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Artist led, AI driven, fan-first media show the way forward at a NAB show dominated by tariff-suffering hardware vendors and advertiser weakened broadcast
Trump didn’t just cast a shadow over NAB, he sucked the air from the room. Only 55,000 turned up in Vegas, a massive drop on the 92,000 who participated in NABShow 2019. Tariffs were the talk of the town as economic uncertainty gripped an industry already challenged to make ends meet.
“What the hell are we doing here?” asked NAB’s opening keynote speaker Stephen A Smith who was presumably booked because he’s ESPN’s leading broadcaster. Since he’s also considering a presidential run in 2027 there were overt political messages too.
“There’s a reason folks all across the globe clamour to come to the U.S,” he said, “but that is not a licence for us to be arrogant and dismissive of legitimate concerns about our republic. It is a reason to stand up and uphold our principals. Not enough politicians are doing this.”
He blamed the U.S media for partisan reporting. “We made the pivotal mistake of taking sides. We’ve got cable networks on the right and the left but what about the truth? Your rhetoric is feeding into the nonsense that disintegrates all 350 million American citizens.”
“I have a sports background but to me this is common sense,” Smith added. “Because of ideology, we’ve got too many selfish people whose sole interest is in going up against each other not whether its right or wrong for the American people. That’s what ticks me off about politicians on Capitol Hill.”
An intersection of non-interacting people
NAB has always been a more parochial show than IBC since it is dominated by the interests of its owners at North American TV stations and cable networks. Like the broadcast business everywhere though it is struggling for identity and relevance in the age of the creator economy.
“It's not an industry so much as collection of people who use media to do lots of things now,” said Barbara Ford Grant, an AI technologies strategy consultant to Marvel Studios and principal of her production company, BFG Productions. “The best way I can describe NAB is as an intersection of non-interacting people. There are sports here, American broadcasters, creators, robotics and virtual production but all seem to operate separately.”
A traditionally trained VFX artist and the first woman chair of the Academy’s 92-year-old Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, Ford has held leadership roles at HBO, DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain and Walt Disney Studios.
“Creatives are not part of the conversation, and that troubles me a lot,” she told a NAB Summit convened by the trade analyst Devoncroft. “When I visited shows like NAB and IBC in the past looking for new technology it was always grounded in the creative context of how we wanted to get our stories out to people.
“The most interesting creativity I saw at NAB this year was around live sports because they have this much more direct relationship with their fans than film and TV does anymore.”
There may not have been a lot of millennials in the LVCC but their fingerprints were everywhere.
“Ten years ago, it was Sony, Panasonic, ARRI, Grass Valley and Avid who were the big companies and broadcasters had to spend millions of dollars on their gear. Today the big companies are Adobe, Blackmagic and DJI. It’s clearly a creator-prosumer level industry now.”
Darren Long, a content supply chain director at ITV, spoke at a breakfast meeting sponsored by Dalet. He said the talk there was “a much-needed gut check for our industry”.
Forget buzzwords for a second, we’re now firmly in a space where innovation, ROI, and operational efficiency aren’t nice to haves, they’re survival tools, Long said.
“Efficiency is the new currency. Forget hours of content; think in terms of how fast and how smart we deliver it. Broadcasters can’t scale beyond 24/7, but digital can. That’s where revenue and relevance now live.
Long added, “Let’s stop just building products for the sake of it. Let’s start building clear capabilities within organisations — joined-up, efficient, and profitable — so we can get the right content to the right audiences in the most effective way.”
Vendors recoil from tariff hit
The shock imposition of tariffs had immediate effect. Australian manufacturer Blackmagic Design was in town promoting its latest 12K camera, PYXIS, but after announcing it would cost $5000 on Friday April 4th, the company raised the price by $1500 over the weekend for the U.S market. Other BMD product was also up 32% for U.S buyer, including the PYXIS 6K.
Most camera makers including those from Sony, Canon and ARRI as well as lenses like Leica are assembled, at least in part, in Asia or Mexico with prices rises across the board likely.
Grass Valley has it manufacturing base just outside of Montreal and said prior to NAB that if tariffs come into force it would have to increase prices to mitigate the impact.
At its NAB press event, GV executive chair Louis Hernandez Jr warned that all vendors needed to slash costs. “Not a little bit, not trimming. I’m talking about 30%, 40%, 50% to get this industry profitable,” he said. “That’s the challenge and that’s exactly what we’ve set out to solve.”
Tariffs only exacerbate existing challenges in the industry which, for Hernandez Jr who also runs the VC group Black Dragon Capital, means the margins for broadcast production have bottomed out.
“As investors, we've been tracking the financials of this industry for a long time,” he said. “A slow steady but still below net profitability overall. There’s a lot more ways to consume, a lot more media and therefore for every asset we create, every story, the consumption of revenue drops significantly because of the sheer number and that created our problem.”
The American TV and film sector is likely to be affected most tariffs both directly and indirectly. That includes a potential ban on Hollywood cinema releases in China.
Ampere analyst Richard Broughton said, “Hardware products will likely face price hikes due to heavy reliance on imports from China. Streaming devices and TVs – often manufactured in or with Chinese partners – will likely become more expensive, dampening consumer demand and extending replacement cycles. Ad-funded media could also take a hit, as key advertisers consider pulling back spend as confidence is hit.”
Puget Systems, a systems integrator of workstations based just south of the Canadian border near Seattle, has temporarily paused orders for components that would be exported from affected countries.
“We are working with our supply partners to understand their strategy to be able to better predict what our cost changes will be,” said president Jon Bach. CPU coolers and fans for example are hit with a 20% hike.
“Thankfully these are not very expensive items in the grand scheme of things, so it won’t have a large impact on system prices, but every dollar hurts!”
The bigger picture however shows that far from pushing vendors to on-shore production to the U.S, it's likely to accelerate the transition towards software, cloud and services running on more commodity hardware.
Tom Morrod, Research Director and co-founder, Caretta Research noted, “There are going to be some vendors that get hit hard by the shifting sands of global trade just as many were hit hard by chipset availability and supply chain disruption coming out of the pandemic. But the vast majority of value is now tied up in managed and professional services, cloud compute and software, so if any industry is ready to ride this disruption out, it should be media.”
Mind the gap
As Morrod noted, if anything, tariffs are likely to push production towards cheaper products - faster. These include low-end portable cameras like the Ronin 4D or RED Komodo, software switching and cloud production tools – the sort of tools already used by creators.
“Studios working on $100 million or above productions have been in a really sweet spot, but now they're not doing well,” Ford said. “They're taxed with having to make something that is a substantially better experience than what everybody else is doing because you want to get audience into theatres but they also have to do it a lot cheaper.
On the other hand, we’re seeing YouTube influencers like MrBeast having to figure out how to make 22 minute episodes. They have to have a supply chain, and they have to figure out how to evolve into a studio. The gap between what used to be completely different industries is shrinking. You can feel that on the show floor.”
Nowhere is this shrinking gap emphasised more than with AI which is putting the means of production in the hands of pretty much anyone.
“This is the age of the generalist,” said Eric Shamlin, CEO of AI-driven production studio Secret Level and co-chair of the TV Academy’s AI Task Force, during the SMPTE-produced summit. “The other thing we are seeing is it’s putting a spotlight back on the creative vision. … People can now create space operas in their bedroom. I think we are about to see a massive unlocking of human creativity…To be a creative, previously, was a very limited group. This blows that apart.”
The integration of AI driven performance versioning tool DeepEditor into the industry’s “most trusted editing platform” Avid signifies a pivotal shift. As Nick Lynes, co-founder & co-CEO of AI company Flawless told IBC, “2025 is the year when that the dam breaks, provided those AI tools are trusted, AI is transformational in an entirely positive way.”
Companies like Grass Valley though risk being behind the curve. CEO Jon Wilson said the company is getting feedback from its customers and will only adopt AI when appropriate.
“I'm not ready to say AI is going to be central to our strategy going forward, but it will be a core part of our strategy, because increasingly it's top of mind for our customers and accelerating in the discussions that we're having with them,” Wilson told TVTech.
Barbara Ford Grant said, “I listened to a lot of executives talk about how they're looking at AI for automated tagging, or they're thinking about doing this or they've started to do that. But entire cottage industries are going to exist in the time it takes them to move their MAM!”
New AI driven studios like Secret Level, Asteria and the Russo Brothers’ AGBO Studio could upend the Hollywood order.
I think jobs are at risk, but I have a lot positivity t because I see the creative potential in businesses that are creator-led. The further your media business is away from the creative process and from the development of new IP and artistry the further away you are from what's happening now.”
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