The 2025 NAB Show was one of transformation—at least that’s what attendees told me as I raced around the Las Vegas Convention Center last week.
My show is quite different to most attendees as I spend most of my time dashing from meeting to meeting, chatting to technology vendors and hearing about their latest developments and what they view as the industry’s key trends.
This year, my show started with the Grass Valley Forum on Saturday, where Jon Wilson was officially revealed as the company’s new CEO. You can watch my interview with Jon here.
During the event, Rebecca Jackson from Caretta Research presented the results of a survey the company recently conducted. She revealed three main themes from the research:
- The market is healthy overall, but consumption trends have impacted buyers and vendors
- Cloud and AI deployments have moved from “one size fits all” to case by case implementations
- Scale and agility are driving spend, but budgets are still under pressure
She also said that AI hype “may have peaked”, something I would agree with. In all my meetings during the show, I rarely spoke about artificial intelligence. My feeling is that vendors are investing in AI for specific use cases. This takes me back to the research TVBEurope conducted with Caretta last summer, where we found broadcasters want AI to be included in existing solutions, not brand new ones.
Jackson made the point that broadcasters and media companies need to invest in technology that “will help meet their goals moving forward” rather than investing in what’s trending at the moment.
Tariff talk
The big elephant in the halls was the ongoing confusion around tariffs—and that’s what it was, confusion.
Despite one vendor telling me the only people discussing the subject were journalists, the majority of people said they didn’t know what impact the tariffs would have on the industry because they just didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow!
It’s almost an unknowable knowable. We know that the tariffs will have some kind of impact, but we don’t know what. I expect this could be something we’ll be discussing in greater detail come September.
What caught my eye
I’m not the greatest camerawoman, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye while in Vegas.
Vizrt was showing virtual production in small spaces at its booth.
And, my favourite marketing idea was Calrec’s Lego sets of its Argo M and Artemis.
One word
Finally, I asked everyone I met at NAB to sum up the state of the broadcast industry in one word, with all responses included in the word cloud below. The majority went for transitioning, showing that the broadcast industry is in a state of change. What that means for the industry going forward remains to be seen…
And now the countdown begins to the 2026 NAB Show, which will run from 18th-22nd April.
