This is my 30th NAB. I stopped counting for a while, then started again because the number started to mean something different. Not a badge. More like a calibration device. After enough trips, you develop a kind of pattern recognition that’s hard to explain to someone on their third or fourth show. You know what the booth talk sounds like before you walk in. You know which announcements were decided six months ago and which ones got made up over dinner the night before. You learn to weight your sources differently.
So here’s how I’m walking into Las Vegas this year, what I expect to find, and why I’m keeping my working thesis loose on purpose.
The Infrastructure Signal
Last year at NAB the big energy was application-layer AI. Tools you could touch, demos you could watch, workflows you could imagine someone in a real organization actually using. That was appropriate for where the market was. This year I think the signal has moved one level down.
What I’m watching for is AI that doesn’t have a UI. The kind that lives inside a workflow and touches automation without announcing itself. The distinction matters because it changes who holds the leverage. Application-layer AI is a product decision. Infrastructure-layer AI is an architectural one. Products get replaced. Architecture gets locked in.
NAB itself is helping make this argument for me, almost accidentally. The West Hall AI Innovation Pavilions, there are two of them this year, up from one; are still organized around content creation, workflow automation, and audience engagement. That’s the loud surface story. What I’m interested in is the layer underneath it, where the architectural decisions are actually being made.
swXtch.io: The Router Is the Story
One of the things I’ll be watching closely is how swXtch.io’s framing lands this week. They’re debuting groundSwXtch, their multicast networking platform, and the broader product architecture they’ve been building around includes what they describe as an AI-native network — a system where intelligence sits inside the signal path and makes decisions about where content goes and what happens to it in transit, rather than operating as a tool downstream of delivery.
What I’m specifically watching is whether that framing starts to land as an architectural shift rather than just a networking one. The capability that interests me is the ability to simultaneously multicast a live source across multiple workflows and AI-driven processing layers in real time — things like generating optimized outputs for different distribution surfaces from a single production feed, driven by the routing logic itself rather than by a human operator making a downstream edit decision. When the router is doing the reasoning and not just moving the bits, the question of who controls the routing logic becomes a very different conversation than it used to be. I want to see whether operators on the floor are hearing it that way yet, or whether it’s still being received as a sophisticated networking story.
V-Nova: Two Different Wedges, Both Worth Watching
V-Nova has two distinct stories at NAB this year and it’s worth keeping them separate, because they land with different buyers and serve different arguments.
The first is LCEVC. This is the efficiency wedge operators already understand. Better quality at lower bitrates, meaningful bandwidth savings at scale, real deployments across broadcast and streaming. That story has been building for a while and the NAB conversations this year include live TV 3.0 deployments in Brazil and continued work across ATSC 3.0.
The second is VC-6, and this is the more interesting one to me right now because the frame around it is shifting. VC-6’s AI Blueprint approach: decode once, reuse the output across multiple AI models, selectively access only the regions and quality levels each model actually needs. This changes the economics of running visual AI on video at scale in a way that LCEVC doesn’t directly address. The real value proposition isn’t bandwidth. It’s reduced decode cost, lower memory bandwidth, less data movement through the inference pipeline, and better throughput when you’re running multiple models against the same content. That’s an AI infrastructure cost argument, not a network cost argument, and it expands the buyer conversation well beyond the engineering team responsible for delivery. I’ll be at their booth to understand how that argument is actually landing, because the gap between a compelling reframe and a changed purchase decision is where the real story lives.
The Displacement Nobody’s Headlining
The C-band satellite story has been grinding for the better part of a decade. It won’t be the flashy headline at NAB this year, but it might be the most consequential infrastructure conversation on the floor. The FCC has committed to competitive bidding for at least 100 MHz of Upper C-band spectrum by July 2027. That’s the auction deadline, not a clean broadcaster move-out date, and the operational displacement timeline is still being fought through policy and protection proceedings. But the direction is not ambiguous. LTN is at NAB explicitly pitching satellite-to-IP migration as spectrum auction pressure intensifies, saying media organizations are already moving hundreds of channels and live sports workflows to IP alternatives. Zixi is making nearly the same argument with a nearly identical show-floor posture.
What’s actually interesting to me is not the migration mechanics. It’s what changes at the relationship layer when the satellite dish is gone. C-band distribution wasn’t just a delivery technology. It was an organizational logic. Affiliates got content one way. Rights flowed through one channel. When that changes, the question of who manages the new delivery path, who sets the SLAs, who holds the affiliate relationship, who controls the failover is genuinely open. The companies winning that answer are building something more durable than a product.
Folded into this is the provenance thread. C2PA authentication is showing up across streaming and broadcast workflows at the same moment MoQ and low-latency security stacks are becoming more concrete. EZDRM is sitting in the middle of both conversations this week. Their DRMaaS now supports MoQ transport, and they’re separately showing C2PA provenance signing. Which makes that intersection worth watching even if the transport story is still settling. Whether MoQ itself is ready for production at scale is a debate the industry is still having honestly, and the benchmark data from real deployments is only now starting to accumulate. The provenance layer threading through all of it is the signal worth tracking regardless of which transport ultimately carries it.
The North Hall Problem
One of the conversations in my Mate Talk group last week that’s been sitting with me is something Sean McCarthy observed about the North Hall. The broadcast-to-IP convergence that everyone was talking about three or four years ago has actually been happening. It’s just not on any headline panels. Traditional satellite and playout operators are going software-defined, not because they chose to on their own timeline but because the economics forced the question. The interesting work is happening there, and most of the streaming-world people I know spend ninety-five percent of their NAB in the West Hall.
I’m making a point this year of crossing halls and staying longer when I do. The companies bridging those two worlds, who understand legacy broadcast operations deeply enough to translate them into software-defined workflows without breaking what works, are in a better position than they’re getting credit for right now. That gap between what the North Hall is working on and what the West Hall is celebrating is itself a kind of market inefficiency, and market inefficiencies have a way of attracting capital once someone names them clearly enough.
What the After-Hours Is Actually For
Part of what I do at NAB is watch where capital is paying attention, and this year that’s an explicit part of my agenda. I’ll be working alongside the Hallstone Ventures team and spending time with the MonteVIDEO Tech Ventures crew, who bring a genuinely different operator lens to what gets funded and why. Both are doing the same fundamental thing from different vantage points: watching which early conversations over drinks become real in eighteen months, and which ones evaporate before Sunday morning.
Learning to tell the difference and asking the right questions before you can tell, is part of what the show is actually for if you use it right. The ideas that are just being floated, not pitched, not presented, just surfaced by someone who’s been sitting on a thought for two years and hasn’t said it out loud in a room full of the right people yet — that’s where I pay the closest attention. Part of my job is to find those conversations, take them seriously, and figure out whether they’re worth pulling forward. Some aren’t ready. Some are already late. Occasionally one of them turns out to be the thing everybody’s writing about by the time IBC rolls around.
The Working Thesis, Held Loosely
Going into the show, my read is that 2026 is the year the infrastructure layer at NAB gets more interesting than the application layer for the first time in a few cycles. AI burrowing into the routing fabric rather than wearing a UI. Compression economics being reframed around inference pipeline cost rather than bandwidth. Distribution architectures rebuilding from the pipe up as satellite displacement moves from theoretical to unavoidable. Capital watching the early conversations for what comes next.
But I’ve been to thirty of these things. The version of NAB I’m walking into on Saturday and the version I’m writing about next weekend are never quite the same show. Something always surfaces that wasn’t on the agenda. A conversation in a hallway, a demo that reframes something I thought I understood, a question somebody asks at 11pm that turns out to be the most important thing said all week.
That’s the part I can’t plan for. It’s also the part I trust most.
I’ll be posting from the floor in Substack Notes all week. The post-show summary lands the following weekend.
