Every April, the media and broadcast world converges on Las Vegas for what is one of the industry's most important weeks of the year. NAB Show 2026 is where the conversations happening quietly in edit suites, newsrooms and tech labs all year suddenly become headline acts. For us at Trint, it's one of the best opportunities to see where our industry is going next.
This year, we're particularly excited. The agenda feels like a mirror of the conversations we have every day: how AI is reshaping the way we create and consume media, what the future of broadcast infrastructure looks like and how storytellers at every level are finding new ways to reach audiences. Here's what we'll be keeping a close eye on.
The National Association of Broadcasters has been convening the industry since 1923, but NAB Show has never felt more relevant than it does right now. With media consumption habits fragmenting across streaming platforms, social channels, connected TV and next-generation broadcast standards, the industry is navigating more change simultaneously than at any point in its history.
NAB Show is where that complexity gets worked through in public – in keynotes, workshops, technical papers and conversations on the show floor. It's where standards get debated, partnerships get made and the shape of the next five years starts to become visible. For a company like Trint, being close to these conversations isn't just interesting; it's essential.
The Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference is one of the most technically rigorous events at NAB, bringing together the engineers and technologists who are literally building the infrastructure that media runs on. This year, it runs April 18 to 21 and features 52 peer-reviewed technical papers alongside panels and keynote sessions.
Poppy Crum, PhD - neuroscientist, technologist, Stanford Adjunct Professor and former Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories - will deliver a keynote titled "From Data to Mind: How Technology is Reshaping the Minds of Storytellers and Media Consumers." Her presentation will explore how advances in AI and human-centered engineering are reshaping how people interact with broadcast content, media and technology.
For us, this is directly in our wheelhouse. The question of how AI can serve human communication rather than replace it. It’s one central to Trint and Crum's perspective, grounded in both the science of how brains process information and deep experience with audio and sensory technology, promises to be one of the most thought-provoking hours of the entire show.
The conference opening takes place Saturday, April 18 from 09:30 – 10:45 in the North Hall, hosted by NAB Chief Innovation Officer John Clark.
If there's a single thread running through almost every session at NAB 2026, it's AI. Of course this won’t be a shock. But the conversation has matured significantly. This isn't about whether AI belongs in media workflows anymore. The question now is how to implement it well, at scale and with ROI you can actually measure.
The Main Stage session on Sunday, April 19 "Powering Intelligent Media: From AI Experimentation to Real‑World Impact" (10:30 – 11:30, sponsored by Microsoft) is a perfect example of this shift. Alongside that, the "AI as Creator: Who Owns the Future of Hollywood?" panel at the Media and Entertainment Theater (10:30 – 11:15) tackles the copyright and ownership questions that are keeping legal teams busy across the industry.
At Trint, we're particularly interested in how the industry is implementing AI for the wide media production workflow – covering live transcription, multi-lingual content, first drafts and editing, as well as captioning and accessibility. For those who share our interests here, the SMPTE VIBE session "The Global Translation Layer for OTT Accessibility and Scale" (Saturday, April 18, 16:05 – 17:00) is one to add to the schedule.
Broadcasters are in the middle of a multi-year migration: from physical to IP-based workflows, from traditional transmission to cloud-native architectures and from legacy standards to the next generation of broadcast technology.
The press announcement about Global NextGen TV taking centre stage at NAB 2026 - featuring Brazil's Minister of Communications and an FCC Commissioner - signals that the international rollout of next-generation broadcast standards (ATSC 3.0 and its equivalents) is accelerating. The BEIT Conference session "Where ATSC 3.0 Goes Next: Brazil's TV 3.0, Hybrid Reliability and O-RAN Broadcast Futures" (Saturday, April 18, 11:00 – 12:00) is a timely look at how this plays out globally.
For anyone building or operating media infrastructure, the "Resilient Broadcast Distribution: Hybrid Connectivity, Open Infrastructure and the Path to 100% Cloud" session (BEIT Conference, Sunday, April 19, 11:00 - 12:00) is essential viewing. And the SMPTE ST 2110 Bootcamp running across the show offers deep-dive technical training for engineers making the IP transition.
For Trint, cloud-native workflows aren't the future; they're the present. Sessions like these help us understand how the broader infrastructure our platform sits within is evolving and where the opportunities to go deeper lie.
Two of the industry's biggest business challenges - the reinvention of local news and the escalating economics of sports rights - get dedicated Main Stage time at NAB 2026 and both are closely connected to Trint's own work.
"Broadcast's Next Big Bets: Reinventing the News Business in an Age of Accountability" (Main Stage, Sunday, April 19, 14:00 - 15:00) takes on the pressing question of how journalism organizations find sustainable models in a world where audience trust and advertising revenue are both under pressure. AI-assisted transcription, editing and content creation - key components of Trint’s platform - are increasingly central to how newsrooms work faster and more accurately under that pressure. So we’ll be excited to watch this session!
The Sports Summit runs throughout Sunday, April 19, with sessions including "The State of Sports Media: Rights, Reach & Revenue" (10:30 – 11:15) and "NBC Sports Playbook: Rights, Partnerships, and What's Next" on the Main Stage (12:30 - 13:15). Live sports is one of the last truly appointment-viewing formats and the race to make sports content more accessible, multilingual and discoverable is one where tools like Trint have a clear role to play.
So we’re being a little biased with this one, for sure. But we’re just so excited about it. Think of one of THE most iconic names in high-end broadcast technology. Then connect Trint. That’s how we get you from First Word to First Draft effortlessly. And we’re excited to unveil a new media workflow for the first time at NAB Show 2026. We can’t say more until the show opens but we’re confident you’ll want to see this.
If you’re attending this year and want to be one of the first to see it, come over to booth N1315. We’ll be running live demo’s for the crowds daily at 11:00, 12:00, 14:00 and 15:00. You can reserve your spot here.
Otherwise, safe travels! See you in Las Vegas!
