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NAB 2026: The Year the “Great Media Reset” Became Reality

The dust has officially settled on the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas, and the atmosphere across the newly renovated halls of the LVCC was unmistakable. This wasn’t just another trade show; it was a pivot point. If 2025 was about the industry asking, “What can AI do?”, then 1,100 exhibitors just spent five days answering, “Here is how it earns its keep.”

The overarching theme of the show was the “Great Media Reset.” After years of “growth at any cost,” the industry has shifted its gaze toward sustainability, operational efficiency, and the practical execution of technologies that have finally moved from pilot projects to production mainstays.

Here is what defined the landscape of NAB 2026.

From AI Pilots to Full-Scale Execution

The most visible shift was the doubling of exhibitors in the AI Pavilions compared to last year. We are no longer looking at “experimental” generative tools in isolation. Instead, AI is now natively embedded into the hardware and software we use every day, from AI noise cancellation in Saramonic’s new wireless audio systems to AI-powered subject tracking in the latest 4K ENG cameras from Sony and Canon.

In the world of asset management and collaboration, the conversation has moved toward automating the “boring” parts of creativity. We saw this trend play out across the floor as teams looked for ways to eliminate manual tagging. It’s why we were so energized to show how MediaSilo AI and FLOW AI are fitting into this new era, focusing on making content searchable and actionable without adding to the editor’s plate.

The “Be Your Own Cloud” Movement

While cloud production is the standard, a fascinating counter-trend emerged this year: “Be Your Own Cloud.” Attendees were highly focused on tools that allow for secure, direct streaming and file access from local drives.

This hybrid mindset acknowledges that while the cloud is essential for distribution and scale, there is immense value in maintaining control over local high-performance storage. This is driving a new demand for infrastructure that bridges the gap between on-prem speed and cloud-based flexibility.

The Professionalization of the Creator Economy

The Creator Lab in Central Hall was no longer a side-show, but a destination. The expansion of this area reflects a massive shift: creators are now building scalable, revenue-generating media businesses. Today’s creators are moving away from broad appeal in favor of hyper-focused niche authority, building sustainable businesses around specific, loyal communities. This evolution is driving a demand for “agentic” production models, where AI serves as a unified stack to handle the heavy lifting of organization and formatting. 

This professional pivot is exactly where the industry is seeing the value of intelligence-driven workflows like MediaSilo AI and FLOW AI. These tools are becoming essential as creator businesses scale, helping them manage the transition from simple content production to complex multi-platform distribution without losing agility. The barrier between high-end professional post-production and the creator economy has effectively vanished, with both sides prioritizing AI-native ecosystems to automate metadata and streamline the path from capture to monetization.

The EditShare team at NAB 2026

The Bottom Line

NAB 2026 wasn’t about the “next big thing,” it was about the “right big thing.” The industry has stopped chasing every shiny object and started investing in tools that provide a clear path to profitability and creative freedom.

As we look toward the rest of 2026, the goal is clear: build workflows that are smarter, faster, and more sustainable. We’re proud to be in the game, helping navigate this reset.

Did you miss us at the show? Reach out to see how we’re helping teams bridge the gap between production and post with intelligence and speed.

We have a big week ahead! As the team prepares to head to Las Vegas for NAB, the excitement is building. While the industry is buzzing with talk about new releases and the latest in AI, it’s the perfect time to remind our community that EditShare is built to support your entire media lifecycle from ingest to archive.

Here is a look at what we’re highlighting this year at Booth N1251.

1. Supporting Your Entire Workflow

EditShare isn’t just a storage provider; we provide the foundational infrastructure for your entire production lifecycle. We play across every stage of the process to ensure your team stays creative and productive:

2. AI Security: Sovereignty Over Your Content

Security is a top concern across every industry. We approach security with a multi-layered strategy to give you total peace of mind:

3. Storage for Every Scale: From 100 Terabytes to Petabytes

At EditShare, hardware is our foundation. We believe every team deserves high-performance storage, regardless of their size or industry. We offer tiers for every need:

See You in Vegas!

We can’t wait to show you these innovations in person. Stop by Booth N1251 in the North Hall to see our storage and AI tools in action.

Book a demo today to see how we’re making your workflow more searchable, secure, and scalable than ever before.

Moving past the “cool factor” to find the tipping point where search friction starts costing you real money.

AI indexing is rapidly becoming a standard feature in media workflows. It’s easy to assume that adopting it is simply part of staying current. But at EditShare, we believe that’s the wrong starting point.

The more useful question isn’t “What can AI do?” but rather: Does it change the economics or throughput of your specific operation?

The Tipping Point: From “Annoying” to “Expensive”

We’ve all heard the complaint: “We produce more than we can find.” For a small team, that’s a minor annoyance. For a high-volume production house, it’s a business failure.

The “tipping point” occurs when search friction manifests as a tangible loss. We’ve seen it happen in three specific ways:

  1. The Duplicate Shoot: A team flies a crew out to capture “generic city b-roll” because no one can find the high-quality drives from six months ago.
  2. The Missed Deadline: An editor spends six hours “scrubbing” through raw footage to find a specific interview soundbite, pushing the delivery past the broadcast window.
  3. The Lost Opportunity: A brand wants to do a “throwback” campaign, but the archive is such a “black hole” of unindexed data that the creative idea is killed because the labor cost to find the clips exceeds the project budget.

When AI Indexing Doesn’t Make Sense

If your team produces one-off projects that are delivered and rarely revisited, the long-term value of indexing every frame is limited. An archive that is rarely accessed does not suddenly become valuable just because it has more metadata. Searchability enables reuse, but it does not create reuse on its own.

When the Math Changes

Where AI indexing begins to make financial sense is in environments where volume and reuse are structurally important.

The Reality Check

AI is a lever, not a magic wand. It is brilliant at pattern recognition, like finding a logo, a specific face, or a spoken word. It still struggles to interpret emotional nuance or “vibe.”

Furthermore, the technology only works if the workflow changes. Media must be centralized, and metadata must be visible exactly where the editors work. Without adoption, indexing is just background noise.

Boston, MA –11 March 2026 – EditShare®, a leader in collaborative media workflow solutions, will demonstrate its latest advancements in AI-powered media operations and high-performance NVMe storage at the 2026 NAB Show (Booth N1251). The showcase will focus on how broadcasters, post facilities, and production teams can manage growing content volumes without increasing operational complexity.

EditShare’s approach centers on Analytical AI, technology that analyzes media to identify and structure information such as speech, faces, text, and scenes. Unlike generative AI systems that create new content, Analytical AI focuses on understanding existing media, automatically enriching files with metadata that makes video searchable and easier to find. Integrated across the EditShare platform and accelerated by high-bandwidth shared storage, these capabilities allow teams to quickly find the clips they need across their media libraries.

“At NAB 2026, we’re showing how analytical AI has moved from an interesting tool to a foundational part of the EditShare platform,” said Brad Turner, CEO of EditShare. “The real opportunity is the ability to analyze video at scale and make that intelligence usable across the entire workflow. Whether media lives on-premise with our FLOW asset manager or in the cloud with MediaSilo, teams can instantly search their libraries and find the moments they need.”

AI and Intelligent Workflows Across the Platform

MediaSilo: Intelligent Review and Approval for Modern Production Teams

Alongside the new AI capabilities being introduced within MediaSilo, EditShare will also unveil new MediaSilo bundles: Teams, Pro, and Enterprise – providing scalable options for organizations of any size. These bundles bring together core collaboration capabilities including forensic watermarking, single sign-on (SSO), and unlimited AI, giving production teams access to advanced functionality without the pricing barriers traditionally associated with high-end review platforms.

MediaSilo also enables teams to collaborate with unlimited external stakeholders, making it easy to involve clients, partners, and reviewers throughout the production process.

Visitors to the booth will see how MediaSilo integrates with the FLOW asset management platform, allowing teams to move directly from ingest and media management into secure review and approval workflows. 

Infrastructure Built for Intelligent Workflows

The continued evolution of the Ultimate EFS lineup will be on display, engineered to support demanding media workflows across leading creative applications including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Flame, and Baselight:

EditShare will again partner with Lasergraphics to showcase high-resolution film scanning captured directly into an Ultimate EFS NVMe storage node. Attendees can watch 4K and 8K DPX image sequences ingest in real time and move immediately into playback and grading in DaVinci Resolve, illustrating the huge sustained shared read and write bandwidth required for film restoration and archive workflows.

Commitment to Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance

As content security becomes increasingly critical for high-stakes productions, EditShare continues to invest in rigorous protection for its users’ intellectual property. MediaSilo has officially joined the TPN+ (Trusted Partner Network) community, signaling a commitment to the industry’s highest standards for content security. The company is also undergoing the assessment process for the TPN+ Shield certification, with completion expected in the coming months. This initiative ensures that MediaSilo users can collaborate with confidence, knowing their workflows adhere to the most stringent security best practices defined by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

From Capture to Collaboration

EditShare is also pleased to welcome farmerswife to the booth, showcasing how its resource scheduling and management tools complement the EditShare ecosystem.  “At NAB, we’re showcasing how farmerswife and Cirkus bring greater structure and visibility to production planning and project execution,” said Jodi Clifford, CEO, farmerswife. “By leveraging EditShare’s Open API, organizations can connect operational data with their media workflows, helping teams stay aligned from acquisition through delivery.”

Attendees are invited to visit Booth N1251 to see these workflows in action. To schedule a meeting with the EditShare team, visit: https://editshare.com/event/nab-2026/

©2026 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact
Katharine Guy
katharine.guy@editshare.com

The “office” is no longer a single building when it comes to media production. It’s a global network of edit suites, home offices, and field locations. But for years, the barrier to seamless collaboration has been the dreaded VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Traditional VPNs are often the “bottleneck” of creativity. They are notoriously difficult for IT departments to manage, confusing for freelance editors to set up, and, most importantly, frequently underperform when handling high-resolution media.

That’s why we created SwiftLink, powered by our partnership with ZeroTier. Here is how we solve the remote access puzzle for good.

The Problem: The “VPN Wall”

Remote production usually hits one of two walls:

  1. The Enterprise Wall: Corporate IT departments are often reluctant to grant external freelancers access to the main corporate VPN due to security risks or complexity.
  2. The Capability Wall: Smaller production houses may not have the technical “wherewithal” to build or maintain a high-performance VPN that can handle the rigors of real-time video editing.

When connectivity fails, editors resort to shipping hard drives or struggling with “SMB over WAN,” which simply doesn’t work for professional workflows.

SwiftLink integrates ZeroTier directly into the EditShare ecosystem to create a “Private Cloud” that is secure, affordable, and incredibly fast.

1. Instant Access for Freelancers

Instead of a complex manual setup, an admin simply generates a 16-digit network ID.

2. “Peer-to-Peer” Performance

Unlike traditional VPNs that route all traffic through a slow central server, ZeroTier acts as a “cloud broker.” Once the connection is made, it gets out of the way.

3. Connecting the Global Studio (Site-to-Site)

SwiftLink isn’t just for individuals; it’s for entire facilities. You can link up to nine distinct sites (e.g., LA, London, and a field unit) into a single ecosystem.

The Bottom Line

SwiftLink removes the “IT middleman” and the “physics bottleneck.” Whether you are a solo freelancer needing to mount a media space as if you were in the room, or a global studio syncing terabytes of data, SwiftLink makes the connection invisible so you can focus on the story.

In the high-pressure landscape of 2026, media teams are constantly tasked with delivering more content in less time. To stay ahead, your infrastructure needs to do more than just store files, it needs to act as a force multiplier.

In this installment of our Cut to the Chase series, EditShare’s Shanna is joined by FLOW product expert Lucy Seaborne to dive into three features that turn FLOW into the ultimate “Swiss Army Knife” for post-production efficiency.

1. EditShare One: Ending the “App Juggling” Era

For years, media professionals have been forced to bounce between different applications to search, log, and ingest media. This “context switching” is a silent productivity killer. EditShare One solves this by providing a unified, browser-based experience that serves as a single point of entry for the entire team.

Rather than managing a fragmented toolkit, users access tailored modules designed for their specific roles. Whether it’s a producer checking a simplified dashboard or a media manager scheduling complex ingest feeds, the interface remains consistent and accessible from any browser. By centralizing these tasks, teams can eliminate the friction of software silos and focus entirely on the creative output.

2. Speed Over Friction: The Seamless Proxy Workflow

Remote work is no longer a luxury; it’s the standard. However, the biggest hurdle for remote editors has traditionally been the “relinking drama” between low-res proxies and high-res masters. Lucy highlights how FLOW removes this bottleneck by automatically generating high-quality proxies the moment media hits the system.

This allows editors to begin cutting on a standard Wi-Fi connection immediately—even for 8K projects—without waiting for massive file transfers. The real magic happens during the finish: with a single toggle in the FLOW panel, the NLE switches back to the high-res media for final color and export. This creates a friction-free bridge between the rough cut and the final delivery, regardless of where the editor is located.

3. FLOW Automation: The Assistant Who Never Sleeps

Manual “grunt work”—like transcoding, moving files to the correct folders, and sending “media is ready” notifications—can consume up to 20% of a creative team’s day. FLOW Automation functions as a background assistant that handles these repetitive tasks without human intervention.

By building customizable, “set it and forget it” workflows, administrators can ensure that every file is QC’d, renamed, and delivered to the right department automatically. With hundreds of possible configurations, this engine doesn’t just save time; it virtually eliminates the risk of human error in file management, keeping the creative team focused on the story rather than the folder structure.

Reclaim Your Creative Time

The goal of FLOW isn’t just to manage assets—it’s to return hours to your production schedule. From a unified interface to an automation engine that handles the heavy lifting, these features are designed to help your team work smarter, not harder.

Watch the full episode below to see these features in action and learn how to get your creative time back.

Want the full conversation?

Learn how to store, search, automate and analyze your assets in EFS and FLOW.

EFS Video Tutorials

Media workflows are changing fast, not because of hype cycles, but because the volume, velocity, and expectations around video keep rising. Sports teams, brands, and enterprises are producing more content than ever, with distributed teams and tighter margins.

To understand what that means for 2026, I sat down with our CEO, Brad Turner, to talk through the trends he sees most clearly in customer conversations and how those realities are shaping EditShare’s roadmap.

Below, we break down the three trends that matter most and the practical implications behind them.

Trend 1: Sports teams and brands are becoming media companies

Sports organizations and large brands aren’t dabbling in content anymore, but running full-time production operations. What used to live with agencies is increasingly moving in-house, driven by the need for quicker turnaround, more control, and content tailored for dozens of distribution channels.

This shift has real staffing and workflow implications.

As Brad explains, editors are moving into non-traditional media roles and taking on different types of work than they did a decade ago. Agencies are still part of the ecosystem, but they’re no longer the default for day-to-day content. Instead, internal teams are being built to support always-on production, especially in sports and large corporate environments.

That shift creates a second-order problem: infrastructure that wasn’t designed to scale.

Most of these teams start small: a few editors, a handful of tools, and external drives stitched together with cloud services. That approach works early on, but over time, it becomes expensive, fragile, and hard to manage. Media sprawls. Costs creep up. Finding assets turns into a guessing game.

What Brad emphasizes here isn’t a single “right” architecture, but sustainability. Teams need to understand where their content volume is heading, how much work is local versus remote, and how often assets will need to move between storage tiers.

Rebuilding infrastructure every few years isn’t just disruptive. Migrating media is slow, costly, and risky.

The takeaway: content operations need systems that can grow with them, not quick fixes that collapse under scale.

Trend 2: AI is everywhere — but practicality matters more than promise

AI has become unavoidable in media technology conversations. But for most production teams, the question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s whether it actually saves time, reduces cost, and fits within security requirements.

Analytical AI — transcription, scene detection, logo, and facial recognition — directly addresses real production pain points: finding footage, reusing content, and eliminating manual busywork. But even those use cases come with constraints.

Cost, speed, accuracy, and security all matter, and optimizing one often impacts the others. Many teams are uncomfortable sending media offsite, even proxies. Others have been burned by AI services that fail, misidentify content, or charge repeatedly for reprocessing.

The result is skepticism, and rightly so.

EditShare is approaching this problem differently: integrating analytical AI directly into asset management workflows, rather than bolting it on as a separate service. The goal is simple: search once, find what you need, and move on, without duplicating effort or introducing new security risks.

This applies both on-prem and in the cloud. As Brad notes, customers don’t all want the same thing, and forcing them into a single deployment model creates friction. Practical AI needs to work where the media already lives, at a cost and speed that make sense for production teams.

Trend 3: Remote and hybrid work isn’t going away — complexity is increasing

Remote work isn’t a temporary adjustment anymore. Freelancers, agencies, in-house teams, and compliance stakeholders all need access to the same content, often at the same time.

The challenge isn’t just remote editing. It’s secure, reliable access across a fragmented workforce.

Most organizations now operate with mixed teams: internal staff, freelancers, and external partners. That means more people need access to content, and not all of them are on the same network, or even in the same time zone.

What customers consistently ask for is simple: the link should work, and it should point to the right version of the asset.

Security requirements complicate things further. Some organizations want everything on-premise, while others are cloud-native and don’t want to manage infrastructure at all. Most sit somewhere in between.

Brad’s key point is that there’s no single buyer profile anymore, and systems need to accommodate different security models without breaking workflows. That means fewer links, clearer versioning, and access that’s secure without being cumbersome.

When remote sharing fails, it doesn’t fail quietly. It slows reviews, creates confusion, and introduces risk, especially when multiple versions of the same asset are circulating.

What this means for 2026

Across all three trends, the pattern is consistent: media teams are being asked to do more, with more people involved, across more platforms, all without increasing complexity or cost.

Brad’s perspective reflects what customers are already experiencing:

These realities are shaping how EditShare is thinking about product development in 2026, with a focus on sustainability, practicality, and workflows that hold up under pressure.

Want the full conversation?

This post only highlights a few moments from the discussion. If you want deeper context on each trend, click the link below.

Amsterdam, 12 Septemver 2025 – EditShare, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage media, is unveiling major product advancements at IBC 2025. From new NVMe storage options to powerful automation features in FLOW, the announcements underscore EditShare’s commitment to delivering high-performance, collaborative solutions for modern production and post.

FLOW Automation: Smarter Remote Collaboration with “Send to Site”

EditShare is introducing FLOW Automation’s new “Send to Site” task, designed to make moving media and metadata between locations faster, secure  and more reliable. Built on EditShare’s Multisite architecture and Warp accelerated transfer services, Send to Site enables direct transfer of high-resolution media, proxies, and metadata between EditShare systems.

This removes the need for manual sidecar files or redundant proxy generation, saving time and reducing errors. Integrated with EditShare One, teams can schedule entire media space transfers, trigger automated workflows, or simply right-click and send assets between locations.

The feature has been hardened in demanding real-world deployments and is available now in FLOW 2025.2.0.

Ultimate EFS Field: More Capacity, More Power On the Go

First launched at IBC 2024, the Ultimate EFS Field portable NVMe-powered storage has been dramatically expanded for 2025. Now offering up to 122 TB of ultra-fast NVMe storage, EFS Field is built for capturing dailies, editing in the field, and keeping productions moving no matter where the shoot takes place.

The system’s airline-friendly design and rugged build make it ideal for mobile crews, while full integration with the EditShare multisite ecosystem ensures footage can be securely transferred back to base with SwiftSync.

EFS Ultimate NVMe: New Options for Every Workflow

EditShare is strengthening its NVMe lineup with three complementary options:

“Today’s creative teams need storage and workflow tools that are as flexible as they are powerful,” said Tara Montford, EVP Sales and Co- founder EditShare . “From high-capacity field systems to cost-optimized NVMe nodes and intelligent cross-site workflows, we’re giving customers more options to accelerate production while keeping collaboration front and center.”

©2025 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact
Katharine Guy
katharine.guy@editshare.com