NABShow 2026 RECAP!

Here goes my recap and highlights of NABShow 2026!

The Adobe Prelude

Before NAB officially started, there was the customary Adobe NDA Breakfast Briefing Session, where (under severe NDA), Adobe showcases its roadmap and upcoming products / workflows to select partners. And this was, without doubt, the highlight of the show for me. Of-course, I can’t talk about it in detail, not share any images, but rest assured – over the next few months you will see revolutionary improvements in Premiere Pro, Firefly, After Effects and a massive upscaling of Adobe’s offerings in the world of Audio.

Unfortunaly, this is the ONLY image from the session I can share:

NAB CONFERENCE SESSIONS

There were 3 broad themes I noticed – Artificial Intelligence (of-course), Sports, & the Creator Economy.
Cloud / Virtualisation was kind-of a sub-theme across the board.

Theme 1: Sports – I was realy happy at the prominent place that was given to Sports, given that it is the last surviving bastion of live-broadcast / live-streaming of content, with live TV in all other areas seeing massive declines. FAST hasn’t been the panacea everyone thought it would be. Broad themes in Sports included Use of AI in sport, Friction-less workflows, Camera to Cloud & Cloud Virtualisation.

Some of the better sessions in Sports were:
– Stadiums of the Future: Tech-Driven Venue Experiences – SO Good!
– NBC and Google Cloud Are Redefining Live Sports Analysis with AI
– Unlocking Live Cloud Production
– Immersive Capture in Modern Sports Production
– IP Workflows in Mobile Production
– Automated Broadcast Production in the PGA Tour

Theme 2: Artificial Intelligence – in AI, there was just too much showcased.

Every 2nd booth had a AI demo. Every 2nd session was on AI. Every product, every workflow had an AI-element in it. There was a lot of it, but a lot of it was also very repetitive. Similar applications across products & services. I was looking for new applications of AI, but not too many were forthcoming.

Some of the interesting AI sessions were:
– Powering Intelligent Media: From AI Experimentation to Real‑World Impact
– AI as Creator: Who Owns the Future of Hollywood?
– Using AI To Make Unscripted Content Better
– How Media Companies Are Turning Archives into AI-Ready Assets
– Personalize Audience Experiences with Multimodal Generative AI

Some images…

Theme 3: Creator Economy – So the prominence for the Creator Economy came off as a little out-of-place for me, esp in a M&E Tech Conference. Coz there isn’t really much cutting-edge work happening in the Creator Economy. They are basically using existing tech / workflows, albeit in a massively scaled manner – given the number of creators.
So I guess NAB needed to bring them into the conversation to help the tech OEMs sell to them as well – given that in volume terms, they outstrip the high-end tech users by a ratio of 1000:1. The Creator Lab / Creator Theatre was well done, but really there was nothing to learn there, just a lot of tech OEMs showcasing their wares to creators and vice-versa.

Other than this, there were a couple of other sessions which I found interesting.

The Sci-Tech Council of the Oscars Academy (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences), which runs the Scientific & Technical Awards (aka Technical Oscars) did a deep-dive session into how the Technical Oscars are planned, how can one apply, how are they evaluated, etc etc. Very insightful.

The other session (wasn’t really a session, but was a in-booth demo) of the Aputure dynamic chroma-key lighting feature. See it below in the booths recap.

Also, the in-booth demo(s) for Stype was pretty cool.

NAB SHOW FLOOR

The Show Floor was well arranged, broken up between the 3 halls, in such a way that you could spend a day in each hall between the floor sessions and see all the booths.

What struck my eye on the floor:

AINA – They create holograms that run natively on consumer devices – on any screen or in VR to smartphones. This is a first step to immersive, real-world holography instantly accessible – basically the foundation for universal spatial video – a future where all content, from YouTube to Netflix, becomes immersive, holographic with rich spatial visuals. They do this by teaching AI to see and think in volume (3D). Very nice. Was so caught up in the showcase that I forgot to take photos / videos. 😣🤷🏻‍♂️

STYPE – Excellent blending of AI & innovation in the Virtual Production ecosystem within Stype. AI Glue is their new product, which is excellent. Also their marker-less mo-cap workflow using RedSpy. Spent a lot of time with the Co-founder talking about it.

SONY – The PXWZ300 is a kick-ass Camcorder with a whole load of Content Provenance features + the ability to natively do object / human tracking with basic in-camera features. Plus they unveiled the entire spectrum of their Immersive offerings – the Sony XYN platform as well as showcased their Camera tracking solution for VP – Ocellus. Fantastic!

Aputure – Blew my mind with ImageBasedLighting and Sidus Link Pro. Also their workflow for visual sampling of colours and recreating them as chroma key backgrounds. This is especially useful if foreground elements have significant amounts of green or blue in them (do watch the video fully even though It is a little long). It’s fabulous what they’ve been able to do. Well done Tim Kang…

Also, Aputure launched Nova II, where you get the same output with a 1X1 light, which you would get with a 2X1 light. Very cool.

Sandisk – massive leaps in SSD storage with increased throughput speeds and high storage volumes. Both for portable SSDs and internal SSD storage.

Sennheiser – finally had the public release of their In-headset spatial audio mixing tool. I had seen a beta of this at IBC 2025 and was completely blown away by it. The final release is even better. Well done Sennheiser!!!

Insta360 & Antigravity – they have joined hands to lauch a 360 drone. Incredibly light and with a flying system that is incredibly user friendly. We have bought one and are testing it out currently. Also, spent a lot of time with the Insta 360 co-founder and the Antigravity CEO working on some interesting collabs between WWI & AG.

Tilta – a cool solution for spatial capture using a load of iPhones. It’s not revolutionary as such… Just looked very cool… 🙂

Movin – Marker-less mocap. With a single capture device, supported by multiple lidar boundary sensors, this system does marker-less motion capture. It wasn’t as efficient as the Stype one, given that it needs a lot of specialised hardware, but was of good quality.

Other than this, there were a plethora of booths – most didn’t really have anything breathtaking, but here are images of the somewhat interesting booths / products…