There is something about the week before NAB that sharpens conversations. Everyone is still at their desks, but the energy is already shifting. The deals that will get made, the demos that will surprise people, the hallway conversations that end up mattering more than any keynote.
Qualabs hosted the first fully remote Mate Talk, bringing together six media technology leaders to talk about what they are watching, what they are skeptical of, and what they genuinely cannot wait to see at NAB 2026. The conversation lasted nearly an hour and covered more ground than most panels twice that length.
AI is moving from application to infrastructure
At NAB 2025, the dominant conversation was about AI with a face: tools you could demo, features with interfaces, things you could show a client on a screen. This year the conversation is shifting deeper. What the industry is starting to grapple with is AI embedded inside infrastructure itself, making content-aware decisions that never surface to any user, but determine everything that does.
The most concrete version of that shift is metadata. Most content libraries carry incomplete or inaccurate scene-level data, and for years the only fix was throwing people at the problem. Visual intelligence models are changing that calculus. The ability to generate accurate frame-by-frame metadata at scale is not just a workflow improvement, it directly affects ad targeting, CPM value, and how much revenue a library can actually generate.
MoQ is gaining substance and real-world data is finally coming
Media over QUIC has been a fixture of NAB conversations for a couple of years. The honest picture heading into 2026: the protocol is maturing, and the buzz is starting to connect to actual substance. MoQ is appearing in workflows alongside DRM and ad insertion, which are the integration points that matter for any real production deployment.
What the industry still lacks is published performance data at scale. The theoretical case for MoQ over SRT or enhanced RTMP is well-documented. Real-world benchmarks across different network conditions and regions are not. That data is starting to emerge. OpenMoQ is releasing open-source test kits as part of both its relay and client-side work streams, and at least one team is already running MoQ in production at scale, focused on interoperability across the protocol's still-evolving spec.
Provenance is no longer a niche conversation
C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, has moved from a standards conversation into something closer to a buying criterion. The standard answers a question that is increasingly hard to answer without technical infrastructure: is this content authentic, and has it been modified? In a distribution environment shaped by synthetic media and AI-generated content, that question is no longer theoretical.
The signal at NAB will be less about whether C2PA is on the agenda and more about how broadly it is being applied. The designed-for use case is authenticity verification. What tends to happen once a standard reaches real practitioners is that entirely new applications emerge from problems the original designers did not anticipate. There is also a SMPTE panel on provenance the day before the show opens, which gives a sense of where the standards community places the urgency.
The broadcast-to-streaming convergence is actually happening now, quietly
Convergence of broadcast and streaming infrastructure has been a NAB theme for years. The reason it is not on any big panel this year is not that it faded, it is that it stopped being a concept and became operational work. The first production systems built on fully converged, software-defined architecture went live in 2025 and 2026. People are not debating it anymore, they are debugging it.
Broadcast infrastructure that spent a decade as dedicated physical systems is being rebuilt as IP-native, software-defined workflows. DRM is replacing CAS (Conditional Access Systems) and BISS (Basic Interoperable Scrambling System) encryption in environments where that transition would have seemed implausible five years ago. Satellite backhaul is giving way to cloud-managed delivery. Software companies are now running live productions at scale, with platforms like Amazon and Netflix operating cameras and cables for live events. The scope of problems at NAB is changing as a result: the big architectural questions are mostly settled, and what remains is the harder, less visible work of making converged systems reliable in production.
The echo chamber problem: industry surveys and the limits of insular feedback
SVTA is running a new quality of experience survey this year, aimed at surfacing the real business and engineering challenges practitioners face, not just the technical problems that working groups already know how to frame. The stated goal is to move from measuring interesting things to measuring the right things in the right places.
The honest tension in that effort: industry surveys tend to reach the same people who already participate in the conversation. The feedback loop reinforces existing priorities rather than uncovering what operators outside those circles are actually dealing with. Widening the audience is the hard part, not designing the questions.
There is a related dynamic on the vendor side. It often takes NDAs and several layers of trust before customers say what is really breaking. The show floor tends to change that. NAB is one of the few places where those conversations happen in the open, and what surfaces there rarely appears in any survey.
Going to NAB for the first time: what the panel actually recommends!
| The situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Your feet by day two | Wear genuinely comfortable shoes. The halls are enormous and you will cover more ground than you expect. Nobody is looking at your footwear. |
| Staying hydrated | Bring your own water bottle. Buying water inside the venue is expensive. |
| Food and lines | Carry snacks!! Convention food is expensive and the lines are long. "Tacos El Gordo" is five minutes from the convention center on Convention Center Drive highly recommended by multiple panelists. |
| Planning the halls | Map your route in advance. Commuting between halls without a plan burns time fast. Most streaming and video folks live in the West Hall, but the North Hall has broadcast infrastructure conversations worth hearing. |
| Cross-pollinating | Andy recommends making a point of visiting every hall at least once. The show means something very different to the North Hall and Central Hall crowds. Going there expands your understanding of the full stack. |
| Your contact strategy | Make sure the people you want to see know you are there. A short message before the show is more effective than hoping to cross paths on the floor. |
| After 6pm | The booth events, rooftop parties, and informal drinks are where the real conversations happen. Dan Rayburn's rooftop event on Monday evening is a known gathering point. Check the Janet Greco list for the full schedule of side events. |
| Off-strip options | Downtown Las Vegas has genuinely good food and bars that locals actually use. Bhavesh recommends "Ferraro's" for Italian, off-strip and more affordable than anything inside the convention area. "The Atomic Cafe" in the downtown area is a historic oddity worth finding. |
| Finding your people | The Montevideo Tech community is gathering Saturday evening at 8:30 PM. Everyone is welcome! The NAB Old Schoolers group gathers Tuesday nights around 9:30 at the Alibi Cocktail Lounge at the Aria. |
The themes that came up in this Mate Talk, AI embedded in infrastructure, MoQ moving from theory to data, C2PA gaining adoption, broadcast workflows quietly going software-defined, are the same ones Qualabs has been working on with clients across the video technology space. We tend to think the most important conversations at NAB happen away from the main stages, in the places where people are honest about what is and is not working.
If you are heading to Las Vegas and want to connect, about any of this, or about what you are building, we would be glad to find time. See you on the floor!!
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