Before the Floor: What I Was Looking for at NAB Show 2026

April 2026 | Las Vegas Convention Center

I recorded this before the exhibit hall opened. At the time, I had a list of booths, a set of questions, and a working theory. Four days later, most of the theory held. Some of it got sharper. A couple of assumptions did not make it out alive…

This is the entry point for a five-part series on what I found at NAB Show 2026. I’m writing it after the fact, so I have the benefit of knowing how it played out. Here’s what I went in looking for.

Why is NAB Important to Those Who “Don’t Work in Broadcast”?

Varde’s clients are not broadcasters. They are healthcare systems, universities, financial services firms, mid-market companies and other non-media types that still produce a lot of video content without having a media operation built around it. NAB is not technically their show.

But the technology on that show floor – storage, asset management, workflow orchestration, AI-assisted search – is what these organizations eventually need. It’s just wearing “broadcast clothes” and sounding very complicated.

Varde’s mission is to help clients create the Enterprise Video Content Factory. In order to do that, we see past the vocabulary and jargon and technical specs, find out what each vendor is actually solving for, and whether it maps onto problems a CIO or a VP of Communications would recognize.

What I Went In Looking For

Going into the show, I had four questions I wanted the floor to answer.

First: Which vendors are genuinely building for the enterprise buyer versus which ones are adding enterprise language to broadcast-native products? This is an important distinction; A product designed for a broadcast engineering team and one designed for a corporate communications team can have a completely different fitness for purpose. I wanted to find vendors who start with the human workflow rather than the technical specification.

Second: Where is the AI story heading? Every vendor has an AI pitch right now. Most of them are genuine, but some of them are theater. I wanted to understand which products had embedded AI into operational workflows in ways that provide ROI.

Third: Are there new integration platforms worth knowing? The biggest operational problem I see across enterprise video clients is not bad tools. It is tools that don’t talk to each other. Workflow orchestration – or ‘business process management’ as it’s called outside the editing suite – is a category that has matured in the last few years, and I wanted a current read on who is connecting the boxes and how well this works.

Fourth: Where is the cloud-versus-on-premise conversation? Enterprise IT teams have been told that the cloud is the destination, but many of them have well-founded concerns that the cloud-first narrative sometimes glosses over. I wanted to look for credible hybrid and on-premise alternatives so that cloud adoption isn’t the only “requirement” for an enterprise video content factory.

Over four days on the exhibit floor, I visited 40+ companies and recorded 25+ on-camera snippets. Each day includes video interviews with the vendors I spoke to on the floor. Those are being edited and published as they become available.

The One Thing I Knew Before I Walked In

I want to flag one observation here, before the vendor coverage starts, because it shapes everything that follows.

NAB Show 2026 reported more than 13,000 corporate media professionals in attendance, nearly double the prior year. The show added a dedicated Enterprise Video Track for Fortune 1000 teams building in-house studios. Multiple vendors ran panels explicitly targeting corporate buyers. These are not small signals, but I believe this is more a broadening of the show’s focus than a shift of its center of gravity.

But attendance numbers and focus shifts are different from solutions that truly fit. The enterprise buyer and the broadcast buyer share some tools but share almost no operating context. A broadcaster has an engineering team. They understand signal chains and codec specifications and infrastructure complexity. An enterprise buyer has a communications team, an HR manager, a Legal Compliance officer, an IT team with competing priorities, and a budget approval process that speaks business outcomes, not technical specifications.

The NAB floor has not bridged that gap. My primary objective with this year’s NAB is to talk to vendors who are working to cross that divide – trying to find out which ones that are worth knowing. The ones that haven’t still require a translator between their product and your organization’s actual needs.

That translation is, in a practical sense, what Varde does.

Read the Series

The posts are linked below as they publish. Start wherever is most relevant to what your organization is working on or read straight through if you want the play-by-play.

Day 1: Ten interesting companies for enterprise video in West Hall: Media Asset Management, Digital Asset Management, Workflow Orchestration, Integration & Automation, Live Production Orchestration, File Transfer Acceleration
Day 2: Another eight in North Hall: Media Asset Management, Live Production Infrastructure, Show/Story planning and execution, Integration / Middleware, AR and Zoom Rooms, Network Acceleration
Day 3: Ten more companies across the full stack: Cloud and On-premise Storage, Cloud File Streaming, Cloud Production Infrastructure as a Service, AI Video Intelligence, MAM / AI Workflow Platform, Video Distribution / Rights Management, Broadcast AV Production Infrastructure
Day 4: The Final Four and a little wrap-up: Browser-based video editing, Live contribution + Publishing, Video Transcoding & Format Processing, Cloud-Native MAM, Storytelling, Broadcast AV Production Infrastructure.
Day 5 Report: The “Enterprise Video Content Factory NAB Show 2026 Field Report”: Reviewing all 27 vendors against our mission objectives and injecting some opinions along the way.

If any of it connects to something your organization is working through, reach out. That is what we are here for.