NAB ’26 Gathers An Industry In Flux

The NAB’s annual conference and exhibition has always been a sprawling, thematically diverse affair as engineers and managers from local stations mix with broadcast and cable network executives, media technology vendors, Washington policymakers and a smattering of Hollywood and sports personalities. And oh, don’t forget the radio folks.

But the 2026 edition of the NAB Show felt particularly disjointed, with no clear narrative thread of where the industry is headed from either a business or technology perspective. Perhaps that is appropriate for a broadcasting business that is currently in a state of flux.

Besides increased competition for advertising dollars from social media creators and influencers (who had a big presence at NAB with double the number of registered creators, influencers and podcasters compared to 2025), the industry is facing a stalled merger between two of the biggest station groups, Nexstar and Tegna; uncertainty over the future of sports as more rights go to streamers and the biggest RSN player, Main Street Sports, winds down operations; and a waiting game with the FCC, as networks and local stations are eager for key rulings on not only how they can use the new ATSC 3.0 digital television standard but also how much C-band satellite spectrum they will have left to distribute their programming.

One thing which most broadcasters and vendors this reporter spoke with agreed upon was that the show had fewer attendees than last year’s reported 55,000, itself a 10% drop from 61,000 in 2024 (NAB on Wednesday reported 58,000 as its official number). “Quality over quantity” was a phrase heard echoed in many a booth, as vendors said that they were generally meeting with a few top executives as networks and station groups sent fewer people overall than in previous years.

Though most vendors said they had good traffic overall, several remarked on slow periods of several hours during the afternoon on both Sunday and Monday, the first two days of the show.

Adding to that perception may have been the configuration of the revamped Central Hall, where RF manufacturers like GatesAir were grouped in a large cluster near one of the entrances. Central was joined by North and West halls to create a geographically more compact show than previous NABs, as the cavernous South Hall was busy hosting a professional wresting event. But GatesAir CTO Ray Miklius said the renovated Central simply seemed too big.

“The aisles are huge,” Miklius said. “You look down, you’ve got big booths that are just isolated, right in the middle of an acre of carpet.”

Nonetheless, Miklius said his traffic had been “surprisingly steady” and that a Sunday customer event enjoyed strong attendance. GatesAir received some fresh orders from Mexico at the show and also was visited by a “huge contingent” of Brazilian broadcasters.

Brazilians were a big presence overall at NAB as they ready for the launch of their ATSC 3.0-based “TV 3.0” system in time for the FIFA World Cup in June (including a number who attended TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Awards Tuesday night to celebrate their colleague Ana Eliza Faria e Silva of Globo, the 2026 Leadership Award winner).

Floor Compression

Lawo CTO Phil Myers liked his company’s spot on the other side of Central Hall, near the busiest entrance and right across from major competitor Grass Valley. He said that traffic had been steady and the company had its usual full slate of meetings, though they were more U.S.-focused than in past years as attendance from European and APAC customers was down.

But Myers predicted that NAB will eventually coalesce around the Central and North Halls as the show has “compressed” since the pre-Covid days.

“I was in West yesterday, and the back end of that is quite empty,” Myers said. “And lot of customers get frustrated with the walk.”

Lawo did have a major product introduction with its Edge One, a compact stagebox suitable for commentary positions or flypacks that combines high-end video and audio processing with a number of inputs and outputs. While that drew a lot of interest, Myers said most of his conversations were broader than any one product as broadcasters wrestle with the broad transition to IP. That could mean anything from SMPTE 2110 networking to cloud-based production workflows to the complete software-based infrastructure described in the EBU’s Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) project.

“A lot of discussions about projects,” Myers said. “Customers coming to learn about new technology, what’s available and how it can solve their problems.”

Focusing On Problems, Not Products

Imagine Communications CEO Steve Reynolds said his company has seen a similar shift in thinking, particularly when it reached out to customers in advance of the show, as it typically does, to set up meetings and prepare requested demonstrations.

“As we’ve gone through that process this year, we’re hearing less and less requests for a specific product demo, and more and more requests for a conversation about solving a problem,” Reynolds said. “And I think that represents a little bit of a maturation across the industry, where people are less focused on the point solution and more willing to talk with vendors about what is the business challenge that they’ve encountered, or what have their bosses told them they need to solve.”

For example, customers interested in the migration to IP aren’t asking for a demonstration of the latest features in Imagine’s Selenio Network Processor (SNP), the company’s flagship SDI-to-IP gateway product, Reynolds said. Instead, they are asking how they can move a production studio to IP to eventually do contribution into a cloud-based production or origination model they have adopted.

The different questions are also a reflection of different people making the trip to Las Vegas, Reynolds said.

“A lot of these companies are going through M&A cycles, and that really is refocusing a number of the big customers across the industry,” he said. “You don’t necessarily have the people who have the 30 or 40 years of lineage in the broadcast engineering space. But what you have instead are people that are technologists, and they have a great understanding of things like software and networking and cloud.”

Grass Valley CTO Ian Fletcher, who was busy walking customers through his company’s full working demonstration of the new Media Exchange Layer (MXL) open standard, has seen a similar shift in who visits the booth.

“In the old days, you would perhaps get a broadcaster who would send 20 people,” Fletcher said. “They’ll now send you two or three execs, but they’re the ones who make the decisions anyway.”

That said, Fletcher has just met with a large U.S. broadcaster who had sent “basically nobody” in 2025 but had 20 people on the floor this year.

“It seems to vary,” he said.

Incremental ATSC 3.0 Progress

The biggest ATSC 3.0 news at NAB was the broad participation by Brazilian broadcasters, who are using the ATSC 3.0 physical layer as the foundation of their new TV 3.0 standard. That included a joint ATSC 3.0/TV 3.0 session on Monday that included speeches from FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty and Brazil’s Minister of Communications Frederico de Siqueira Filho and Secretary of Broadcasting Wilson Diniz Wellisch.

“From the outset, Brazil approached this transition with a fundamental question — how can we design a broadcast system that’s not only technology advanced, but also socially relevant, economically viable and futureproof?” de Siqueira Filho said.

He and others, including Raymundo Barros, president of the SBTVD Forum and CTO of Globo, then laid out the steps that Brazil is taking to deliver 4K coverage of the FIFA World Cup from new TV 3.0 stations in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo by the second week of June. That includes the installation of MIMO antennas to deliver robust indoor reception and the rollout of new consumer set-top receivers with remote controls that feature a prominent “DTV+” (the consumer brand for TV 3.0) button to easily access the over-the-air broadcasts.

The progress shown at NAB for ATSC 3.0 in the U.S. was more incremental in nature. Perhaps most important was a demonstration of the type of low-cost ATSC 3.0 receivers that will be included in NextGen TV Converter Box program announced last week by Pearl TV. Prototypes from ADTH, Skyworth and Zinwell were shown at the ATSC booth in Central Hall, where they were being fed by an ultra-low-power ATSC 3.0 signal that Sinclair Broadcast Group set up for demonstration purposes.

The goal of the Converter Box Program is to produce a new category of devices with a suggested retail price of $60, said Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle. Boxes that qualify under the program will not include an integrated display or a digital video recorder, will have no more than one tuner and will benefit from special pricing considerations from participating IP license holders and component manufacturers.

While there are existing ATSC 3.0 set-top receivers that support DVR and other advanced functionality, research done by Magid with existing over-the-air viewers emphasized the important of a low-cost converter box that would allow those viewers to maintain service with their existing televisions if and/or when ATSC 1.0 signals are turned off, Schelle said. While this is not a government-sponsored program, it does have some similar goals as the boxes provided through the NTIA coupon program for the original analog-to-digital transition.

“Instead of a coupon program, what we’ve done is gone out and negotiated, and then in the process of negotiating volume discounts for the companies that come into the program the box would be certified,” Schelle said. “It would have a different logo on it.”

A potential wrench in the works, Schelle cautioned, is the spike in pricing for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips, which have jumped some 70% since the beginning of the year due to a supply shortage driven by high demand from data centers. The DRAM shortage is affecting pricing in a range of electronic devices from low-end consumer devices to high-end servers.

There was also progress described by EdgeBeam Wireless, the datacasting joint venture of Scripps, Gray, Nexstar and Sinclair. EdgeBeam has acquired the BroadSpan distribution platform and engineering team from Sinclair, giving it the ability to seamlessly combine 3.0 and cellular signals for data delivery for applications like enhanced GPS and digital signage. And it has finally started to earn revenue and has more deals in the pipeline after a successful exhibition at the Global Channel Partners show in Las Vegas the week before NAB.

“We now have multiple paying customers running on the network, end customers doing real commercial jobs, getting their data off our network,” said EdgeBeam CEO Conrad Clemson. “All of those customers are in the RTK (real-time kinematic positioning) enhanced GPS space. And in addition to those customers, we’ve got about a dozen dealer trials that are running right now.”

C-Band Buzz

Besides a section highlighting new AI tools, another busy part of the West Hall was basically any booth offering solutions to the planned loss of at least 100 MHz of C-band satellite spectrum, and perhaps much more, in an FCC auction that is mandated to close by July 2027.

Providers of terrestrial IP delivery like LTN and Zixi and suppliers of satellite encoding and IRD technology like Synamedia and MediaKind enjoyed steady traffic around their booths, while over 200 broadcasters gathered for a standing-room-only panel session at the Renaissance Hotel on Tuesday morning to discuss the implications of this “C-band squeeze” and potential solutions (more on this to come in a post-NAB report on infrastructure and distribution technology slated for April 30). Executives from LTN and Sinclair also discussed the issue in a panel session at the Programming Everywhere conference organized by TVNewsCheck and NAB on Sunday.

“It’s been very busy,” said Zixi VP of Strategic Business Development Alan Young. “Obviously, there’s a lot of what am I going to do if the FCC repurposes my satellite capacity? And how am I ever going to deliver something that is close to the level of reliability and cost of C-band? And so, we’ve spent a lot of time on that.”

The post NAB ’26 Gathers An Industry In Flux appeared first on TV News Check.