Insights

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.

This article provides an analytical deep-dive into the rapid rise of agentic AI in Media Tech, tracing its development from Jensen Huang's CES 2025 keynote through a wave of product launches in mid-2025. It maps agentic AI activity across the media supply chain (upstream, midstream, downstream), identifying advertising, content discovery, and user experience as the primary hotspots. The piece concludes with ten strategic implications, arguing that agentic AI is compressing development cycles, reshaping platform architecture, and making data quality a critical competitive factor.

This IBC 2025 preview combines an original skills analysis of 1,109 job postings from broadcast and media organizations with a curated roundup of key industry trends. The skills data reveals the growing importance of data literacy alongside traditional media skills. The trends playlist covers sustainability divergence between Europe and North America, stalling cloud adoption, a 24% drop in scripted streaming originals, agentic AI uncertainty, and the accelerating use of acquisitions to drive technology development under tariff pressure.

This half-year review of 2025 identifies consolidation as the defining theme, contrasting North American media companies splitting their empires with European counterparts pursuing acquisition strategies to survive against global streaming giants. It covers the Warner Bros. Discovery split, European streaming partnerships, and vendor consolidation led by LiveU's acquisition of Actus Digital. The piece also tracks secondary trends including AI in advertising, the creator economy overtaking traditional media revenues, and the still-uncertain trajectory of agentic AI.