It’s been a minute since NAB Show 2026 wrapped, but I feel compelled to include my thoughts here anyway. (Sometimes it takes me a minute to get myself together, OK!?) I mentioned some of these thoughts on LinkedIn, but I needed more space to fully write about what I saw and what I thought of the show this year.

First, because I know y’all are nosy, I know you want to know if it was busy. In my completely unscientific opinion, this year’s show felt medium in terms of traffic. I think it was busier last year, but that also could’ve been because of how the show floor was arranged. Technically, registration was up by 3,000 attendees this year, so maybe it was just me.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about what I saw. I’ll keep this part relatively short because David Danto covers it extensively in his NAB Show wrap-up, but basically, the show floor felt like a giant collision of professional broadcast tech, gear for Twitch streamers, conferencing products and AV solutions. Some companies even brought both their professional and consumer products. It really got me thinking about who the average attendee is now. Who is the end user? Who is the technical end user? The answer, honestly, is everybody.

I saw AV integrators, tech managers from universities, executives from TV stations and streaming platforms, but also YouTubers and Twitch streamers. This show is for everybody.

That led me to a conversation I had with Dave MacKinnon at Clear-Com. Who is the end user here? For many of Clear-Com’s products at NAB, the end user is the multimedia journalist. These people are not technologists first — they’re content creators in the field trying to get footage ready for that day’s broadcast. Journalists are dealing with budget cuts, shrinking staffs and impossible time constraints. Sometimes MMJs don’t have someone in the field fixing footage or uploading files for them. So, a product designed by AV people for AV people just isn’t going to fly in that environment. The average journalist isn’t the same kind of end user as a K-12 teacher, but they also aren’t AV managers.

I really enjoyed our conversation (linked below), and it solidified my view that the news industry is changing significantly. Journalists are already expected to be a million things at once, and many stations are now effectively adding “technologist” to that list. I’m interested to see how this market continues to evolve and how technology companies respond to it.

My final thought: NAB is absolutely worth attending if you’ve never been before. It’s fascinating to see how many different industries broadcasting now touches, including AV. I think that’s what explains the wildly different attendee base. Broadcast means a lot of different things to a lot of different people now.

At its core, though, the definition is still pretty simple: sending a message or signal from one source to be received and viewed by many. Honestly, that’s not so different from how AV was explained to me when I first joined the industry. And the fact that so many traditionally AV-focused manufacturers were exhibiting at the show? That feels like a pretty clear sign there’s more crossover coming.

Want to hear more of my thoughts on the show? Check out this conversation with me and Tim Albright from AVNation.