and Norway. It is also based on interviews with leading news publishers such as the New York Times, the Guardian, The Economist, Schibsted, Bonnier and Die Zeit, as well as podcast-first companies Goalhanger and Chora Media.

The report is available for download here.

Futuresource Consulting’s post-NAB 2026 report has concluded that the long-discussed convergence of pro AV and broadcast is no longer a trend but an established reality, with enterprise clients now expecting broadcast-quality output from pro AV budgets and pro AV teams.

The report, co-authored by Helen Matthews, senior market analyst, pro video & broadcast at Futuresource, points to attendance figures as an early indicator of the shift. Corporate media professionals at NAB 2026 numbered more than 13,000 – almost double the 2025 figure – and NAB introduced a dedicated Enterprise Video Strategies track for the first time. Overall attendance reached just over 58,000, up from 55,000 in 2025, with representation from 146 countries and 132 first-time exhibitors among a total of more than 1,100.

The report identifies IP networking as the primary technical enabler of convergence, with IPMX momentum at the show confirming what Futuresource describes as a clear industry goal – creating a seamless bridge between pro AV and broadcast environments. SMPTE 2110 workflows, previously the preserve of broadcast production infrastructure, are now being specified and supported by enterprise AV teams.

The report cites product launches on the show floor as evidence of how vendor strategies are responding – pointing to Shure’s DCA 901, a compact digital broadcast microphone array designed to deliver eight channels over a single network cable with native REMI workflow support, as an example of a traditionally pro AV manufacturer now pitching directly into broadcast applications.

Virtual production is identified as another area where the boundaries have shifted materially. Tools that originated in film production – LED volumes, real-time compositing, camera tracking – are being packaged and priced for organisations with no post-production team or broadcast engineering resource, with Sony’s virtual production showcase at NAB cited as an explicit illustration of that direction.

The report also outlines where the challenge now sits. Matthews said the gap between a brief that says conference room and a client expectation of broadcast studio is where integration expertise is being tested, and that pro AV integrators who understand broadcast signal chains, IP video standards and production switching infrastructure are in a fundamentally different advisory position to those who do not.

Download the report here.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand Installation.

The National Association of Broadcasters has launched a podcast dedicated to delivering timely broadcast industry news.

New episodes of “AirTime” will be released every Wednesday morning, highlighting the legislative and regulatory developments that impact local television and radio stations. The first episode is available now, addressing Washington’s interest in keeping live sports on broadcast TV.

“Local broadcasters are on the front lines of informing communities, whether it is breaking news, severe weather or the issues shaping our democracy,” NAB Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Michelle Lehman said. “AirTime is about connecting those real-world impacts to the policy decisions being made in Washington and ensuring our industry, policymakers and the public understand what is at stake. When local stations are strong, so are the communities we serve.”

“AirTime” will deliver insights into the policy decisions shaping the future of local broadcasting, and how those decisions affect communities’ access to trusted news and emergency information. Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving media landscape, the podcast underscores the essential role broadcasters play in serving their communities and the need for policies that support this critical mission.

The debut episode features insights from Jon Miller, president of Acquisitions and Partnerships at NBC Sports, in a conversation with Puck’s John Ourand at NAB Show. Miller explains why broadcast television remains indispensable to the future of live sports, citing its unmatched ability to deliver massive audiences for marquee events. The episode also explores the policy debate over sports rights, the importance of keeping games available free over the air and NAB’s Game On campaign.

LONDON—Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” has surpassed 1 billion viewing hours, cementing its title as the most-watched film on Netflix, according to new research from Ampere Analysis.

The kids’ movie was the most popular movie on subscription streaming platforms in 2025 and was declared “the most-watched film of all time on Netflix” last summer, when it surpassed “Red Notice” with 256 million views.

“KPop Demon Hunters” is one of the first streaming original films to break into a space dominated by the franchises of major studios like Disney and NBCUniversal, Ampere said. It is also a rare example of an original film reaching a level of cultural impact reserved for flagship series such as “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things.”

Ampere’s analysis revealed:

• Hit Children & Family titles have longer viewing lifecycles. “KPop Demon Hunters” reached peak weekly viewing in its 11th week after release. In comparison,Ampere’s analysis of the top 20 most-viewed Original films released onNetflix shows they usually reach peak weekly viewership in week one or two andengagement diminishes quickly.
• Netflix has reduced commissioning in the genre. Children & Family content accounted for 4% of Netflix’s total commissions during 2024-2025, down from 9% during 2022-2023.
• This reflects a broader streaming platform trend. SVOD platforms have the lowest share of scripted Children & Family commissions than any other content type. Globally, they accounted for just 13% of Children & Family commissions in 2025, versus 47% for traditional TV outlets such as public service broadcasters. Increased reliance on ad-supported tiers, where monetizing children’s content is complex, and the rise in popularity of platforms like YouTube are contributing to the SVOD pullback.
• Despite this, kids’ content remains a key subscription driver. Among households with children, 35% say having TV shows and movies their children want to watch is a key subscription motivator (Ampere Q3 2025 Media Consumer data).
• The Children & Family genre continues to deliver strong engagement. In H2 2025, it generated 4.4 billion views, second only to Crime & Thriller, according to Ampere’s analysis of Netflix’s global viewing data of movies and TV seasons.

“The film’s musical core extended its reach beyond the platform and encouraged repeat viewing,” Ampere Research Manager Joe Hall said. “Its themes, grounded in the global Korean cultural wave, helped build a highly engaged international fan base. With a sequel already announced, ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ shows there is still a lot of value in developing original IP that appeals across age demographics.”

Another NAB Show has come and gone and thankfully my feet are still talking to me (my sleep-deprived brain, well that’s another story, give me a couple more days). But I’m still coherent enough to share my thoughts about our industry’s largest annual gathering and wanted to do so while my memories are still fresh.

This year was my 30th show and I celebrated my milestone like I mark every show, talking with exhibitors and attendees and gathering their thoughts about new products, services and the trends they are seeing.

This year also marks the 103rd such NAB Show, which began at the dawn of broadcasting in the early 1920s. Radio (and eventually television) are the original “mass electronic media” and this year’s show demonstrated how resilient we are as well as how the show itself is adapting to those changes.

The Reality of ‘Swipe Left’
The NAB Show focused heavily on the content creator economy this year, featuring conversations from the people who are driving the next generation of media. Creators of all shapes and sizes have more options than ever to inform and entertain through outlets such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

In most of those conversations, the new generation of creators (of all ages, by the way) found that they have a lot in common with the generations who were informed and influenced by the evolution of television, in particular; the desire for “broadcast quality,” which so many of us still consider the gold standard.

And when I refer to that term I’m not talking about traditional methods of talking heads, static backdrops and old-style Hollywood production styles, or even video resolutions. No, today’s viewers have far more choices than ever before and that media has to grab your attention immediately. The very definition of television has changed over time (the subject of my first editorial for TV Tech when I started back with the magazine back in 2001) and the demands have become higher.

The meaning of “broadcast quality” has changed and while today’s creators don’t want to necessarily recreate the traditional TV show, their goal is the same: to keep the viewers’ attention, especially since more and more are viewing content on a variety of screens.

In essence, broadcast quality is no longer a set of specifications, but rather a mindset to which creators are approaching on their own terms. Broadcasters are content creators too but as gatekeepers, they’ve opened those gates to a wider community.

Television production was already becoming more “democratized” two decades ago when the dawn of YouTube gave a voice to anyone with an IP connection and digital software-based editing platforms were becoming more widely available. Since the launch of Youtube and social media over the past two decades, we’ve seen an explosion of new production styles that have eventually forced both the TV and film communities to adapt.

The NAB Show has had to evolve to meet the crop of new content creators and the show floor still had a plethora of high-end technology demanded by media companies worldwide.

But those same exhibitors—from AWS, Sony, Blackmagic Design and For-A to Shure and Audio Technica to name just a few—were also talking about new audio techniques and vertical video. In essence, anyone who develops media technology was showcasing (or at least discussing) new media creation technologies and techniques designed for this rapidly expanding media.

I spoke with one such content creator prior to the show. Jefferson Graham, host of the PhotowalksTV travel series on Youtube talked about how having his show broadcast on Scripps stations on a weekly basis impacted his career.

Jefferson said the relationship with Scripps pays off when he visits communities where Scripps owns a local TV station. “I get to work with some of the local people there, so big shout out to WCPO in Cincinnati!” he said. “They spent a day with me shooting and then I also went on the air and did a segment with them, that was fantastic,” adding that he also worked with local broadcasters in Detroit, San Diego and Missoula Mont. as well.

But Content is Still King
The NAB Show’s theme this year was about “unveiling powerful new tools and technologies that put storytelling in everyone’s hands,” according to Karen Chupka, executive vice president of NAB Show, and overall I think they did a great job guiding the discussions and giving those storytellers the opportunity to test drive those new tools on the exhibit floor.

I’ve seen enough NAB Shows to understand the need to adapt and to change. Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve seen the lines blurring between “professional” broadcasters and the creators (who remembers the term “prosumer” which was all the rage 15-20 years ago?), so the trend is not necessarily new. But like my editorial of 25 years ago, when I tried to anticipate the popularity of the Internet and its impact on television, the reality of this evolution just took a bit longer than I anticipated.

Today, it’s no longer a question of if those worlds converge—it’s happening in real time, and NAB Show remains one of the few places where you can see it unfold.

The NAB Show entered my bloodstream three decades ago and with nearly half of this year’s attendees first-timers, it will probably do so for many of them as well. But unlike me, they’re seeing a radically different media landscape that no longer requires a massive budget and where the distinction between broadcaster and creator matters less.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Roku announced today that it has surpassed 100 million streaming households worldwide, a major milestone that the company says “reflects the broader shift in viewing habits, as streaming becomes the primary way people watch TV.”

Roku defines streaming households as the number of distinct user accounts streaming on the Roku platform in a given 30-day period. Roku achieved this milestone as of April. A “Roku platform” is defined as a Roku streaming player, first-party Roku-made TV, or one of the Roku TV models built by the company’s global hardware partners. All Roku devices offer the same Roku Home Screen and are powered by the Roku OS.

“Surpassing 100 million streaming households is a defining moment, not just for Roku, but for the future of television,” said Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku. “We’re helping shape the entertainment landscape by making it easier to discover great content, more affordable to watch it, and more effective for advertisers and partners around the world to connect with audiences. We are deeply grateful to our viewers, teams, advertisers, and partners for helping us reach this milestone. And as the shift to streaming continues to accelerate, we’re more energized than ever to lead the evolution of television.”

Roku says its streaming devices are used by more than half of all U.S. broadband households, and growth continues across key international markets, including Mexico, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Latin America.

According to Comscore, Roku drives more than three times the engagement of the next leading TV operating system in the U.S., underscoring the scale and importance of the Roku Home Screen in how people stream. (Chart below reflects U.S. viewing only.)

Roku also offers more than 500 free live linear channels in the U.S., thousands of free on-demand titles, and access to every major premium streaming service from a single Home Screen. The Roku Channel is ranked as the #2 free, ad-supported streaming app on the Roku platform and the #5 streaming app overall in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s The Gauge™ report.

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."

Artificial intelligence I in media has moved well beyond a collection of tools. Capabilities such as metadata tagging, QC automation, transcript generation, and recommendation engines now shape decisions across the content chain. As these systems grow more connected, AI increasingly acts as the operating layer that routes content, applies policy, and manages routine tasks.

The industry is shifting from narrow automation toward agentic systems that can understand context, pursue goals, and execute multi-step processes within clear editorial and policy boundaries. Routine content can flow automatically while sensitive material is held for human review. The result is faster, more consistent operations — paired with new expectations for transparency and trust.

How End-to-End AI Workflows Work Today — and Why They’re Now Essential
Broadcasters tend to begin one of two ways: solving individual pain points or linking teams and systems into continuous workflows. Both paths have reshaped operations.

Individual High‑ROI Tasks
For many organizations, the first gains come from targeted use cases. Smarter metadata tagging improves archive access, personalized recommendations and artwork help keep viewers engaged, churn prediction sharpens retention efforts, and load forecasting prepares systems for major events without guesswork. Automated compliance checks flag inappropriate content, while QC tools catch frame-level issues.

Crucially, AI now reaches upstream into pre-production, where agentic systems orchestrate automated script breakdowns, generate storyboards, and optimize complex production schedules before a single frame is shot.

Shift to Workflow Orchestration
As organizations connect individual AI tasks, the operating layer starts to take shape. Instead of siloed workflows, agentic systems act as the connective tissue between the newsroom, production, advertising, and operations. For example, AI now orchestrates contextual advertising by analyzing video frame-by-frame for hyper-targeted dynamic ad insertions (DAI). Content moves according to policy, not manual handoffs, and the system improves as teams refine rules and review outputs.

These orchestration models can even show “self‑healing” behavior, with agents monitoring traffic patterns, detecting early signs of congestion, and adjusting routes automatically. Human teams retain oversight for judgment calls and editorial nuance, guided by clear governance on when to intervene.

Some broadcasters have already taken orchestration further. Sky Italia uses an AI-driven delivery platform that routes video data dynamically across its network, ensuring buffer-free 4K streams for millions of viewers. By anticipating demand spikes, the system reduces egress and storage costs while improving viewer experience.

As distribution expands across regions, platforms, and accessibility requirements, manual versioning and monitoring cannot scale. Three domains show how AI has become foundational:

1. Real-time Monitoring and Operational Intelligence
   Operations teams oversee thousands of feeds at once, and AI helps surface issues that would otherwise go unnoticed — mis-triggered graphics, muted audio, compliance violations, subtle sync drift. In one recent global sports broadcast, AI detected graphic rendering errors on mobile devices early, prompting an automatic switch to a backup encoder before viewers notice anything. AI‑driven forecasting also helps teams scale resources for major events, reducing the need to over‑provision and improving resilience during peak demand.
   
2. Localization remains one of the most labor‑intensive parts of media operations. AI accelerates translation, subtitling, compliance edits, metadata generation, and platform specific packaging. It also preserves sync and ensures consistent output across formats and languages. With accessibility expectations rising, AI systems can automatically identify non-speech audio cues like "[rain patters]" or "[door creaks]" and support high‑volume production of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH).
   
   Dubbing has also improved significantly. Newer models preserve tone, pacing, and emotional nuance rather than merely converting dialogue. Netflix has seen completion rates for global titles increase after adopting emotionally aligned dubbing, demonstrating how performance‑aware tools can improve viewer engagement. Humans still guide cultural context and oversee less‑common languages, but AI now handles much of the repetitive work that slows production.
   
3. Sports Logic, Highlight Generation, and Resource Optimization
   Sports broadcasting shows how quickly AI is evolving. Instead of generic highlight packages, AI now identifies sport‑specific moments — a goal, three-pointer, or slapshot — and assembles clips for social distribution instantly. This logic also powers generative personalization, as seen when NBC Universal used AI orchestration to create millions of highly personalized daily Olympic recaps. These same systems forecast audience surges for major matches and adjust cloud and network resources accordingly – helping maintain stream quality while cutting infrastructure costs.

Securing AI-Native Operations: Risks and the Trust Stack
As AI becomes central to production, the risks grow too. Synthetic anchors, fabricated promos, tampered clips, and impersonations of public figures can erode credibility. Another challenge comes from contaminated or synthetic content entering production pipelines, where it becomes harder to detect and more costly to fix.

A stronger approach builds trust into each asset. A practical trust stack includes:

• Digital watermarking — durable, invisible identifiers that survive editing, compression, and screen capture.
• Provenance frameworks — cryptographically signed manifests capturing an asset’s origin and transformations. Broadcasters such as France Télévisions and ARD have begun daily use of C2PA protocols to safeguard VOD authenticity.
• Authentication — hardware-backed proof at capture that confirms material comes from a trusted source, as seen in Sony’s latest C2PA-enabled camera systems.

For this to work, trust signals must be added at ingest and persist through localization, editing, transcodes, and multi‑partner distribution. Challenges remain, including metadata stripping, uneven adoption, social-media black holes, and key-management burdens. However, without these layers, AI-native operations carry significant brand and legal risk.

A Pragmatic 12-Month Plan
Adopting AI effectively starts with a focus on viewer impact and measurable outcomes. Choose one or two high-value problems — manual bottlenecks, missed QC anomalies, dubbing throughput, churn — and link them to clear KPIs such as time-to-air reductions, versioning-throughput targets, or improvements in detection-to-resolution times.

A brief workflow audit will surface quick wins, especially where AI already functions as an informal orchestrator. From there, lightweight governance helps clarify risk ownership, documents human-override paths for agentic systems, and anticipates rising expectations for explainability. Procurement should include questions about provenance and authentication support so integrity signals travel with each asset. Finally, investing in skills helps editorial and technical teams shape and evaluate outputs rather than carry out repetitive work.

What Success Looks Like in 3–5 Years
Recent moves, like Netflix’s acquisition of Interpositive AI, prove tier-1 media companies are now embedding AI directly into their core infrastructure as an operating layer. Broadcasters that thrive won’t bolt AI onto legacy workflows; they’ll operate inside agentic, policy-driven systems that learn from outcomes, route work fluidly between humans and machines, and embed trust by default.

As these systems mature, each output improves the next, KPIs guide decisions, and consistency scales globally. The earliest deployments already show these benefits, and they will increasingly define industry expectations in the years ahead.

For the better part of four decades, the local sports ecosystem enjoyed a period of artificial economic tranquility. This era was defined by the "cable bundle," a structural masterstroke that effectively socialized the cost of premium sports content across a broad subscriber base.

In this model, every cable household contributed to the local team’s rights fees, regardless of whether they were die-hard fans or had never watched a single minute. This subsidization provided a robust financial safety net, creating a reliable and ever-growing revenue stream that insulated teams and broadcasters from the volatility of direct consumer demand.

We must acknowledge that this economic safety net has not merely frayed, it has vanished. The shift in local sports video economics is not a temporary fluctuation but a fundamental structural realignment.

Economic 'Squeeze'
We have transitioned from a subsidized model to one where revenue is derived directly from the fans who are actively subscribing to and viewing the games, whether through linear tier packages or digital streaming platforms. In essence, the fan is now the primary, and often sole, underwriter of their favorite team’s media presence.

While this direct relationship between fan and content may seem philosophically pure, it has introduced a precarious economic "squeeze". In this narrowed revenue stream, the combined income from subscriptions and advertising must now bear the full weight of rights fees, production overhead, and delivery costs.

When the mathematical reality of these expenses exceeds the revenue generated by the active viewing audience, the entire system becomes inherently unstable. We are witnessing the limits of "onefer" monetization, a system where the value of local sports media is measured strictly through the lens of a single transaction, be it a monthly subscription fee or an ad impression—a challenge that is exacerbated by the size of a team’s local market and the competition from other teams for local fan attention.

To achieve long-term economic stability in this disrupted market, we must look beyond these traditional, singular pillars of monetization. Barring a massive downward change in rights fees and/or production costs (which seems unlikely given the premium nature of the live sports content), the entities acquiring local media rights must find expanded ways to monetize fan attention. Success in the modern era requires a "twofer" strategy.

A "twofer" is the ability to leverage the high-engagement power of live sports to drive a secondary, but highly lucrative, business value. We see this masterfully executed at the national level by Amazon, which utilizes sports not just as a content offering to support its subscription business, but as a potent catalyst to drive Prime memberships and expand Amazon’s share of the consumer’s wallet.

A 'Twofer'
In the local context, this logic applies with equal force. A "twofer" might manifest as a large over-the-air network using marquee local games to bolster viewership across its entire content portfolio, increasing the value of its total ad inventory.

And for the modern era, it involves a team-branded direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform that utilizes granular audience data, which had previously been inaccessible to the team’s business intelligence department, to drive the increased sale of in-person tickets to the team’s games, concessions, merchandise, and promotion of other events at the team venue, as well as the value of the team’s sponsorships, advertisements, and activations, creating a fan flywheel that grows the team’s value.

In this scenario, the cooperative stackup of multiple twofer platforms for the distribution of the live sports broadcast serves as both a product and a sophisticated top-of-funnel lead generation tool for the team’s physical business operations.

Entities that successfully create multiple revenue streams from each fan's attention possess a structural advantage over those limited to "onefer" paths. They can afford to experiment with new content formats, business models, and fan engagement strategies. Furthermore, they provide a more durable source of revenue to support that team’s local media rights and production costs.

And ultimately, they provide stability for fans, as the stability of the distribution of the game to the fan’s screen from year to year is not tied solely to the volatility of the onefer entity’s monthly churn rate or the direct revenue from ad impressions.

When markets undergo the level of disruption we are currently seeing in local sports media, the natural inclination is to seek immediate, short-term fixes. However, we must be disciplined enough to avoid "solutions" that merely perpetuate the instability caused by onefer business models. We cannot simply reconstruct the same onefer model and expect the same results. The math has changed.

The path forward requires an intellectual shift in how we value fan engagement. We must stop viewing the broadcast as the final destination of the revenue journey and start viewing it as the beginning. By embracing the "twofer" economy, we can move toward a sustainable future where local sports media rights are not just a financial burden to be managed, but a strategic asset that fuels the long-term health and value of the entire sports organization. Stability in local sports will not be found by looking backward at what we lost, but by looking forward at how we can diversify the value of the attention we earn.

The DPP has published a new report exploring how media companies are using data to drive better decisions, stronger engagement, and improved commercial outcomes.

Making Data Pay is the result of input from over 70 contributors representing 19 content organizations and 19 vendors.

It explores data across four key areas of the media business: management and operations, audience engagement, business strategy, and the technology foundations that support them.

According to the DPP, despite significant investment in data capabilities, many organizations are still struggling to translate that investment into measurable impact. Making Data Pay examines where data is already delivering value, where complexity is emerging, and the practical lessons the industry has learned so far.

The report adds that while data is abundant, impact is uneven, suggesting that media companies are “drowning in data but lacking alignment” and need “data coherence”.

It suggests companies should begin by defining the questions and then find the data points to answer it. “Without purpose, dashboards multiply but strategy stalls,” states the report. “Data must drive decisions, not simply score past performance. Metrics that only look backwards aren’t enough to shape the future.”

The DPP urges companies to “measure what matters” by focusing on the metrics with the greatest strategic importance rather than those which are the easiest to measure.

“Across the industry there’s strong belief in the power of data, but turning that belief into measurable impact remains a challenge,” said David Thompson, technology strategist at the DPP.

“Successful data strategies aren’t just technology projects,” added Thompson. “When the questions being asked of data aren’t clear, organisations quickly end up measuring everything but understanding very little.”

The report is available for DPP members to download here.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

Live sports has emerged as a perfect use case for cloud workflows. Teams travel. Venues change. Games are seasonal. Demand fluctuates. Distribution across diverse channels grows more complex by the day. In the face of these challenges, leagues, broadcasters, and streaming platforms increasingly are leveraging cloud workflows to produce, manage, and deliver live sports. Instead of moving infrastructure to each event, they are connecting each event to infrastructure in the cloud.

In employing cloud workflows, these organizations realize greater efficiency, agility, and scalability that translate to lower production costs , as well as better responsiveness to expanding distribution demands and new business opportunities. These gains are driving the shift of cloud-based workflows from experimental deployments to core broadcast infrastructure supporting live sports production and distribution.

Innovation, Inspired by Inefficiency
Sports is a dominant driver of real-time television viewing, possibly now more than ever. As rights costs for this valuable content rise and as distribution opportunities extend across more diverse platforms and geographic regions, media organizations are looking to realize greater flexibility with lower operational costs.

It has become harder to justify an operationally rigid production model that involves complex logistics, with large crews and large amounts of physical equipment sent to every game or event. Similarly, there is less willingness today to power and maintain physical systems that often sit idle between games. As media organizations expand production to include regionalized feeds, language-specific streams, alternate commentary versions, and platform-specific distributions, conventional approaches that depend on duplication of infrastructure are no longer feasible.

Solving for these inefficiencies presents an opportunity for innovation, and cloud workflows offer a highly adaptable vehicle for such change. Once infrastructure and systems are enabled in the cloud, there is no need to duplicate the same physical footprint to support the next game or match. Moreover, modern cloud-based workflows give media organizations the capacity to extend production — from one show to multiple parallel shows built around one event — by scaling compute resources and orchestration tools and by facilitating collaboration among distributed team members.

An organization can spin up and reuse resources across events with ease. It can scale up or down quickly, according to need. Rather than overbuild physical systems to handle peak demand, it can align infrastructure more closely with actual production schedules and requirements. At the same time, production team members working remotely can contribute their talents more effectively, and without the time and stress associated with travel.

Having embraced cloud-based workflows for live sports production, broadcasters and other media organizations unlock added potential for further opportunities across services and markets. They deploy limited resources on-site, and the cloud gives them the capacity to monetize those resources in countless ways.

From Compromise to Core Infrastructure
A decade ago, remote and cloud workflows were often viewed as compromises, lacking the quality and reliability considered essential to broadcast-grade production. Today, practical and technical barriers to adopting cloud workflows for live production and distribution have largely been overcome.

On the technical side, modern encoding technologies and increased available bandwidth now support full 1080p HDR workflows from end to end. Compressed production has matured to the point that end viewers don’t notice a difference; the image quality is consistent with broadcast standards.

While latency and reliability remain critical in live sports, these challenges also have been met. When properly engineered, today’s networks and encoding methods support latency levels that allow for real-time communication and coordinated production by distributed teams. Sophisticated monitoring and telemetry ensure reliability by making it possible to see what is happening across the entire workflow — from source to destination — instead of simply sending a signal and hoping it arrives cleanly.

Together, all these elements preserve broadcast-grade quality and boost capacity while reducing the on-site footprint necessary for live sports production.

What does not change is the human element. Directors still direct. Operators still operate. Live sport is still the product of top-notch coordination, judgment, and storytelling. Cloud infrastructure supports that work by making the underlying systems more flexible and easier to scale across events.

Integration of Cloud Workflows
Even the most advanced users of cloud workflows began the shift incrementally, integrating new technology selectively. Hybrid models allow media organizations to preserve current investments in on-prem equipment while gaining flexibility where it makes the most sense. Over time, the balance may shift, but the transition typically is gradual.

As organizations lean into compute-powered production, common entry points include remote contribution, replay, multiviewers, and graphics integration. These workloads are relatively easy to virtualize and can be layered into existing facilities without disrupting broader operations. While many of the engineers and operators rising within modern production operations are used to working with distributed systems and are familiar with software-driven environments, ongoing education and training can help ensure that the right operations are moved to the cloud, for the right reasons.

As cloud adoption increases, improved visibility into cloud spending and production costs will also facilitate optimization of operations both on-prem and in the cloud. Within intelligent cloud platforms for live production, more definite attribution is emerging: workloads are tagged, usage is categorized, and software value is separated from raw compute costs. Cost control is catching up with technical flexibility, empowering media organizations to evaluate and refine cloud workflows more effectively — and better align their expenses with production outputs.

In recent years, live sport has successfully served as a testbed for innovations including REMI workflows, IP contribution, and centralized production models. Once again facilitating a significant structural shift within the broadcast industry, the live sports segment is providing real-world validation of cloud workflows in the most demanding of production environments.

At the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas, Interra Systems will showcase its latest advancements in automated QC, real-time monitoring, and captioning.

“Media and broadcast companies are under increasing pressure to scale streaming operations while maintaining absolute reliability, with little margin for error. As the industry moves toward IP- and streaming-first workflows, the conversation has shifted from experimentation to execution at scale,” said Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management at Interra Systems. “Our solutions provide a trusted platform for mission critical operations, delivering production-ready, human-trustable media intelligence for FAST, live linear, and on-demand workflows. Automated QC, captioning, and real-time monitoring for IP and OTT streaming remain our foundational pillars, so we are sharpening our focus in areas where we have strong traction and credibility.”

“At NAB Show 2026, we will also demonstrate how Interra Systems is applying AI responsibly to deliver results customers can rely on, especially where accuracy and error-free content delivery are crucial,” Anantharaman added.

Interra Systems solutions on display:

• ORION monitoring platform: Recent updates include all-frame deep-dive analysis, support for modern IP formats such as NDI and Zixi, and AI-driven video corruption detection to improve visual quality and reduce troubleshooting time. For live events, ORION enables faster issue detection and response, helping teams operate with greater confidence under pressure. ORION Suite now includes an integrated multiviewer that unifies monitoring data across multiple streams. Enhanced automation – including real-time multiviewing, automated audio language detection, and updated SCTE35 signaling – streamlines advertising workflows and monetization. Additional security and networking enhancements such as IPv6 compatibility, SNMPv3 support, and granular DRM authentication provide a flexible, reliable foundation for live sports, news, and large-scale streaming operations across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments.
• BATON Automated QC: Interra Systems will introduce BATON 9.4, the company’s latest version of its BATON platform featuring enhanced audio and video QC that delivers greater accuracy, fewer false alarms, and broader detection for more reliable automation and reduced manual rechecks. Other enhancements include support for Oracle Cloud Interface (OCI) as S3 compatible storage, one-click diagnostics for faster troubleshooting and quicker resolution of operational issues, and more.
• BATON Captions: The latest BATON Captions updates focus on faster workflows, higher transcription accuracy, and simplified compliance. Enhancements include a new web-based editing experience, Whisper AI integration, expanded language support, automated workflows, and advanced tools for localization and broadcast compliance — all designed to reduce operational overhead for streaming and broadcast teams.
• VEGA Media Analyzer: Interra Systems’ VEGA media analyzers help teams validate compliance and troubleshoot complex streaming and hybrid workflows, with recent updates adding AV1, VVC, faster multicore analysis, built-in chatbot assistance, expanded cloud compatibility, and improved tools to boost reliability and reduce validation time.

Interra Systems will be in Booth W2243 in the West Hall of the LVCC.

COLUMBIA, MD—LTN and MediaKind today announced a strategic partnership to tightly integrate MediaKind’s MK.IO Beam on-premise devices with the LTN Network, combining advanced edge video processing with LTN’s global IP transport infrastructure.

The integration connects MediaKind’s MK.IO Beam devices directly to the LTN Network, enabling reliable, redundant transmission of compressed video transport streams — for both contribution and distribution. The companies said the end result will be the delivery of a seamless path from high-availability IP distribution to on-premise content processing at scale.

The partnership comes at a pivotal moment as satellite-based C-Band distribution options continue to decline. With the FCC scheduled to auction off the remaining C-Band spectrum by 2027, programmers and content distributors, particularly in mid- and small-size headend markets, are seeking solutions that match the reliability of traditional C-Band while delivering faster deployment and improved cost efficiency.

“As the industry accelerates its shift away from satellite distribution, programmers and content distributors need IP solutions that deliver the same reliability, with greater flexibility and speed,” said Malik Khan, executive dhairman and co-founder of LTN. “Our integration with MediaKind brings advanced content processing directly to the edge of the LTN Network, enabling customers to deploy faster, operate more efficiently, and confidently scale their IP distribution plans.”

Enabling Direct, Redundant Connectivity at the Edge
Through the integration, MK.IO Beam devices can connect directly into the LTN Network, extending LTN’s multicast and multipath IP delivery capabilities to the edge. This enables multipath delivery over dual redundant IP connections, automatic “steering” of last-mile traffic to the best available LTN Network access node, and reliable, managed transport for both sending and receiving compressed video streams.

At the same time, the LTN Network gains streamlined access to MediaKind’s edge processing capabilities, allowing customers to transcode, multiplex, and transform content directly on-prem — ideal for source- or destination-specific processing requirements.

“The industry is under growing pressure to modernize distribution workflows without sacrificing performance,” said Shahar Bar, senior vice president, Products & Marketing at MediaKind. “By integrating MK.IO Beam directly with the LTN Network, we combine advanced software-based video processing with a highly reliable IP transport backbone—enabling faster deployments, greater operational agility, flexible cloud economics including monthly or hourly pay-as-you-go models, and a seamless transition away from legacy satellite infrastructure.”

Faster Deployment and Simplified Edge Operations
The companies say the partnership significantly accelerates IP distribution and contribution rollout timelines. Any MK.IO Beam device can now be quickly provisioned onto the LTN Network, shortening deployment cycles for contribution and distribution workflows, particularly in environments where time, infrastructure constraints, or cost sensitivity are critical.

For existing LTN customers, the integration enables content transformation at the edge, by simplifying custom encoding for regional or affiliate requirements, multiplexing for cable headends, and destination-specific processing handled locally.

By combining managed IP transport with on-prem video processing, programmers and content distributors can reduce infrastructure complexity while maintaining high reliability, they said.

MONTREAL—Haivision has released its seventh annual Broadcast Transformation Report, with remote production tech and AI dominating the trends.

Based on input from more than 1,300 broadcast professionals worldwide, Haivision—a global provider of mission-critical, real-time video networking and visual collaboration solutions—says the 2026 report offers "a broad-reaching snapshot of adoption trends, ongoing challenges, and emerging areas of innovation shaping the industry. The findings highlight continued focus on remote production, increased usage of SRT, growing reliance on cellular networks, AI adoption, and the dominance of SDI, reflecting an industry balancing modernization with operational realities."

The report examines how broadcasters are adapting workflows, infrastructure, and technology investments as they balance modernization efforts with operational constraints.

Key Broadcast Trends:

• Remote production dominates tech priorities: For several years now, broadcasters have identified enabling remote production as their leading technology focus for the next 12 months. In fact, it has consistently ranked as the top choice in the report for the past four years, with 41% of respondents citing it as their biggest technology priority in 2026.
• SRT celebrates 5 years at #1: Since the report’s debut in 2020, SRT usage has steadily grown in broadcast workflows, ranking as the most widely used video transport protocol over the last five years. SRT adoption climbed from 47% in 2020 to 78% in 2026 – a 31% increase overall.
• Broadcasters embrace cellular for live video contribution and redundancy: Broadcasters are increasingly relying on cellular networks in their live video contribution workflows. In 2026, 54% of respondents reported using cellular networks for live video contribution, up from 46% in 2025. When using fiber as their primary network for remote production workflows, cellular networks are the leading choice for redundancy, with 61% of respondents using them for backup to fiber.
• AI tops list as most impactful future technology: While AI usage among broadcasters rose slightly from last year’s report (increasing from 25% in 2025 to 27% in 2026), the outlook for AI is very strong. 64% of respondents cited it as the technology expected to have the greatest impact on broadcast production over the next five years.
• SMPTE ST 2110 adoption is growing, but SDI still dominates: SMPTE ST 2110 adoption is rising, however SDI remains the backbone of most broadcast operations. This year, 30% of respondents reported using ST 2110, up from 26% in 2025. Despite these advances, SDI is dominant, with 82% of respondents leveraging SDI infrastructure.

“Broadcasters continue to evolve their workflows while navigating operational and financial realities,” said Marcus Schioler, Vice President of Marketing at Haivision. “With record participation in this year’s survey, the report reflects a broad industry perspective balancing innovation with operational reality, where reliability, flexibility, and efficient contribution workflows are essential to supporting future growth.”

Haivision says the findings reflect an industry increasingly relying on hybrid workflows that combine established and emerging technologies. While SDI remains foundational, IP-based contribution, cloud-enabled workflows, and cellular connectivity continue to shape the future of live production.

The 2026 Haivision Broadcast Transformation Report is available for download here: https://www3.haivision.com/broadcast-report-2026-pr

A new report from the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) casts doubt among those who think linear TV’s days are numbered.

According to the association’s 2026 Media Comparisons Study, TV, viewed on a television screen, has the highest reach and time spent of all media platforms studied, for all age groups and categories measured and in addition, the majority of those viewers are reached through broadcast TV.

The report, conducted by GfK/NIQ and commissioned by TVB, examined media use among adults 18+ on over 20 traditional and digital media platforms including free, paid ad-supported, and advertising-free streaming platforms, as well as user-generated and short-form content like YouTube. It measured linear broadcast viewing of programs on TV, mobile devices, websites/apps, and digital devices to get a complete picture of broadcast’s assets, TVB said.

In addition to analyzing reach and time spent, the study also looked at what news sources are considered most trustworthy, the level of community involvement, and motivation to do further research online.

The report also had more good news for local TV, as the majority of respondents (79%) cited local stations as their most trusted news source, with 47% of respondents citing local broadcast television assets as “most involved in their community.” Ranked at the bottom of the list were social media and news aggregator websites.

In terms of broadcast, the study reported that more time is spent with broadcast TV across all devices than with cable and streaming programs and that respondents spend far more time on broadcast TV than on user generated and short-form content like YouTube.

Other key findings of the study include:

• TV ads motivate viewers to do further research online.
• 85% of broadcast viewing is on the larger TV screen, while 51% of viewing time on platforms like YouTube is on smaller digital devices.
• Total broadcast assets can reach nine out of ten adults 18+ and in key categories.
• Broadcast websites, and broadcast TV on a digital device, added more reach to broadcast TV than cable and AVOD.
• When looking at long-form ad-supported programming, linear TV represents 68% of viewing time, while streaming represents 32%.
• Broadcast reaches 94% of ad-supported streamers who stream on their TV sets.
• Advertisers cannot reach ad-free streamers, but broadcast assets can reach 92% of them.

The survey covered a base sample of 4,000 and was conducted in November and December 2025.

NEW YORK—An estimated 32.6 million people watched President Donald J. Trump deliver the 2026 State of the Union address on Tuesday, February 24, according to Nielsen.

Of those viewers, 2,047,000 were aged 18 to 34.

Nielsen’s historical data noted that the 2026 speech was down from the 36.6 million who viewed Trump’s 2025 SOTU, but above President Biden’s speeches in 2024 (32.2 million), 2023 (27.3 million) and 2021 (26.96 million).

It was however lower than Biden’s SOTU in 2022 (38.19 million) and notably lower than Trump’s SOTUs during his first administration, which attracted between 37 million and 47 million viewers.

It was also much lower than the 6 most popular State of the Union speeches of the 21st century, led by 62.06 million for President George W. Bush’s 2003 speech, followed by President Barack Obama’s 2009 (52.37 million), Bush’s 2002 (51.77 million), Obama’s 2010 (48 million), Trump’s 2017 (47.74 million) and Trump’s 2019 (46.78 million) speeches.

ZURICH—At a time when sports have become an increasingly lucrative offering for broadcasters and streamers, a new survey of senior sports executives and fans highlights trends and expectations that are likely to boost the industry’s prospects over the next year.

One topline result of the 7th edition of Altman Solon’s Global Sports Survey is that the sports sector is entering a new growth cycle, supported by strong industry confidence and changing fan viewing behavior.

Based on a survey of 250 senior global sports executives and 6,000 sports fans across the U.S., U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, 88% of executives told researchers that they are are optimistic about the sports sector’s outlook over the next 12 months, with 43% reporting a more positive view than last year.

Optimism is strongest among investors and tech and service providers, signaling continued capital inflows and innovation across the ecosystem.

That confidence is reinforced by fan behavior. Most notably, the survey found growing interest in sports viewing among younger viewers, who, in the past had lower viewing levels than older viewers, a trend that has prompted some concerns about the future of the sports industry.

The Altman Solon survey found, however, that sports viewing remains strong across age groups and continues to grow, most notably among 25–34-year-olds, where total consumption is the highest of any cohort and has increased 6% compared to three to five years ago.

This group watches over four hours of live sports per week, similar to older audiences, while consuming significantly more highlights and other non-live formats.

Among 18–34-year-olds, the shift is decisive: they spend nearly three times as much time on non-live formats as on live sports, underscoring that consumption is expanding beyond the linear live broadcast.

"Our findings support renewed optimism and challenge some of the narratives of recent years that younger generations won’t engage with sports content,” says David Dellea, partner at Altman Solon. “Younger fans simply consume differently, with streaming services and short-form content increasingly serving as their preferred gateway to sports content."

To engage fans in 2026, Altman Solon suggests sports executives and rights owners evolve toward a multi-format, multi-channel offering, as media consumption is no longer anchored in linear TV. Format preferences vary widely by age, requiring new approaches to fan engagement, rights packaging, licensing, and monetization. Younger fans, for example, are less likely to watch full live games: 39% of 18–24-year-olds typically watch the entire event, compared with 61% among fans aged 65 and over.

"We believe the industry is entering a new era of accelerated transformation, where the scale of opportunity matches the scale of change required to capture it,” says Matt Del Percio, associate partner at Altman Solon. “Sports monetization gains will be increasingly driven by leveraging fan and team data, not just live broadcasts.”

However, other findings from the survey point to a growing monetization challenge as consumption expands beyond live games, reinforcing the need for smarter packaging and differentiated offerings across formats and platforms.

At the same time, the rise of creator-led and AI-enabled content is enabling greater differentiation, creating new opportunities for rights owners and platforms to build value through smarter packaging and product innovation.

The survey also points to continued investment momentum across the broader sports economy, where annual operating spend supports a deep ecosystem of service and technology suppliers. Looking ahead, industry leaders expect investment to remain concentrated in teams and clubs while accelerating in services and sports tech, reflecting growing conviction in the infrastructure layer underpinning long-term fan engagement and revenue growth.

“Sports are evolving into a comprehensive, multi-tiered asset class,” says Christoph Sommer, associate partner at Altman Solon. “With premium assets scarce, we expect more capital to move toward mid-tier properties and the technology and services layer underpinning the sports economy.”

Altman Solon will release two additional chapters from the 7th Global Sports Survey in the coming weeks, focusing on Unlocking the Full Value of Sports IP and The Next Frontier for Sports Investment.

The full report is available here.

The following is an opinion piece from Michael Petricone, SVP, Government & Regulatory Affairs with the Consumer Technology Association:

Broadcasters benefit from one of the largest government giveaways in American history: free, exclusive access to the public airwaves. As Americans increasingly consume content in new ways, it’s time to rethink that approach and consider reallocating the spectrum to serve consumers and the broader economy.

During the first half of the 20th century, radio and television were breakthrough technologies. Spectrum allocated for broadcasting helped connect the country with local news, information, and entertainment in a way that had never been possible before. That access was always a temporary license to serve the public interest, subject to renewal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Today, fewer than 9% of Americans access broadcast TV programming solely using an antenna, with many instead using streaming, mobile, and on-demand platforms to get the same local content. Despite this declining viewership of over-the-air TV, broadcasters still control vast swaths of prime spectrum that could be put to more efficient use.

Now, broadcasters want even more, including looser ownership rules so they can merge, consolidate, and entrench their position. Before Congress hands out new favors, it should look at reclaiming underused broadcast spectrum. We can’t afford to reward inefficient use of public airwaves and shut the door on more efficient uses of spectrum – especially when unlicensed spectrum is so valuable. The limited amount of unlicensed spectrum available today generates $95.8 billion per year in sales to our economy.

Spectrum powers many of the technologies we rely on today, and next-generation advances in AI, advanced manufacturing, precision health, 6G, autonomous mobility, and defense systems will require expanded access to it.

It’s long past time to reset the system. At CES 2026, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested that “if you want to continue broadcasting without the public interest obligation, then let everyone have a fair and free shot at purchasing that spectrum.” He’s right.

An “Incentive Auction 2.0” would allow the federal government to reclaim this spectrum, auction it openly, and let the market allocate it to its highest and best uses, while generating needed government revenue. Policymakers should start asking broadcasters some tough questions and looking for opportunities to put spectrum to its highest value use.

Everyone should compete on equal terms. No more freebies. No more special favors that distort the market and advantage legacy broadcasters over their competitors. If a business model works, it will survive without government protection.

We know this approach works. When the FCC began auctioning spectrum in the 1990s, it sparked one of the greatest waves of investment and innovation in modern history. Wireless networks expanded, smartphones emerged, and the mobile economy took off.

The same holds true for convening another auction of broadcast spectrum, which would boost economic growth, improve connectivity, and help American companies compete against global rivals. As China reallocates spectrum aggressively to strengthen its technological edge, the United States cannot afford to let ours sit idle.

The airwaves belong to the American people. It is time for the FCC to take the spectrum back and allow the market to determine its most efficient use.

What do you think? Drop us a line at tvtechnology@futurenet.com

The broadcast industry has seen major transformations, but what we’re facing now is a deeper shift. It’s not just transport or tools. It’s a rethinking of how we build, scale, and operate live production infrastructure.

You’ve probably heard “infrastructure as code” a lot lately. For some, it’s the next step in automating and scaling live production. For others, it sounds like handing your OB van to a DevOps engineer with a YAML file.

I get the skepticism. But if you look at where the pain points in live production are today, you’ll see this isn’t just another tech trend. It’s a strategic necessity.

Why This Feels Risky (and why it’s necessary)
For decades, broadcast engineering has been a hardware-first, hands-on craft. SDI routers, frame syncs, multiviewers, and patch panels were built with precision and meant to run 24/7. Rebuilding a live environment on demand in the cloud? That’s a radical shift.

This works well for customers in sports, OTT, and fast-channel environments. They want modular workflows, not one-size-fits-all systems. But flexibility brings complexity.

It’s relatively easy to code infrastructure to spin up servers, storage, and connections. But configuring tech from 10 different vendors? That’s the real challenge. You need a unified, software-based control system.

The Real Bottleneck: Control
The industry’s made progress solving video transport. SMPTE ST 2110 helped us move beyond SDI into scalable IP production. But in focusing so hard on transport, we overlooked something else: control.

As we added more vendors, cloud services, and hybrid workflows, that gap became more obvious. It’s not just the complexity. It’s the manual overhead of stitching together multiple systems in real time. That doesn’t scale.

Customers don’t want one big system from one vendor. They want to curate their own stack. At Ross, we now support over 200 control protocols across our products. No one would design a system that way, but here we are.

Event-based, ephemeral infrastructure makes sense. But with a dozen vendors, each with different APIs and quirks, spinning it up isn’t trivial.

What is Infrastructure as Code?
It means managing infrastructure with software logic instead of manual steps.

Think:

• Configuration as version-controlled text files
• Automated deployments of full production environments
• Predefined templates that launch workflows in minutes

Engineers don’t need to become Python programmers. But they’ll spend less time fixing protocol mismatches and more time producing content.

In software, Infrastructure as Code defines entire environments, networks, services, storage, application workflows, via configuration files. Tools like Terraform and Ansible aren’t just for DevOps anymore. Broadcast engineers need them to deliver scalable, on-demand infrastructure.

At AWS, this approach runs some of the most advanced live workflows in the industry. It’s not just about cost, it’s about agility.

Not Just Hype: A Culture Shift
Let’s be honest: not everyone’s ready for this.

Broadcast engineers aren’t usually trained in cloud orchestration or declarative configs. That’s not a criticism. It reflects how the industry grew up. Our workflows were built to be robust and hands-on.

Going in as a traditional engineer will be tough. If we don’t invest in training — or use automation to bridge the gap — adoption will stall. But tools exist to help. That’s part of what SMPTE ST 2138 (Catena) is about.

ST 2138 provides a vendor-agnostic, software-based control layer across on-prem, private cloud, and public cloud, without rewriting APIs each time.

The Payoff: Real Agility
The goal isn’t to turn live production into a science experiment. It’s to reduce friction—especially when you need to launch fast, reconfigure often, and scale on demand.

Software-defined infrastructure lets teams work faster and more consistently. It’s the only path forward if you need to do more with less. You can’t afford brittle, inflexible systems.

With a software-defined control layer you can:

• Launch events in hours, not days
• Automate failover, resource allocation, and monitoring
• Test environments in isolation
• Run infrastructure only when needed
• That’s not just smart engineering. It’s good business.

Final Thoughts: Change is Hard; Standing Still is Harder
ST 2138 provides a unified control standard across vendors, platforms, and environments. It simplifies control and enables multi-vendor automation.

This shift challenges legacy thinking, skills, and comfort zones. But it’s already happening. If you’re skeptical, that’s healthy. But the transition won’t wait.

To future-proof operations and protect quality and creativity, we must stop start seeing infrastructure as code: reusable, testable, scalable, and under your control.

That’s not the end of engineering. It’s the evolution of it.

Infrastructure as code won’t replace the art of live production. It just changes how we manage the canvas.

The draft of ST 2138 (Catena) is now open for consultation. If you’ve ever wrestled with multi-vendor control or hybrid workflows, we need your help.

Click here to review the draft and join the conversation.

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.—For the thirty-first time, leaders of the television and cinema content production community gathered here in California’s Coachella Valley to discuss the latest developments in media technology, industry trends, challenges facing the industry, network, and also take a short break from the winter weather.

The setting, as it has been for several years, was the Westin Rancho Mirage Golf Resort and Spa, and once again, the Feb. 15-19 event was a “sell out,” quickly reaching its attendance cap of 800 and organizers opening up a wait list to try and accommodate registration procrastinators.

Reviving Old Tech to Enhance AI Workflows
Looming over most of the four-day gathering was what the impact artificial intelligence has had on almost every business and population segment, especially media production.

While LED walls or “volumes” have been popular for lowering production costs by creating sets virtually, these large arrays of LED video screens do come with disadvantages. One of these is the necessity to plan camera shots to avoid generation of moiré patterns due to LED array size and camera scanning patterns.

Even with very fine pitch arrays, there is a critical camera zoom point at which moiré patterning becomes visible. Other disadvantages include the large amount of heat generated by massive LED display arrays, along with high construction and operational costs.

In the session “Case Study: Beyond the Green Screen: Virtual Projection’s Revival in Modern VFX Workflows,” Chris Barnett and Joseph Conover from Christie Digital Systems discussed how these LED virtual set disadvantages are being addressed by applying a much older Hollywood (and television) technology for inserting visual elements into a live scene, front projection.

“What’s old is new and what’s new is old again and coming back full circle,” said Barnett, the driving force behind the technology at Christie Digital Systems. “When I joined Christie, I started talking to some really smart people in the company about my past experience with virtual production.”

Barnett explained that he’d been experimenting with standard LED panels driven by high-speed processors to push the limit of what’s possible in virtual production, and soon realized that laser-driven video projectors in front-projection applications might be better suited for creating sets virtually.

“We’d been leaving this technology on the table and not leveraging it for no good reason,” he said.

Barnett’s work with this modern iteration of old technology proved successful in terms of being less expensive in both upfront construction costs and operational power requirements, and he also discovered that the application of frontal projection created a better environment for utilizing AI.

“You don’t know how difficult it is to actually control AI so that it can tell your story accurately,” he said, noting that AI “really struggles” when in-camera video effects are being used. “It’s really apparent once you start to learn how to control AI in separating your foreground and background in order to get the most out of your storytelling.”

Barnett observed that this reincarnation of technology was also accompanied by a reduction in costs.

“Studios are going bankrupt left and right,” he said. “People are rescaling, trying to figure out how to get ahead of this new curve. The upfront cost we’ve calculated is about half of what’s involved in building an LED wall. The energy used by these laser projectors is next to nothing compared to an LED wall workflow environment where the heat generated is massive. This is all about creating a more sustainable and accessible workflow."

Broadcast Television Session Returns
After an absence of several years, the Tech Retreat’s “TV Panel” returned, rebranded as a “Broadcaster Update” from Matthew Goldman, vice president, strategic & technical initiatives for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Goldman reflected on the changes that have taken place in television broadcasting since the digital transition began a quarter decade ago, noting that the video streaming trend has resulted in younger people being unaware that “you can just put this stick of metal up and get television for free over the air. It’s amazing how things have changed and (there are) so many people who don’t understand what over-the-air television is all about.”

Goldman described the advantages of the ATSC 3.0 standard over 1.0, especially its ability to provide much more useful and timely emergency alerting information.

“We all know people — probably some of those in this room — who were in the devastating Palisades fire where a lot of our colleagues lost everything. The emergency information that was going out was incorrect and people were told to do the wrong thing. The new EAS system is hyperlocal.”

He also expressed disappointment over the lethargy in setting a date for sunsetting ATSC 1.0 television service, as it’s keeping broadcasters from rolling out the full feature set available in NextGen TV.

“The National Association of Broadcasters…came out with a document saying we really need to establish a clear timeline because we have to break ‘the cycle of hesitation’,” said Goldman. “The television manufacturers don’t want to add another (ATSC 3.0) tuner to their sets because the consumers aren’t asking for it, and consumers aren’t going to ask for it until there’s a compelling reason to do so. Broadcasters can’t add new features because there’s not enough bandwidth to do that.”

Goldman stated that this cycle of hesitation could be broken by setting a firm date for sunsetting ATSC 1.0 and this could encourage production of receivers with NextGen TV capability.

“The FCC said to add the [ATSC 1.0] tuners and that actually accelerated the transition and the turning off of NTSC.”

A Detour into Healthcare
The Tech Retreat shifted away from traditional content production for something of a first at the conference — the application of some 21st century moviemaking technologies in the healing arts.

The session “Beyond Film and Television: Media Technology is Shaping the Future of Healthcare,” featured Thom Belda, director of immersive experimental learning technology at the Mayo Clinic. Belda explained how the use of augmented/virtual reality, large language models and “digital twins’ is being applied in medical classroom training.

“Our goal is to advance medical science through the use of digital technology,” said Belda in explaining the emphasis on digital imaging at the Mayo Clinic, noting that even back in the 1930s the Mayo brothers had hired a medical illustrator to provide drawings to supplement those in textbooks of that period.

“This was a major achievement,” he said, observing that tapping virtual reality was a similar step in providing surgeons with more detailed information about the human body. “VR allows people to be trained in all sorts of surgical procedures, and 3D models provide surgeons with advanced information on what they’ll be getting into.”

He noted that “digital twining” or the creation of a virtual replica of a physical object was also useful in the field of medicine, with the Clinic applying this technology in several areas.

“The digital twinning of human pathology allows surgeons to be able to ‘hold’ whatever the pathology is, a tumor for instance, in their hands,” said Belda, explaining that this was particularly useful in complicated surgical procedures, making a “huge difference” in many cases.”

He also stated digital twinning allowed the creation of very accurate 3D-printed structures for implantation in patients.

Belda described the ongoing construction of a large new Mayo facility that was specially designed to embody the latest digital imaging and other technologies, including an immersive learning lab, a visual light studio for internal image capture, an area for augmented/virtual reality, as well as a large-scale LED “volume” for interactive experiences.

Another use of digital technology by the Mayo Clinic was on the digitization of some 150 years of medical history amassed by the facility to make it more accessible for research purposes.

“The goal is to advance medical science through the use of digital technology,” said Belda.

Breakfast Roundtables
Learning opportunities begin early in the day at HPA Tech Retreats, with discussions on new and emerging technologies and practices taking place over breakfast. There were 30 such “breakfast roundtables” on the program at the Retreat this year, with topics ranging all the way from “Art in the age of AI” to “Why Hollywood won’t adopt your tech.”

One of these was of special interest for those who have to cope with today’s RF spectrum congestion and the ever-increasing number of wireless devices vying for connection to broadband wireless networks.

In the roundtable discussion “Private 5G and CBRS for live broadcast and remote production,” organizer and moderator Jim Jachetta introduced conference attendees to the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and explained how this FCC-allocated and managed 3.55 GHz spectrum chunk can be useful when multiple users max out conventional bonded cellular spectrum.

“The CBRS spectrum is available on a shared basis with the government, satellite communications and wireless broadband companies that have purchased segments for use by their customers,” said Jachetta, CTO and co-founder of VidOvation. “There are several tiers and priorities involving its use. You go into the FCC’s data base and if a 10 MHz slice of 150 MHZ-wide spectrum is available you can get a minimum of one and as many as four slices.”

Jachetta explained that these public use “slices” could not be reserved, but if they were available a user could establish use priority by turning on a transmitter in advance of the event.

“A big use case would be at big sports venues,” said Jachetta. “You’ve got 80,000 fans in the stadium and they’re all on Instagram or filming the game and the Wi-Fi in the venue is oversaturated and the public cellular around the stadium is oversaturated, making use of bonded cellular video transmission difficult or impossible.

“This is where a private 5G network is very useful. Consumer phones can’t get into this spectrum. The band is 150 MHz wide, and if there’s not a lot of usage you can get up to four slices for a high throughput.”

Jachetta noted that most 5G bonded cellular gear used for video transmission is equipped for use in the CBRS band, and that most 5G devices can be tuned to operate in this spectrum by use of either a special physical SIM if the device can accept one, and also by an e-SIM.

Farewell to the Conference ‘Maestro’
On Wednesday, Mark Schubin, a very visible presence at HPA Tech Retreats, announced that would be stepping back from his post as unofficial conference “maestro” or “wrangler.” His involvement with HPA Tech goes back 30 years, with Schubin noting in an interview at last year’s event that he’d first heard about the gatherings during a 1997 New York City SMPTE Section meeting and made it a point to find out more about the event and to make plans to attend the 1998 conference.

From then on, Schubin, with his landmark flower-patterned pants and small bicycle horn used to alert attendees to the start of proceedings, has been an integral part of the Tech Retreat. (He recalled during the 2025 interview that early-on in his attendance, he had to take on multiple roles at the proceedings when members of a scheduled panel on high-definition TV didn’t arrive.)

“I flew out early and I got there, but there was a big snowstorm on the east coast, and none of those I’d invited were able to come, but they all gave me permission to present their policies on HDTV,” said Schubin. “So, I made a whole bunch of really large paper hats and I decorated them, and I would put on the different hats depending on which network I was representing at the moment, and people could ask me questions.”

Schubin was honored for his long-time service in a special ceremony Wednesday afternoon, with present and past HPA presidents on stage to thank him, along with a special video with many of those who had known him through the conference and television industry offering praise for his service. At the end of the ceremony, Schubin was asked to honk his bicycle one last time before it was laid to rest in a specially-prepared display case.

The 2027 HPA Tech Retreat will be hosted by the La Quinta Resort & Club in La Quinta, Calif., Feb. 14-18.

Industry pundit Pete Putman weighed on the recent OEM agreement between TCL and Sony:

Well, I predicted this would happen...over 15 years ago. As the Japanese TV market slowly collapsed, egged on by the Great Recession, once-famous brands like Panasonic, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and JVC either (a) stopped manufacturing TVs altogether and left the business, (b) OEM'ed televisions from Korean manufacturers (Samsung, LG) and Chinese manufacturers (TCL, Hisense, et al) and "private labeled" them, or (c) Washed their hands of the manufacturing end, but licensed their brands to Korean and Chinese manufacturers.

Profit margins on televisions plummeted over the past decade.

Both Samsung and LG were getting ready to shut down their LCD panel manufacturing facilities before the pandemic, but a surge in demand for everything from TVs to laptops and tablets kept those fabs open. Now, even the Korean giants shop in China for wholesale LCD panels and even finished TVs, with only LG's WRGB OLED fabs and Samsung's RGB OLED materials manufacturing still in operation.

Sony bragged for decades that they manufactured everything in the television chain, from cameras to TV screens. But even Sony was shopping for panels in the Chinese wholesale marketplace like everyone else. And their market share continues to slide year-over-year, with Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and LG together commanding over 90% of worldwide TV shipments.

Considering that 65-inch LCD panels for televisions can be bought for about $100 apiece (or less!) on the wholesale market (and TCL is one of the largest LCD panel manufacturers)—and you can buy an 4K 85-inch LCD TV for about $700 at BJ's and Costco—this deal was probably inevitable. Sony is slowly getting out of a lot of hardware businesses like laptops and audio gear. (They still are, by far, the world's biggest manufacturer of camera sensors, a very profitable business.)

The Bravia TV business was losing money 15 years ago and was spun off into a separate company from Sony Corporation because of that. I would not be surprised to see Sony eventually exit the TV manufacturing biz entirely, along with consumer audio, and just license their brand to a OEM company, like Hitachi, Toshiba, and JVC have done.

It's hard for some Japanese companies to admit when they've lost, but that's just the brutal economics of the TV biz nowadays. (And to think that 45+ years ago, we were still building and selling televisions in the U.S.!)

NEW YORK—In the run-up to Super Bowl LX, the VAB has released a new study filled with data bolstering the notion that primetime football is among the most powerful programming on TV, delivering massive viewership, real-time engagement and high-impact audiences across streaming and linear TV.

The study comes at a time when reports indicate the NFL is seeking to renegotiate existing contracts for media rights, which the League believes are undervalued compared to sums paid recently paid for the NBA and other sports.

The new report, What's the Spread? Examining Key Stats on Audience Growth From the 2025 NFL Season notes that as Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, Sunday Night Football on NBC and Monday Night Football across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC all continued to grow, NFL primetime served as a reliable engine for scale, with divisional rivalries and tightly contested matchups consistently delivering the biggest audience lifts, with strong co-viewing and out-of-home viewership adding significant incremental reach.

"The NFL continues to deliver outsized, real-time impact, with audiences up year-over-year across all three signature primetime series, reinforcing live football as one of Premium Video's strongest drivers of reach and engagement," said Jason Wiese, executive vice president, strategic insights and measurement, VAB. "Divisional rivalries and many tightly contested games were key drivers of higher audience ratings across the three signature primetime series. Out-of-home viewing, which skews towards younger demographics, is also a critical component of audience growth that adds substantial reach for live sporting events, especially during key holiday periods."

The analysis also highlights how Nielsen's Big Data Plus Panel measurement captures NFL total P2+ audience viewership in comparison to the legacy Panel Only measurement that was the currency-of-record in past years.

Key findings include:

• Live NFL games are watched in real-time, reinforcing it as an effective environment that delivers unmatched immediacy and ad impact.
• Divisional matchups increase viewership by double-digits as fans are more likely to flock towards long-standing, established rivalries.
• Primetime NFL games deliver high-value audiences in key buying demos across multiscreen TV platforms.
• Out-of-home viewership contributes double-digit lifts in total audience, especially among the highly elusive P18-34 demographic.
• Broadcast TV telecasts, led by late-Sunday afternoon timeslot, continue to be the most watched NFL games throughout the season.

The report's findings draw from VAB's viewership analysis based on the full 2025 season schedule across the three signature primetime series versus the prior season. The report—which includes in-depth data, key takeaways and cited sources— can be accessed here.

For decades, live sports were the last stronghold of traditional linear television. That’s no longer true. More people in the United States now watch live sports via streaming than through linear TV: 114 million in 2025 compared to 82 million on linear TV. Just three years earlier, traditional TV still led by double-digit margins. By 2027, the gap between streaming and linear TV is expected to climb 62%.

To consumers, the shift seems seamless: the same game, the same commentary, even the same screen. But behind that smooth experience lies enormous technical complexity. For internet service providers (ISPs), every major sporting event now means a surge of unpredictable demand that tests the very limits of their networks.

What ISPs Are Saying
Netskrt’s State of the ISP Industry Survey set out to quantify what many in the broadband world already suspected: Live sports are stressing networks more than any other content category. Consider:

• 78% of ISP respondents said sports cause them the most concern when it comes to streaming reliability, far ahead of major video game drops at 20%.
• Nearly 75% reported that network traffic spikes by as much as 200% during major sporting events, amplifying the risk of congestion and buffering.
• More than half cited traffic congestion and buffering as their top technical worries during live streams, and one in three named buffering alone as their primary issue.

In other words, the excitement of a championship match looks very different from an ISP’s vantage point. When hundreds of thousands of households in a region all tune in at once, local nodes can be overwhelmed within seconds.

Why It Matters to Content Providers
For streaming platforms, winning sports rights is a major coup. Exclusive live games attract subscribers, increase engagement, and command premium ad rates. But every new contract also brings new operational responsibility.

When a stream falters, viewers rarely blame their ISP. They blame the streaming platform. A single high-profile outage can trigger social backlash and subscriber churn. That’s why content owners entering or expanding their live sports presence need to think beyond rights acquisition and video production. They must consider how their distribution strategies affect the downstream networks that ultimately deliver the experience to fans.

Today’s delivery ecosystem is interconnected: Streamers, cloud providers, CDNs, and ISPs all share accountability for Quality of Experience (QoE). Yet many of those relationships remain siloed. ISPs have little visibility into the event-specific demands about to hit their infrastructure, and content owners have limited insight into last-mile conditions.

What Content Providers Should Consider
Survey respondents made clear that the problem is not just capacity but coordination. Even well-provisioned networks struggle when traffic patterns change abruptly. A more collaborative approach between content providers and ISPs, supported by their content-delivery partners, is essential.

As live streaming becomes the centerpiece of sports distribution, content owners should apply the same diligence to delivery that they apply to content acquisition. Key questions to ask when evaluating CDN or infrastructure partners include:

• Are they purpose-built for video? Many legacy CDNs were designed for general web content and struggle with the low-latency demands of live streams. Platforms need partners engineered specifically for high-bitrate, real-time video.
• Do they have deep visibility into ISP networks? CDNs that integrate closely with ISPs can pre-position content and steer traffic intelligently, reducing last-mile congestion.
• Can they scale dynamically? Elastic capacity and real-time traffic management are critical when audience size can triple in minutes.

A Shared Responsibility for a Shared Audience
The migration of live sports to streaming is irreversible and still accelerating. For ISPs, it’s a technical and financial challenge. For content providers, it’s an opportunity tempered by risk.

The only sustainable path forward is partnership: clear communication among streamers, CDNs, and ISPs; smarter use of data; and investment in delivery architectures built for volatility.

Live sports have always united fans across regions. Delivering them flawlessly in the streaming era will require that same spirit of teamwork behind the scenes.

NEW YORK—Ad-supported television represented 74.2% of overall TV viewing in the fourth quarter 2025, according to Nielsen’s newly released Q4 Ad Supported Gauge, hitting a peak for the viewing share of ad-supported content in 2025.

Compared to Q3 2025, ad supported viewing was up 9%, outpacing the 7% increase in total TV viewing, as football and young adults helped drive upticks.

Audiences spent 45.6% of their ad supported viewing time with streaming, 29.6% with broadcast, and 24.8% with cable. Broadcast experienced the largest quarterly jump of any ad supported viewing category throughout all of 2025 in Q4, capturing a 22% increase and adding 3.2 share points. Football was a major driver for broadcast, as sports viewing surged by 135%, almost doubling its Q3 share of the category to 34% .

Overall, the ad supported broadcast category saw its biggest increase among 25-34 year olds (up 41%), but the key demographic groups of 18-49 and 25-54 also saw increases of 31% and 29%, respectively.

Now in its fourth edition, Nielsen’s Ad Supported Gauge, an extension of The Gauge™, provides the industry with the broadest view of the portion of television that delivers advertising across broadcast, cable and streaming. These new insights provide advertisers and agencies with an essential, up-to-date view of opportunities to connect with consumers across ad-supported platforms.

As the broadcast industry moves further into the IP/cloud and software-based environment, the need for interoperability and scalability has increased. In response, many vendors are coalescing around the Media eXchange Layer, (aka MXL) to solve such issues and give customers more flexible solutions.

This was the topic of discussion for TV Tech’s most recent webinar, "MXL in Action: Real-World Interoperability for the Software-Defined Era," the second part of a two part series produced in conjunction for TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope (Click here for Part 1).

Launched by the EBU, the North American Broadcasters Association and the Linux Foundation, MXL is an open-sourced initiative designed to work within the IP environment to allow software-defined processes from competing vendors to work together, allowing broadcasters to choose best of breed applications.

It uses shared compute memory to enable the processing of video and audio streams to enable faster and more efficient transport within a live production. This “Open Source Initiative,” part of the EBU’s Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) architecture and implemented via an SDK, is currently in the candidate stage, but development of an SDK is moving quickly.

Broadcasters that have taken the lead on the project include CBC-Radio Canada, BBC and France TV.

TV Globo
The webinar started off with a keynote from Helio Eufrauzino, media solution specialist at TV Globo, who discussed how Brazil’s largest broadcaster is approaching the type of software-defined production MXL promotes.

Although MXL is not yet fully developed, Eufrazino explained how TV Globo ran a proof of concept (PoC) in AWS at the broadcaster’s hub in São Paulo, using SRT to move signals to and from the cloud and an asynchronous media framework inside the cloud with multiple vendors’ tools.

For the project, TV Globo used Matrox Origin/AWS as the media-transport layer in the cloud. The results?

• A clear signal with good visual quality and no stuttering;
• Studio-level objective metrics: PSNR and MSE comparable to broadcast studio production;
• Low internal latency: Even though SRT adds some latency to/from cloud, the Matrox internal processing introduced no noticeable latency during switching or operations, and
• Consistent timing: Input and output latency matched across the system.

The outcome showed that asynchronous media frameworks—similar in concept to MXL—can reliably distribute live media inside the cloud with quality and latency comparable to hardware-based workflows. However, more work still needs to be done on designing cloud-native applications, containerization and orchestration, improved security and the development of operational and support models customized to software systems, he said.

The best result, Eufrazino stresses, should be a hybrid ecosystem where hardware-centric and software-centric production coexists.

Eufrazino said that the results were promising enough for further research with plans to go live soon.

“At the end of the year, we hope to have a prototype capable of covering a live production, maybe a news program, soccer game, something that we can have to prove that we can cover a certain time and type of event,” he said.

Bringing Broadcasting into Compute
During the panel discussion, Adam Marshall, chief product officer with Grass Valley, explained how MXL will allow live production to operate in a more compute-centric environment.

“As we move into a more software-defined world, having multiple applications from multiple vendors all running on the same same block of compute—especially if we had to use those linear standards—is just not sufficient," he said. “It adds encapsulation delay, it doesn't work in a way that computers work.”

Marshall added the importance and effectiveness of developing MXL as an open source protocol and pointing to GV AMPP as the company’s approach to visual computing.

“MXL is effectively the evolution, or the next step, of what we have in our memory share technology with frame cache,” he said, adding that “we're working together collaboratively with other vendors on co-developing that as an open SDK, so that it makes interop much easier between vendors, and ultimately makes it easier for customers.”

Mike Cronk, vice president of strategy for TVU Networks said the company has been doing shared, memory-efficient transfer of uncompressed video between computers for about a decade, using Linux tmpfs, (a type of technology that's fairly standard in the IT industry), but says he’s optimistic about the prospects MXL could promise.

“The exciting thing about MXL and the Open Source Initiative is everybody's going to have a common way of doing it,” he said. “Interoperability promotes a ‘rising tide that lifts all boats.’ And you get the benefits of compute efficiency.”

Cronk added that MXL brings media production architectures more in line with how computers traditionally work.

“When you think about software-based live production, you're paying for the software, but how many compute cores do you need?” Cronk mused. “How much storage do you need? That's where the price tag goes up, and because it [MXL] is so much more efficient than doing all this effectively needless work in terms of packetizing the bits that MXL is really going back to the first principles of video and computers and how they work together.”

Russell Trafford Jones, industry engagement manager at Techex, commented on how current workflows will become more efficient under MXL.

“Time and time again, we're seeing people making compromises, and they don't want to make those compromises, but fundamentally, there are some times when you have to do that,” he said. “One of those is the lack of MXL, so for us, we're really interested in making sure that we've got a solid foundation MXL-wise to build not only tomorrow's workflows, but literally the ones that we're already operating today, using other technologies, pushing things together.”

Drew Martin, head of video product management for Riedel Communications, sees MXL as the next step in bringing more leverage for operations relying on COTS servers.

“After going IP, people started using COTS servers, and they wanted to get more efficiency out of them,” he said. “So having vendors work together to make an SDK and on a standard so that other people can integrate with it without having to go through all the hoops and jumps that you have to do when it comes down to other protocols… I think it's very important for Reidel to be a part of this and for our future products to be handling it natively.”

Moving Forward
Marshall commented on how fast the process has moved from what was initially discussed during the 2024 IBC Show to where it is now.

“The CBC Radio Canada team was instigating the discussion, saying ‘look, guys, let's get together on this,’” he said. “It took just over 12-13 months, effectively, to where a release candidate was announced on Christmas day [2025]. And the really amazing thing there was, it actually worked the first time. There wasn't a long drawn out process.”

The cost savings realized by MXL could be significant, Cronk adds.

“People want to provide more content to generate more revenue and do it more efficiently, and there's cost precedence, with rights deals going up and up and those types of things,” he said.

Cronk says the current ability for broadcasters using software and elastic compute could has some "room for improvement" and pointed to research TVU had done on the potential for savings. “We did a study… a 20-camera soccer match with standard pricing on AWS EC2 [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud], for 90 minutes. It was less than $15, which is just mind boggling.”

Cronk stressed though, that the same standards that have driven broadcasters for decades still apply.

“So there's this tremendous, potential economic promise, but you have to have the right quality, you have to have the right latency.”

With MXL allowing broadcasters to pick and choose which applications they want to use and when to use them, Martin says this will help lower costs as well.

“Allowing us to have the ‘best of breed,’ hopefully running on the same VM or interconnected and not having to use all the compute to compress, decompress, encapsulate, decapsulate, and being able to do that will one make cloud productions much more feasible when it comes down to pricing,” he said.

Trafford-Jones likes the idea of an a la carte economic model.

“Sometimes it just doesn't make sense to have a feature, but you need that, right? So maybe you need to plug in the gaps, or you're able to then flexibly say, ‘well, this part of my workflow is working well, but I heard that this one's going to be better. It's got a better flexibility of a pricing model,” he said.

Eufrazino says one of the biggest challenges facing the adoption of MXL is getting more participation.

“We need to have more vendors involved, because to have the best solution for each part—the best solution for the production switcher, the best solution for the audio—the best approach is the multivendor scenario.”

Both webinars are now available on demand:

MXL Architecture and Its Capabilities: Unlocking the Future of Live Production

MXL in Action: Real-World Interoperability for the Software-Defined Era

MELBOURNE, Australia—NEP Australia, part of NEP Group, has launched a new OB facility that targets the broadcast industry’s shift towards hybrid workflows combining new software solutions with traditional hardware.

NEP Australia’s newest OB introduces an intelligent technical design for major event productions across leagues including the NRL, AFL and NBL—and is a significant departure from traditional OB infrastructure, according to the company. Named “HG 31” within NEP’s global fleet, the truck houses just three racks of IT and networking equipment, handling all video and audio processing, routing and monitoring.

Rather than relying on conventional onboard production infrastructure, all production operations are managed remotely through NEP’s connected hub ecosystem, including the NEP Andrews Hubs in Melbourne and Sydney, and NEP’s Production Hub in Auckland.

HG 31 supplements traditional hardware control surfaces with software-driven touchscreens, enabling agile workflows onsite synchronised with a full hardware-based mixing board or audio console in remote production control rooms. Production and engineering teams can move seamlessly between software and physical interfaces as workflows evolve, making it one of the most flexible OB units ever designed, NEP says.

This combination of a compact, lightweight, software-driven OB unit working in tandem with an offsite production facility marks an industry first for top-tier live productions. The approach further advances NEP’s strategy of delivering flexible, scalable, and software-defined media solutions that adapt to the evolving needs of broadcasters and rightsholders.

“This marks another milestone for NEP in the global development of our software solutions, giving broadcasters the flexibility to scale production processes and configurations up or down as needed, all within a single, easy-to-use platform,” said Dan Murphy, vice president of NEP Platform, who is leading NEP Group’s software platform development globally.

"NEP has a proud tradition of combining the best-in-class technology available to deliver the right solutions for our customers. The evolving world of software processing expands this capability, and we’re excited to give customers more freedom to choose the right tools for each production and adapt even more quickly as requirements change."

NEP’s development of software-led broadcast solutions began nearly a decade ago with the creation of TFC, NEP’s all-in-one broadcast control, orchestration, and infrastructure platform. Designed to manage the complexity of IP workflows, TFC brings hardware and software systems together into a single, intuitive control environment for live production teams.

Today, TFC powers live productions across more than 120 NEP facilities and OBs worldwide and is available industrywide for rightsholders, leagues, federations, news organizations, and streamers to deploy within their own operations.

DALLAS—As pay TV operators continue to struggle with cord cutting and streaming platforms seeks to retain fickle consumers who regularly cancel subscriptions, a new study from Parks Associates takes a deep dive into consumer loyalty, engagement levels with various services and the factors that motivate them to either subscribe or drop a service.

Understanding those issues are particularly important for streaming services and programmers facing high marketing costs to attract consumers in an increasingly fragmented streaming landscape. A better understanding of their willingness to pay for multiple services and their long-term loyalty could boost profitability and reduce marketing costs, the researchers noted.

The new Parks survey found that 60% say the main reason for cancelling pay TV services is to save money and reduce monthly bills. In contrast, programming seems to pay a major role in decisions to start and retain streaming services. About one quarter (23%) of consumers reported cancelling streaming subscription services because they finished the show they were watching. Likewise, the top reason to subscribe, wanting a specific program/event, recently rose from 27% to 32%.

The survey also ranked the new promoter score of various streaming services. The score measures how likely subscribers are to recommend (or promote) a service to someone else on a scale of 1 to 100. By that measure, which provides a rough approximation of the value consumers see in a services, Netflix toped the survey, followed by Discovery+, HBO Max, Fox One and ESPN+. Peacock ranked last.

This research explores engagement trends in video services, measures the impact of exclusive content and original programming, and quantifies consumer demand for interactive and personalized experiences. This report provides the insights platforms need to balance content investment with sustainable business models and ensure long-term profitability.

More information is available here.

WASHINGTON—A new study highlights the ongoing importance of free local TV and radio broadcasting in the U.S. with data showing that local broadcasting fuels $1.19 trillion in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and supports 2.46 million jobs nationwide.

The study, which was conducted by Woods & Poole Economics, Inc. with support from BIA Advisory Services and commissioned by the NAB, also found that local broadcasters employ nearly 311,000 Americans directly, generating $54 billion in GDP through journalism, programming, engineering and advertising services.

“No other industry gives more to Americans for free,” said Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. “Local stations provide trusted journalism, life-saving emergency alerts and the sports and entertainment that bring our communities together. This report reinforces that broadcasters are not only essential to our democracy and daily lives, but to the strength of our economy, as well.”

In addition to the important role broadcasters play in providing local news, the study focused on these key points:

• Emergency Information and Public Safety: Broadcasters are the backbone of the nation’s Emergency Alert System, ensuring every American can be reached during wildfires, hurricane, and other disasters, even when power or internet fails.
• Community Connection through Sports and Culture: Whether it is Friday night football, local election results or cultural programming, broadcasting unites communities through shared experiences, available without a subscription.
• An Economic Multiplier: Local broadcasting’s economic ripple effect extends deep into other sectors — from construction to retail — adding another $134 billion in GDP and supporting nearly 776,000 additional jobs.
• A Powerful Advertising Platform for Main Street: With unmatched reach into every home and demographic, advertising on local broadcast television and radio generates more than $997 billion in GDP and sustains over 1.37 million jobs. Local businesses rely on this trusted platform to reach customers, grow their operations and fuel local economies.

“Broadcasting is more than a business model; it is a civic model,” added LeGeyt. “This industry stands alone in its mission to inform, protect and uplift every community in America, regardless of zip code or income level.”

As policymakers debate the future of media, this report offers a compelling reminder: Free, local broadcasting is not just surviving. It is delivering extraordinary value to our democracy, safety and economy.

The full study is available here.

NEW YORK—While recent media coverage has promoted Amazon Prime Video’s January 10 NFL playoff matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears as the most-watched NFL game ever on a streaming platform, a new study by the TVB of Nielsen data shows that broadcast television continues to deliver significantly larger NFL audiences for postseason and regular season games.

According to Nielsen, the national Live+1 audience for the Amazon telecast among people 2+ posted a 9.82 rating, delivering 31.6 million impressions. However, this figure includes local broadcast station viewership in the home team Designated Market Areas (DMAs), specifically Green Bay and Chicago.

While Green Bay’s local broadcast data has not yet been reported, Nielsen has released Chicago DMA results. In Chicago alone, the game delivered an 18.4 Live+Same Day rating, totaling approximately 1.73 million impressions. When the Chicago broadcast audience is removed from the national total, Amazon’s streaming-only audience is estimated at approximately 29.87 million impressions.

The highest NFL game for that weekend using the same metrics (Live +1 for people 2+) was on broadcast television (Fox) with a 12.73 rating and 40.97 million impressions.

During the regular season, broadcast NFL games consistently generate large viewership. The Thanksgiving Day NFL game on CBS achieved a 17.81 rating and 57.33 million impressions while the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Philadelphia Eagles rematch on September 14, which aired on Fox, earned a 10.5 rating, delivering 33.81 million impressions.

BRISTOL, UK—Global usage of ad-supported subscription tiers increased across Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max between Q4 2024 and Q3 2025, according to Digital i research.

The highest growth in adoption was on Netflix, with 40% of active accounts using its Standard with Ads plan in Q3 2025, in the 20 countries measured by Digital i.

This was up by 14% from the 26% of subscribers on that tier in Q4 2024 that were recorded in Digital i’s trend report, Evolving Streamer Strategies, last year.

According to Comscore’s State of Streaming 2025 report, time spent on major ad-supported streamers rose 43% in 2025 with Netflix’s ad-supported plan now accounting for 45% of total household viewing hours in the United States. This is up from 34% in August 2024.

Ad-supported tier usage rose from 35% to 44% on Disney+ during that period and from 22% to 28% on HBO Max. Amazon’s streamer Prime Video remains the service with the highest ad-supported tier usage, but this fell from 88% of subscribers in Q4 2024 to 82% in Q3 2025.

Digital i measures streaming audience data in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, South Korea and Japan.

VIENNA and MADRID—Big Blue Marble has announced a strategic partnership with HISPlayer, a video player for Unity, Unreal Engine, and Meta Spatial SDK. Together, they will deliver DRM-protected, end-to-end video streaming solutions for interactive and immersive XR (Extended Reality) use cases on mobile, PC, laptop, and VR/AR headsets.

The joint offering combines Big Blue Marble’s Cloud Video Kit, a modular tool for managing and processing live and on-demand video, and Cloud DRM, its multi-DRM content protection service, with HISPlayer’s advanced XR playback technology. As a result, broadcasters, content owners, telecom operators, and sports platforms can now bring their existing premium video content into XR environments with full DRM protection across all supported devices worldwide, the companies said.

Together, these technologies unlock next-generation XR experiences, including:

• Secure playback of protected content with Widevine DRM Level 1 on the Meta Quest
• Ultra-high-resolution 8K video
• Seamless multi-camera or multi-angle playback
• Interactive ad formats native to 3D environments
• Enhanced video with dynamic lighting and VFX
• Rich spatial audio for full immersion.

Most XR experiences today rely on placeholder or demo footage because rights-protected content cannot be used safely. With DRM-secured video now available in XR environments through the partnership between Big Blue Marble and HISPlayer, broadcasters and sports platforms can begin experimenting with immersive formats using the premium content their audiences value, according to the companies.

“Immersive technologies are finally moving from hype to real use cases, but these experiences cannot be deployed at scale unless premium content is protected at the same level as established streaming services,” said Dawid Gorniak, Product Owner for Cloud Video Kit and Cloud DRM at Big Blue Marble. “Our partnership with HISPlayer gives organizations the confidence to bring their highest-value assets into the XR space without compromising on security or user experience, and without the costly process of changing the headend.”

HISPlayer's CEO, Carlos Lucas, said: “HISPlayer's goal is to lead the market in high-quality XR/VR video streaming across all devices, and that requires the ability to deliver premium video content with the strongest level of DRM protection. This strategic partnership enables us to offer customers a turnkey, end-to-end solution that brings together DRM content protection, the most advanced VR/XR video player available, and the broadcasting delivery expertise of Big Blue Marble."

LONDON—Investment in media content production worldwide will reach $255 billion in 2026, rising 2% year-on-year, according to new forecasts from Ampere Analysis.

The researcher said growth continues to be driven by sustained investment from global streaming platforms, which are further increasing their share of content spend. While overall growth remains modest, this continued shift is widening the gap with traditional broadcasters, as ongoing advertising pressures impact their ability to increase content investment.

The report finds:

• Global streaming platforms remain the primary driver of growth in content investment. Ampere Analysis forecasts that ad-funded and subscription-based streamers will spend $101 billion on content in 2026, representing around two-fifths of total global content spend.
• Traditional broadcast models face a more constrained outlook. Ampere expects pay TV, commercial broadcasters, and public broadcasters to see stagnant or declining content investment, reflecting ongoing pressure on advertising revenues and rising production costs.
• The divergence between global streamers and local broadcasters continues to widen. While international streaming services scale investment, local broadcasters face increasing challenges sustaining content output amid rising costs, ongoing advertising pressure, and shifting post-pandemic viewer behaviour. In the US, commercial broadcasters are reducing spend as studio parent groups redirect budgets to their owned streaming platforms. In contrast, broadcasters outside the US show slightly better resilience, maintaining their investment levels through 2026.
• Major global sporting events, including the football World Cup and Winter Olympics, will provide a boost to content spend in 2026. Historically dominated by broadcast television, streaming platforms continue to expand their sports strategies, with platforms such as Amazon Prime Video securing major NBA rights through 2026.

“Spend in 2025 was in line with Ampere’s expectations, marked by streamers overtaking commercial broadcasters for overall contribution to the content spend landscape for the first time,” said Peter Ingram, Research Manager at Ampere Analysis. “In 2026, we expect streamers to further build on this, seeing 6% growth in expenditure. The accelerating shift in content investment toward streaming underscores a structural rebalancing of the global TV market, with scale and reach emerging as the central competitive differentiators for operators to remain buoyant.”

For years, the large streaming platforms were in a winner-takes-all arms race to amass the most content and acquire the most subscribers. But as we look toward 2026, the landscape is shifting. Now with more distribution options than ever before and armed with new tools to allow them to deliver their feeds to any platform, content owners are no longer forced to cede control of their brand or audience to a limited number of distribution partners.

In sports, this trend will see teams and leagues add even more distribution partners, unlocking fan bases in markets that were previously out of reach. This will also see the accelerated growth of direct-to-consumer platforms, as sports organizations look for new ways to connect more deeply with their biggest fans.

Content creators will also put pressure on the existing streaming economy by building on the recent success of a number of entrepreneurial pioneers who turned social media fame into thriving media companies. The popularity of creator-owned, direct-to-consumer (D2C) platforms will continue to grow in 2026 as both creators and fans find new channels to authentically engage with their digital communities outside of the walled gardens of social media.

This increased control and audience ownership in the hands of content owners will continue to drive meaningful change. The following are the three fundamental shifts that will drive the evolution of the streaming industry in 2026:

Prediction 1: The Rise of Centralized Distribution Technology

In 2026, the media industry will finally confront its greatest hidden cost: distribution fragmentation. Today, content owners of all sizes are wasting vast amounts of time and financial resources managing a sprawling web of disparate distribution partners. Every deal with a new distribution partner (e.g. global streamer, FAST channel, regional OTT, etc.) requires a unique feed, each with their own unique requirements like encoding, custom graphics, ad insertion, and translation. Currently, this process is manual and siloed, increasing operational expenditure and slowing time-to-market.

The solution will be the mass adoption of centralized distribution platforms. These digital solutions will allow content owners to upload content once and instantly manage its formatting, delivery rules, regional rights, and technical specifications for dozens of partners simultaneously. Additionally, these distribution platforms will also find innovative ways to incorporate AI into this automated workflow, providing users increased efficiency and a more detailed and searchable index of their content.

This shift from a bespoke, per-partner integration model to a standardized, "ingest-once, publish-everywhere" system will dramatically reduce technical overhead and operational friction. For fans, this means content becomes far easier to find, as broadcasters can quickly onboard new partners without weeks of logistical work, ensuring content is always available wherever the consumer chooses to watch.

Prediction 2: Creator-Owned Platforms Introduce Disruptive Monetization

The second major shift is the maturation of the creator economy. Previously confined to social media, top creators are increasingly migrating their loyal audiences to multi-channel D2C platforms, challenging the dominance of traditional SVOD/AVOD giants. We are already seeing services like DropoutTV, which began as the YouTube channel CollegeHumor, living side-by-side with Netflix and Hulu on smart TV interfaces.

In 2026, these creator-owned platforms will drive significant change in two key ways relevant to established media. First, they will force the industry to grant legitimacy to talent and creative business models that have long been ignored by the Hollywood machine, basing success not on legacy metrics, but on direct audience connection.

Second, these D2C platforms are not bound by the established monetization best practices of major streamers. They will widely adopt hybrid, fan-centric models like Pay-Per-View (PPV), tiered membership subscriptions that include real-time access, and exclusive digital goods that maximize the average revenue per user far beyond what flat subscription fees or standard ad inserts can deliver. Broadcasters must study and replicate these dynamic models to augment their own flat subscription tiers.

Prediction 3: Sports Ownership Drives D2C for Data and Relationship

The movement of live sports into the D2C space will continue to accelerate beyond the regional level. Over the last several years, teams and leagues, from small regional organizations to major international organizations, have realized that ceding the fan relationship entirely to a traditional network is a strategic long-term mistake.

In 2026, a critical mass of sports rightsholders will invest in launching their own D2C platforms, even if the primary game distribution remains locked behind legacy deals. The value of this shift doesn’t just come from incremental revenue, but from fully owning the audience relationship.

A D2C platform provides first-party data that allows a team to understand who their fans are, what they watch, what merchandise they buy, and which offers they respond to. This data is the engine for hyper-personalized marketing and non-game revenue streams.

Whether they launch fully developed global platforms or focus on local, alternative broadcasts, the objective remains the same: bypass the middleman to build direct connections with the fans. This focus on data-driven relationship ownership will become the undisputed best practice for all sports media technology professionals.

In closing, 2026 is the year the broadcast industry stops reacting to fragmentation and begins building unified, intelligent systems that prioritize direct fan connection and enable content owners to assert more control over their distribution strategy. Success will belong to those who use platform technology to streamline distribution and embrace the audience-centric models pioneered by the creator and sports economies.