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tichannel reality to drive growth. Media
companies are unifying their businesses
around audiences and data, creating prod-
ucts for advertisers that put them where
the action is. Brands want to create expe-
riences that engage these audiences, and
so media companies need to have the in-
frastructure and the offerings that brands
are looking for to reach their audiences,”
said Dave Dembowski, chief revenue offi-
cer at Operative.
A regulatory moment
Running alongside the technology and
business shifts is an unusually active regu-
latory environment.
The FCC’s pending decisions on ATSC 3.0
and on the second C-band spectrum auc-
tion will set the pace for broadcast distri-
bution infrastructure decisions for the next
decade. The EU AI Act is phasing in obliga-
tions for organizations using AI in produc-
tion and distribution workflows. And in the
United States, new legislation is extending
broadcast standards into streaming for the
first time.
“Broadcast and streaming are increasing-
ly operating under the same expectations
from regulators and audiences alike. Cali-
fornia’s new SB 576 law will be a key discus-
sion point for many at the show, requiring
ads in streaming content to match the loud-
ness of the surrounding program and ex-
tending principles similar to the CALM Act
into the streaming world. Fragmentation
across the ad tech stack makes this a tricky
issue to solve. Getting compliant and mak-
ing this law really work for consumers will
require much closer collaboration between
content providers, ad tech players and au-
dio partners,” said Costa Nikols, executive
team strategy advisor for media and enter-
tainment at Telos Alliance.
The CALM Act – the Commercial Adver-
tisement Loudness Mitigation Act – has
governed loudness standards in broadcast
advertising since 2012. SB 576 extends
comparable requirements to streaming ad-
vertising in California, a development that
has implications for ad tech infrastructure
well beyond the state’s borders given how
streaming ad delivery is architected at a na-
tional level.
The next technical frontier
Beneath the operational and commer-
cial pressures, a technical shift is also
taking shape that will be visible in early
deployments at NAB Show 2026, the move
toward what some in the industry are be-
ginning to call AI-native architectures.
“The most significant shift this year is
the convergence of compression, deliv-
ery, and machine intelligence into unified
workflows. Traditional formats were built
for human perception, not machine anal-
ysis, and the cost of that mismatch is now
measurable: accelerators sitting idle 30
to 60% of the time waiting for properly
structured data, while pipelines decode
entire frames only to discard over 99% of
the pixels. NAB Show 2026 is where com-
pute-aware codecs like MPEG-5 LCEVC
and SMPTE VC-6 move from standards
documents into deployed production sys-
tems,” said Fabio Murra, senior vice pres-
ident of product and marketing at V-Nova.
That shift, from infrastructure designed
for human viewing to infrastructure de-
signed to serve both human viewing and
machine processing simultaneously, may
be the most consequential long-term de-
velopment on the show floor this April,
even if it does not yet carry the visibility
of the cloud or AI conversations that have
dominated recent years.
The industry arriving at NAB Show 2026
is not short of technology. It is working
through the harder questions of how to
operate it at scale, sustain it financially and
govern it responsibly. Those are the ques-
tions the exhibit floor, the education ses-
sions and the conversations between buy-
ers and vendors will be organized around
– whether the agenda says so explicitly or
not.
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