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LAS VEGAS — Like Christmas, the 2025 NAB Show in early April has now come and gone, and it’s time to assess the haul and plan for next year.
More so than any recent NAB Show, maybe any NAB Show ever, the emphasis was on content and its creation, yet the pervading atmosphere was technology. There was lots of amazing, wondrous, consuming, constantly changing digital technology.
The show is clearly pushing to make itself into a mecca for entertainment producers — not necessarily for, say, big movie producers and stars, but everyone else (including would-be movie producers). From the start-up podcaster to ambitious networks, the tools to make your dream possible can be found at the NAB Show.
The radio and TV silos are crumbling — or bursting open — as the multimedia omniverse swells like an all-encompassing tidal wave. The future is definitely going to be different than the past.
Down but up
Due to the continuation of reconstruction of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the massive Central Hall was closed off, so the show was physically smaller than last year’s. Thus, the usual giant exhibitors such as Sony and Panasonic had their acreage significantly trimmed. Concomitantly, attendance was down to around 55,000 or so. President Trump’s tariff barrage may have been a deterrent.
The future is definitely going to be different from the past.
According to the National Association of Broadcasters, attendees from over 160 countries visited, with international (i.e., non-American) attendees making up 26%. There were over 1,000 exhibitors, 442 of whom were international.
There was simply no way to get around the chief “trend” or “topic” — AI. It was everywhere, unavoidable. Anything that could be tied to it was. For radio broadcasters, many booths showcased AI-generated voices, scripts, programming and even control if requested. AI was also behind the broadcaster’s workflow, business software and data intelligence collection, such as audience information, in ways almost unimaginable just a few years ago.
Digital dance partners
Pushing further in, AoIP is now the only thing. It, too, is seemingly everywhere, networking with everything and controllable by anyone. Its dance partner is cloud virtualization, which is also popping up in the most unexpected places. The rapid digitization of the media network is dizzying, and there is no feeling that the rate will slow down anytime soon. It’s as if someone who has ridden a horse all their life is suddenly behind the wheel of a Formula One racer.
Of course, there was new equipment, such as transmitters and consoles, but even there, the selling point was often how networkable or remote-controllable it was. Software upgrades were a popular pitch for many exhibitors.
On the TV side, incredible high-definition cameras and video walls were almost always within sight, while virtualization systems were simply jaw-dropping in their mimicry of reality. More shocking were the affordable prices. A populist financial reckoning is coming to programming production soon. Everyone is a movie mogul!
A broadcast space oddity
For those who didn’t spend the whole show in booths, the prevalence of sessions with sports programming as a topic might have been a surprise. The NAB has aggressively tried to ally itself with America’s big sports leagues.
Despite their historic massive popularity (read: cash cow), the leagues are nervous as their reliable over-the-air broadcast outlet audiences slowly wither for one reason or another. Broadcasters are equally aware of this and are casting about for a move. They all know that streaming, in one form or another, is the future, but they don’t know what kind of ecosystem — or ecosystems — will win out.
Plus, all sorts of other sports, some startups, some created exclusively to produce inexpensive streaming content, are chipping away at the audiences’ finite attention resources. The NAB is also courting these newcomers since sports is seen as an audience magnet. Where audiences go, advertisers are sure to follow.
