NAB Show 2025 Preview Analysis: 5 Key Trends in 5 Words

In this article, I have rounded up some of my recent LinkedIn posts about the key trends I have observed in broadcast and media ahead of NAB Show 2025.

This NAB Show 2025 Preview analysis exercise aims to provide attendees and exhibitors with an analysis of the main trends shaping the media technology industry before one of the most important sector events of the year.

I have used 5 words to describe the 5 key trends I am seeing in the industry this year. But before I do that, let me provide some brief context on the business environment in broadcast and media in 2025.

The Business Environment in Broadcast and Media

2025 is a strange year for the broadcast and media industry. 2023 and 2024 have not been easy years amid financial hardship and cost reductions, which have led media businesses to focus on using technology to drive new efficiencies and revenues.

To provide some evidence on this, I analysed EBIT data for 20 large and public broadcast and media businesses in the US, finding that cost reduction initiatives implemented between 2023 and 2024 generally led to a significant improvement in margins.

On average, margins almost doubled, changing from 6% in September 2023 to 11% in September 2024 for this group of companies, as illustrated by the figure below.

Arguably, cost-reduction initiatives were the main driver behind this. We witnessed several companies cutting personnel, reducing technology budgets, rationalizing content portfolios, and, more generally, adopting a stricter approach to investment.

Even though the mood at industry trade shows has been upbeat, industry confidence has been in decline due to this cost-cutting and cautiousness in technology investment. This has led some suppliers to explore other industries and shows, as I explained in my post-ISE 2025 analysis.

Some expect 2025 to be a continuation of trends that already emerged in the past two years, and I generally tend to agree with this view. However, I think that some established trends from the 2023-2024 biennium will mature, with some aspects we have not paid enough attention to becoming more important than before.

Let’s have a look at 5 key trends I expect to be prominent at NAB Show 2025.

5 Key Trends to Watch

#1 AI

AI (mostly Gen AI here) was arguably the top technology trend in the industry and the world in 2024, driving most of the discourse, interest and investment.

I think that 2025 will be no different: AI will remain the top trend due to its immense potential to change the sector.

However, conversations about AI at NAB may shift with the buzz surrounding the technology being gradually (and naturally) overshadowed by realism. I expect an increasing focus on the real benefits of AI, as well as its necessary guardrails. Things like the value of this technology, costs, ROI, specific use cases, pricing models, security, compliance, sustainability, and the like.

Therefore, challenge vendors in these areas if you are a buyer and prepare to be challenged if you are a supplier. This should be a healthy development for a technology that has often been surrounded by too much buzz, despite its real potential.

Not all the buzz around the technology will evaporate, as I expect some to still surround the use of AI in content creation. And I must admit that I am still on the fence on this topic. While there is compelling evidence that AI on its own still has some obvious limitations in creating authentic content, the rise of AI-driven content creation cannot be ignored, particularly as the industry grapples with financial constraints.

I lean towards the view that "AI needs humans" for context and creativity, but contradictions remain, and the boundaries of what AI can do are still being pushed. Even though 2025 might still be too early for a revolution in this area, AI will continue to make content creation more accessible, which will influence a plethora of creative industries, including ours.

There is still debate around regulating the use of AI in content creation, and I think that this will be a hot topic this year, particularly as some of the Oscar-nominated films made (only surgical) use of AI technology.

Big developments in AI technology will still be led by big tech (and governments!). The keynote of Nvidia’s CEO at CES 2025 focused on AI agents, which is what the AI sector is pushing for now, though I doubt this will be the year we relinquish our agency to them (and I doubt we will ever fully do that). There are too many safety questions surrounding the concept of AI agency that still make this unfeasible in the short-term, though the unprecedented speed of change of this technology may prove me wrong (see what Deepseek did in a day!).

Interestingly, the sheer complexity and speed of change in the AI technology landscape is leading organizations to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to AI management, strategy and governance something that is also related to the next trend I will look at. If you are interested in this topic, I talked to Globo about their approach to AI strategy and governance in an episode of Pulsecast.

Finally, back to realism. The potential of AI has driven astronomical valuations for AI businesses and massive CAPEX investments. But the jury is still out on whether these investments will yield returns. Will this disconnect between investment and revenue cause an AI bubble to pop in 2025?

#2 Hybrid

The industry has already diversified its stakes in several business areas in 2024, and I think that this is likely to continue in 2025 as well. Diversification was the industry's natural response to risk increasing due to the emergence of a variety of threats ranging from conflict to inflation, which stifled consumers’ propensity to pay for entertainment and led to rising financial pressure on the fundamentals of the sector.

From a business model perspective, media companies have diversified their position through the launch of ad-supported business models and the increasing reliance on live content, particularly sports. Netflix notably shifted its model towards these two areas in response to financial pressure.

Hybrid business models are now the norm in the media and entertainment sector, and finding synergies between their sub-elements has become increasingly important (think about the synergies between live sports and advertising Netflix has been taking advantage of recently). This is an area technology can perhaps help more with, so I expect to see more features enabling better synergies between disparate business models at NAB Show as well.

Content portfolios are becoming more hybrid as well. Not only are streamers increasingly relying on live sports but also the lines between short-form and long-form content are blurring. For example, Netflix is exploring new programming formats such as short-form digital content and podcasts while YouTube is revamping its TV app to enable creators to:

“Organize shows around episodes and seasons, mirroring what viewers have come to expect on subscription video platforms.”

M&A have helped diversification as well, though recent evidence has shown that some large media companies are dividing their empires to find clearer strategic direction. Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, media businesses such as Vivendi, Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast all made similar moves consistent with this trend. This is an interesting trend that might have been caused by several factors. I believe that one of them is a return to focusing on the core and achieving more nimbleness in a rapidly changing sector.

From a technology perspective, we have seen companies adopt a more hybrid approach to cloud investment in recent years due to their stricter cost controls. Nobody is talking about an industry that is set to be 100% in the cloud anymore with most businesses recognizing a healthy coexistence of cloud and on-premises. If you think about it, the same applies to the coexistence of other opposites like in-house and outsourced technology (outsourcing has also been growing in the last few years, consistent with media companies' push to focus on the core).

AI is also driving people to acquire hybrid skillsets. In various industries, including broadcast and media, skillsets are becoming more hybrid to be less vulnerable to AI-driven automation.

Finally, I am also increasingly seeing the adoption of hybrid (i.e., more democratic and multi-disciplinary) decision-making models in AI strategy to deal with the complexities of the technology. Think about AI councils to advise on the impact of AI on organizations. This is a relevant trend for technology suppliers as it disperses decision-making, forcing them to talk in more than one tone of voice.

#3 Live

After the difficulties caused by the pandemic-driven shutdowns, live and particularly live sports, have experienced a resurgence. Interestingly, I saw a similar resurgence of live in the Pro-AV sector when I attended ISE 2025 (this is my ISE 2025 post-show analysis for those of you interested in this market). We saw several examples of this live resurgence between 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 (I will focus mainly on live sports here).

Notably, we saw Netflix reneging on its long-standing promise to never enter the live sports market. In a 2024 LinkedIn post, I talked about how Netflix’s high-profile live streaming of the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match represented a case study showing the potential of business models dominating technology issues in media. This event attracted 60m households globally, leading to 1.4m related signups according to Antenna and positively influencing Netflix’s ad-supported streaming offering as well. Netflix has continued to double down on sports since then.

In February 2025, the Super Bowl resiliently attracted a record viewership of 127.7m across all platforms (3% increase year-on-year). Streaming viewership continued to increase with nearly one-third of viewers using a streaming platform to watch the event according to this nScreenMedia analysis. The Super Bowl is a particularly good case study to illustrate the resurgence of live sports post-pandemic, as its audience consistently declined in the period 2018-2022.

My main takeaway from these flagship events is that live is alive and well, and that live streaming is becoming much more important. I wonder whether event size will be a key factor determining the future of live sports (it is already a key factor in technology investment). Will only very big live events remain the stronghold of traditional media platforms while smaller events fall in the hands of digital platforms and creators? There's certainly a tension in sports business models that should be in the spotlight soon.

From a technology perspective, I am seeing a few interesting trends that go hand in hand with the resurgence of live.

One trend is related to the synergies between live content and monetization (particularly in the advertising sphere) I mentioned earlier. How can I squeeze as much money as I can from my live content? An example of this is Netflix’s recent patent for splicing targeted content such as advertisements into live streams. This is an area of focus particularly for broadcasters in the live sports market.

This is related to the viewer experience, which is now a complex equation including not only picture quality but also other important factors such as latency, exposure to advertising and interactivity. All of these are also synergetic and should be considered by both technology vendors and buyers at NAB Show.

I am particularly interested in how the relationship between live and interactivity develops in 2025 and beyond. Although some broadcast and media organizations retreated from their investment in interactive entertainment experiences between 2023 and 2024 due to rising financial pressures, audiences demand them, and interactivity might represent a lever for differentiation in a crowded sports market.

#4 Creator

There is plenty of data points showing a growing divergence between what I’ll call “Traditional Broadcast and Media” and the thriving Creator Economy. Analysts like Doug Shapiro have shared plenty of compelling evidence in support of this trend. To simplify it to the extreme: while the viewership numbers attracted by the Creator Economy are skyrocketing, the Traditional Broadcast and Media sector is struggling to remain relevant to viewers, particularly younger eyeballs. To give you a figure, Google announced in December 2024 that YouTube’s total daily viewing via a TV set had reached 1bn hours. The blog post shared by the YouTube CEO at the start of the year puts this quite bluntly:

“YouTube is the new television.”

The Creator Economy is a market that NAB Show has been increasingly targeting in the last few years. They have been focusing on this more significantly in their content, marketing and messaging, for example. However, even if I am not sure what is the percentage of buyers associated with the Creator Economy that regularly attend NAB, I suspect it is not the majority.

The interesting bit for me is what this all means for media companies and technology suppliers. In both cases, it is a strategic dilemma.

For media companies, this shift is leading to more collaborations with emerging creators as well as an increasing reliance on creator-led platforms for content distribution. Fox bought conservative podcast business Red Seat Ventures in February 2025 and this is another sign of shifting power balances between creators and broadcast platforms, as well argued by this NY Times article:

“The acquisition moves the Fox Corporation into the heart of the online “creator economy,” where media personalities who once relied on old-school corporate distributors — like, say, the cable networks owned by Fox — have struck out on their own to build podcasts and streaming shows that rack up millions of subscribers on platforms like YouTube and SiriusXM.”

And even streamers such as Netflix and Amazon have been looking with increasing interest at the Creator Economy. Netflix is looking at new formats such as podcasts and short-form videos while Amazon invested in a very expensive TV show led by a YouTuber. These new partnerships between established media and content creators are only poised to grow.

This is a relevant trend that will have a profound impact on business models, content, and technology in M&E as well as the technology discussions that will be held at NAB Show.

For technology companies, there is a clear opportunity to increase the number of markets they sell to as technology becomes more accessible (I focused on some of the reasons why broadcast technology is becoming more accessible in my pre-ISE convergence focus). However, more markets are also a challenge as they increase potential competition while diluting resources. Moreover, the new markets present B2C-like buying patterns, including the requirement to sell more units at lower prices, which is no easy task to achieve.

#5 Headwinds

The rising influence of macroeconomic and geopolitical developments (e.g., trade wars, conflicts, etc.) on the technology business landscape should not be underestimated by companies in the media and entertainment sector.

This arguably rose to prominence when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but has significantly increased in its importance and relevance since then.

Most recently, the outcome of the US elections has already changed the power balances in the technology landscape. The new US presidency is having an impact on a wide range of issues.

Most notably, tariffs (and the threat of future tariffs) are influencing technology supply chain strategies and components cost inflation for several companies while significantly increasing business uncertainty.

Moreover, some companies are retreating from their ESG and remote/hybrid work pledges due to their shifting political mood regarding these topics (though some are also maintaining them).

These are just some of the obvious implications, though there are many more I could mention (e.g., repeal of AI legislation).

While all of this might not be evident on the show floor, it will be an important element of conversations between media technology suppliers and buyers.

Don’t look at these trends in isolation

Despite my simplified distinction of 5 key industry shifts, you could perhaps already spot some connections between the trends I have discussed so far.

Let me provide some examples. Both hybrid skillsets and decision-making are becoming key to managing AI innovation within organizations. Accessible AI-driven creator tools influence the quantity and quality of content churned out by the Creator Economy. Individual creators are increasingly attracting live audiences, and their live streams sometimes focus on deepening the discussion on live sports and news played out by traditional broadcast platforms. It is perhaps clearer how headwinds will influence many of these trends (e.g., AI regulation).

My point is that these trends should not be looked at in isolation but rather with a good dose of systems thinking (back to hybrid skillsets!).

Checklist for NAB Show vendors and visitors

This is a checklist of areas to focus on for NAB Show vendors and visitors based on my analysis:

• Follow the money by focusing on efficiency and revenue generation.

• Focus on AI's real benefits, ROI and guardrails.

• Be multi-disciplinary, particularly when it comes to AI.

• Be flexible and open-minded in technology investment and provision.

• Highlight and focus on the synergies between content and monetization.

• Consider the multi-dimensionality of content quality, including interactivity and engagement.

• Understand the impact of the Creator Economy on your customers and your business model.

• Prepare for threats from the external economic and political environment.

• Use systems thinking rather than looking at trends in isolation.

Conclusion

As we look ahead to NAB Show 2025, these five key trends will shape the conversations and decisions made throughout the event.

Whether it’s navigating the complexities of AI, adapting to hybrid business models, embracing the power of live content, understanding the dynamics of the Creator Economy, or managing the external pressures of geopolitical and economic headwinds, there is much to keep an eye on this year.

For attendees and exhibitors alike, staying ahead of these trends will be essential for success in 2025 and beyond.

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