NAB Show 2026 Preview – Professional Essentials Guide

32 NCS | NEWSCASTSTUDIO.COM

Repurposing content has become a new

must-have for broadcasters as viewers

continue to second-screen television.

Smaller crews, broader

expectations

Broadcast productions that once re-

quired large, specialized crews are in-

creasingly being staffed by smaller teams

– a shift driven by budget pressure, tech-

nological capability and the influence of

creator-style production, where a single

operator routinely handles what would

have been multi-person roles.

“Small teams now expect to produce

multi-camera events, sports coverage, and

corporate broadcasts with the same agility

creators bring to digital platforms. More

and more, customers are asking for help

supporting these models, where auto-

mation and remote control allow a single

operator to manage increasingly complex

productions,” said Claudia Barbiero, direc-

tor of global marketing at PTZOptics.

The practical implications reach into

how broadcasters staff secondary or low-

er-priority productions, the events that

need to look professional but don’t carry

flagship budgets.

“Creators have been pioneers in produc-

ing ... content with small crews, even just a

solo operator, and minimal gear. Some of

these solutions also provide the robust re-

liability that broadcasters require, making

them excellent budget-friendly options

for broadcasters’ diversifying secondary

channels, platforms or projects — such as

lower-tier sports matches or backstage in-

terviews at major events — where budgets

and personnel are limited,” said Amy Zhou,

director of sales at Magewell.

Flexibility in tools and team

The crew flexibility question is not limited

to camera and capture.

Graphics workflows are also adapting to a

model where productions draw on shifting

combinations of staff and freelancers, often

working across multiple projects at once.

“The focus on creativity forces teams to

be flexible and agile, allowing teams of staff

and freelancers to form for a project, then

reform in a completely different way for the

next job,” said Miguel Churruca, market-

ing and communications director at Brain-

storm, who noted the importance of collab-

oration and seamless integration, especially

with creative and graphic deliverables.

The common thread across segments

is that tools are being evaluated not just

on output quality but on how easily they

accommodate the way production teams

actually work: smaller, faster and less fixed

in structure than the traditional broadcast

model assumed.

Control rooms are becoming more

adaptive as a result.

“By combining video wall processing,

AV-over-IP, and IP KVM, organizations can

deliver high-performance visualization

and real-time interaction while maintain-

ing the flexibility to expand and evolve

their operations. Built on open standards

and hybrid designs, these systems support

interoperability, higher resolutions, and

resilient workflows across a wide range

of mission-critical environments,” said

Daniel Maloney, manager of platforms and

ecosystems at Matrox Video.

Hybrid as the working reality

For most broadcasters, the path to soft-

ware-defined production is not a wholesale

replacement of existing infrastructure. It

is a gradual layering of new capabilities on

top of what is already in place — a hybrid

model that keeps legacy systems running

while extending what operators can do.

“The move toward IP and software-de-

fined production doesn’t have to mean re-

building an entire facility overnight. At NAB

Show this year we will see how broadcast-

ers are increasingly adopting hybrid en-

vironments where modern orchestration

and control layers allow new distributed

workflows to coexist with existing infra-

structure. The real value comes when op-

erators can manage increasingly complex

production environments through unified

control systems, regardless of whether the

underlying technology is baseband, IP, or

cloud based,” said Joyce Bente, president

and chief executive officer of the Americas

at Riedel Communications.

Visibility across a distributed

signal chain

As control room environments spread

across on-premises, cloud and remote in-

frastructure, maintaining a clear picture

of what every signal is doing across every

path becomes a central operational chal-

lenge.

“When your environment is that spread

out, maintaining consistent signal over-

sight across every path becomes the cen-

tral operational challenge. The trend we’re

seeing is engineering-grade analysis mov-

ing out of standalone hardware and direct-

ly into the monitoring environments oper-

ators already live in,” said Demb.

Multiviewers — systems that display

multiple video sources simultaneously

on a single screen or display wall — have

historically been hardware-based tools.

Their role is expanding as control rooms

distribute.

“Modern software-defined multiviewers

running on COTS hardware are evolving

beyond simple display walls, integrating

with monitoring platforms to provide re-

al-time insights into signal health, metada-

ta, and system performance. This visibility

helps teams detect issues earlier, reconfig-

ure control room workflows more quickly,

and maintain reliable operations across

increasingly complex broadcast, stream-

ing, and live event productions,” said Steve

Reynolds, chief executive officer of Imag-

ine Communications.

COTS, or commercial off-the-shelf hard-

ware, refers to standard computing equip-

ment rather than purpose-built broadcast

hardware — a distinction that matters for

cost and flexibility as facilities modernize.

Automation and the production

workload

Alongside infrastructure changes, auto-

mation is becoming a more significant part

of how control rooms manage the volume

of content modern broadcast operations

require. Newsrooms and live production

teams are being asked to produce more

output across more platforms without a

proportional increase in staffing.

“Newsrooms are being asked to deliver