With less than three weeks before the 2026 NAB Show, TV Tech Content Director recently spoke with Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Appear about the company's latest news and plans for Las Vegas.
TV Tech: Since Appear’s successful IPO in late 2025, how has the transition to a public company influenced your long-term R&D roadmap and where are you focusing your 2026 investment to build on your present momentum?
Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen: The IPO was an important milestone for Appear, not because it changes our R&D roadmap, but because it reinforced the momentum we have built and gives us even greater scope to accelerate. The successful IPO and our market momentum reflect customer confidence in our business, the market opportunity ahead of us, and the role Appear is playing as one of the real success stories in this sector. There is a great deal of positive energy around the company, both internally and externally, and that comes from the fact that customers are responding very strongly to our strategy, our innovation and the results we are helping them achieve.
For 2026, we are investing to build on that momentum in areas where we see the clearest customer demand and the strongest commercial opportunity. The common thread is bringing scale, performance and agility to live event production. Customers are increasingly looking for the flexibility to operate across hardware, software and cloud in hybrid environments, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, latency and efficiency. This means continued development of our award-winning X Platform for the most demanding live production and contribution environments, expansion of our all-software-based VX to support hybrid and cloud-based workflows, and the delivery of X5, extending the application of our X Platform to a wider range of production use cases.
TVT: There is an industry-wide shift toward IP-based live production. How is Appear helping broadcasters bridge the gap between traditional SDI workflows and the "all-IP" future?
TBJ: The reality for most broadcasters is that this is not an overnight shift. They are managing a mix of legacy infrastructure, new IP investments and growing pressure to become more flexible and more efficient. Our role is to help them move at their chosen pace.
We help customers transition from SDI to IP in a way that preserves operational continuity, while opening the door to newer workflows based on standards such as ST 2110, alongside low-latency transport and processing technologies that support modern live production.
Our customers demand the flexibility to respond to the requirements of each event production. They value the features and performance density of the X Platform as their agile enabler to acquire, process, format convert, encode/decode and transport live video, audio and data in the most demanding scenarios.
TVT: Appear was selected to support NBC Sports for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Milan Cortina. What specific technical challenges does a multivenue, high-stakes event like the Winter Games present for your X Platform compared to standard seasonal sports?
TBJ: An event like the Winter Olympics is different from seasonal sports in both scale and complexity. You are dealing with multiple venues, a very high concentration of simultaneous live feeds, a broader mix of production requirements, and a level of operational scrutiny that leaves no room for failure.
For NBC Sports, the challenge was not only transporting more content, but doing so with the quality, resilience and the timing precision expected of a global event of this scale. That includes supporting fibre and satellite contribution workflows, efficient bandwidth usage, high-quality video delivery including HDR, and the growing role of remote and distributed production across the enterprise.
The X Platform really stands out when it is faced with these types of high-density, high-stakes live environments, where customers need flexibility and scale as well as robustly proven performance for the most prestigious events.
TVT: You’ve said the YouTube partnership was driven by direct customer demand from a major European broadcaster. How are real-world customer requirements like that shaping and accelerating the X Platform roadmap, and what does YouTube SRT verification say about the growing role of low-latency, pro-grade IP delivery for both traditional distribution and direct-to-platform streaming?
TBJ: This is a very good example of how our roadmap is shaped in practice. The YouTube verification did not begin as a theoretical product exercise. It came directly from a major European broadcast platform that wanted Appear encoders to support its production pipeline. That customer requirement helped trigger the collaboration with YouTube and ultimately led to official verification of the X Platform for SRT live streaming.
For us, that is exactly how the best innovation happens. When a customer comes to us with a clear operational need, it validates the use case almost immediately and helps accelerate development in the right direction. In this case, it reinforced the importance of giving broadcasters and rights holders a seamless, resilient and low-latency way to deliver high-quality live content not only through traditional broadcast chains, but also directly to major digital platforms.
At NAB, the conversation will no longer be about choosing between hardware and software, or between on-prem and cloud. It will be about combining these choices intelligently to create more scalable, more efficient and more future-ready live production workflows.
What the YouTube SRT verification shows is that professional-grade IP delivery is now firmly extending beyond traditional contribution and distribution. Broadcasters, sports organisations and production teams increasingly want one reliable, broadcast-quality workflow that can support linear, OTT, FAST and direct-to-platform delivery. That is exactly where the market is heading, and it is why customer-led developments like this are so important to the evolution of our solutions.
TVT: What will we see at Appear's booth at the NAB Show?
TBJ: At NAB, the conversation will no longer be about choosing between hardware and software, or between on-prem and cloud. It will be about combining these choices intelligently to create more scalable, more efficient and more future-ready live production workflows.
We will enable this by showcasing how Appear technology enables sports leagues, broadcasters, and service providers to address key industry trends and needs, including satellite-to-IP migration, scalable remote production (REMI), and hybrid edge-to-cloud operations. Appear will launch new advances across the X Platform, a high-capacity, ultra-dense, low-latency media processing and gateway platform for live contribution, production and distribution, alongside the commercial availability of the X5, which brings X Platform performance to smaller-scale live productions, delivering Appear quality and core capabilities in a compact, energy-efficient chassis.
At NAB our objective reflects our mission – working daily with customers and the industry to enable the future of live production through innovation and proven technology performance from Appear.
