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:
- Content volume is growing faster than infrastructure plans
- AI must be useful, not experimental
- Remote collaboration has to be reliable and secure, not improvised
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.
