Insights

Second Close-Ups episode: a conversation with Ben Swanton, founder of 808 Talent and a 20-year media tech headhunter, on the sector's talent trends. Topics include AI, partnerships, product leadership, generalists vs. specialists, culture, and predictions for 2027. The key takeaway is that strategies are shifting faster than organizations can adapt.

Reflecting on IBC 2026, Lorenzo notes that buyer attendance fell 6% year-over-year, continuing a longer decline, which is pushing vendors toward partnerships and adjacent-market strategies (notably Pro-AV) rather than the vendor M&A wave he had anticipated. He concludes vendors will need to build trust through business models that ease customer pressure and manage AI risk to stay relevant.

The first episode of a new Sense the Frame interview series, Close-Ups, features NDI Head Miguel Coutinho discussing the accelerating convergence between broadcast technology and Pro-AV. The conversation covers where AI adoption is concentrated, why go-to-market remains the biggest stumbling block for broadcast vendors entering Pro-AV, and Coutinho's prediction of a shift from AI agents back to automation ahead of ISE 2027.

Co-written with Andy Beach (Engines of Change), this piece combines a floor read of NAB Show 2026 with a word-frequency and log-odds analysis of 148 exhibitor announcements to argue that control, not AI, was the dominant theme of the show. It shows agentic AI product launches increasingly built around orchestration and governance, links this to a wave of orchestration-focused M&A (Foundry-Griptape, Kaltura-PathFactory, OpenAI-Ona), and frames IBC 2026 as the test of whether agentic AI becomes a true operating layer.

Launching a new Media Tech Takes video series, Lorenzo outlines nine trends he expects to dominate IBC 2026: live sports economics, agentic AI in production, advertising as a revenue lever, supply chain orchestration, vertical video, hardware inflation, vendor M&A, AI trust and risk, and broadcast/pro-AV convergence. The throughline is an industry under margin pressure looking to AI and new revenue streams for relief, while a trust deficit around AI transparency becomes a bigger talking point on the show floor.

Explores how vibe coding and AI-assisted development are commoditizing software creation in Media Tech. DPP data shows the build-vs-buy equation is tilting back toward insourcing. Vendors are responding through three differentiation strategies: superior UX design, orchestration layers that coordinate AI agents for media workflows, and trust as an explicit competitive differentiator — with the principle mirroring the content curation challenge examined in Part 1.

Lorenzo argues that value in the media and technology industry is shifting toward curation, building on a point first raised in his 2026 key trends watchlist. This is Part 1 of a two-part series, focused on the media side of that shift.

An anniversary retrospective reviewing all articles published in Sense the Frame's first year (June 2025 to June 2026), from media tech trends and M&A analysis to live sports and ISE convergence research. Lorenzo reflects on how the newsletter's editorial identity solidified through the act of writing, summarising each piece in the archive with brief commentary. The piece closes with a call to share the newsletter and an outline of what is coming in year two, including further work on agentic AI, content discovery, and skillsets.

A data analysis of product announcements from 148 exhibitors at NAB Show 2026, drawing on trade press coverage to decode vendor messaging across North, Central, and West halls. Contrary to prevailing post-show narratives, AI was not the top word: control, cloud, and IP ranked higher. The article finds that live sports was the dominant use case, on-prem cloud was the top bigram, and the overall tone of vendor language signalled pragmatic moderation rather than exuberance.

A reflection on the MediaTech Festival 2026 in Odense, where Lorenzo presented on the MediaTech Pendulum. The article draws on sessions about journalism, misinformation, and organizational change to argue that emotional intelligence is an undervalued asset in media, both in how organizations engage audiences and how they manage internal transformation. It concludes that the signal from the conference was a growing recognition that the emotional dimension can no longer be ignored.

Drawing on a visit to ICE 2026 and a rewatch of the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, this article argues that a Casino Capitalism mindset, defined by risk-chasing and speculation, is reshaping how younger audiences engage with media. It applies the MediaTech Pendulum framework to the attention economy, tracing the arc from Metaverse hype to betting growth. The piece concludes that building fandom through immersive storytelling is the best counter-strategy for media companies.

A trend watchlist for Media Tech in 2026, framed through the lens of Bandersnatch's quiet removal from Netflix as a cautionary tale about innovation cycles. The article argues that AI is primarily a business transformation challenge, that value is migrating toward curation, that trust is becoming scarce, and that economic pressure will drive further vendor consolidation.

The final part of the Live Sports series applies text analysis and topic modelling to 124 sports technology product announcements ahead of IBC 2025. Using LDA and BERT-based methods, it identifies six to twelve themes dominated by cloud, IP, and AI. The analysis finds strong alignment between vendor announcements and the technology hotspots identified in earlier parts of the series, with a notable gap in content protection.

Part 2 of the Live Sports series shifts focus from market dynamics to Media Tech, examining how technology vendors are responding to sports broadcasting trends. The article identifies five key hotspots: AI workflows, interactive experiences, low-latency streaming, ad monetization, and content protection. It concludes that technology supply is closely following the commercial priorities of media companies.

The first part of a multi-part series examining the growing strategic importance and financial pressure of live sports in media. The article argues that sports rights are essential for broadcaster relevance but that costs have risen dramatically faster than industry revenues, creating a structural tension between survival necessity and business model sustainability.

A data-driven analysis of 1,219 ISE exhibitor text entries examining how broadcast technology vendors communicate in the Pro-AV market ahead of ISE 2026. The piece finds a significant messaging gap: broadcast vendors use engineering-led infrastructure language while Pro-AV buyers prioritize product outcomes and applications, a disconnect that limits market effectiveness.

The article argues that AI is driving a great content homogenization, where reliance on the same LLM tools causes creative output to converge toward statistical consensus. Drawing a parallel to the TV show Pluribus, it contends that the antidote is not rejecting AI but leaning into curation, genuine human experience, and cross-domain experimentation to remain distinctive.

Part 2 presents the core data analysis of 110 vendor-to-vendor Media Tech M&A transactions from 2021 to 2025. It identifies a 23% drop in deal volumes between the two sub-periods, with Ross Video as the leading acquirer. The technology theme analysis shows AI and Data deals doubling in share while cloud-related deals decline, and the supply chain analysis reveals content production and monetization as the primary hotspots. The piece concludes that M&A activity is concentrating among fewer, larger players, with AI capabilities now central to acquisition strategy.

Part 1 of this data-driven M&A series establishes the macro context for five years of Media Tech consolidation, framing the period through two distinct phases: an expansionary 2020-2022 driven by streaming growth and cheap capital, and a contractionary 2023-2025 defined by cost cutting and efficiency. Drawing on a compiled dataset of over 100 M&A deals and the DPP Media Tech CEO Survey 2025, it shows deal volumes peaking in 2021 and declining since, while deal values rise, indicating a shift toward fewer but larger transactions.

Inspired by watching Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, this personal essay uses the film's critical success and commercial failure as a lens to examine the tension between quality and financial return in content creation. It connects the pressures facing filmmakers to a broader AI slop rush flooding the web with algorithmically optimized content, and notes that social media engagement has been declining since 2022. The piece closes with a philosophical reflection on the balance all creators must strike between artistic integrity and commercial reality.