NAB is one of those shows where you walk out with your head full and your notebook overflowing. After spending a week in Las Vegas meeting with customers, partners, and ISVs, sitting on panels, and having some genuinely great conversations on the floor, I came away with a few clear themes I keep returning to.
Here’s what stuck with me.
The Resonate launch landed-and the timing felt right
I’ll be honest: walking into my first NAB as a new member of the Presidio team, I was curious how the Presidio Resonate announcement would land. By Thursday, I had my answer. It was coming up in virtually every conversation we had with AWS and beyond, and the response was genuinely positive.
What I kept hearing from customers is that the industry is ready for AI, but people are at very different points in that journey, and they’re protective of what goes out over air. Rightfully so. There’s a tremendous amount of pride and thought that goes into broadcast. That’s exactly what makes Resonate’s modular approach so compelling: it doesn’t ask organizations to hand over the keys to their content all at once. Maybe you start with summarization, or automated retrieval, or back-end workflow automation. You build comfort. You see results. You go from there.
That message resonated (no pun intended) in a real way.
The archive opportunity is bigger than most people realize
This is one I’m very passionate about, and it came up repeatedly on the floor. There are still broadcasters and organizations sitting on libraries of legacy content – some of it on actual tape – that hasn’t seen the light of day in decades.
I use this example every time I make the case for migrating and unlocking tape libraries: The Greatest Night in Pop on Netflix. That documentary about the recording of “We Are the World” was the best thing I’ve watched in years, and I’ve watched it more than once. What made it extraordinary wasn’t just the story, it was the raw footage. Stevie Wonder teaching Bob Dylan his verse. All these legends in one room together. I would imagine that content existed on tape for decades. In sports, entertainment, and news domains, there is rich, hidden content out there just waiting to be digitized and repurposed for modern audiences.
The demand for compelling stories isn’t slowing down. In fact, with audiences consuming more content across more platforms than ever before, there’s real appetite for the unexpected archival find; the thing people didn’t know they needed to see. AI tools can help surface that content in ways that simply weren’t possible when a small team was responsible for logging everything by hand. Where we once had to manually scan through hours of footage, today you can use intelligent tagging and natural language queries to uncover what’s sitting in the archive. The stories are already in there. The technology is finally there to find them.
Cloud production has moved past proof of concept
I was on a panel in the Sports Summit focused on cloud-based broadcast and production workflows, and what was striking to me is how the conversation has matured. A few years ago, we were still convincing organizations to try it. Now, broadcasters and leagues have proven this out. The POC phase is largely behind us.
And the reason is straightforward: if you want to produce content at scale, you need the flexibility cloud provides. You’re not bound to a production truck. You’re not locked to a single edit suite. A student at a university with a cloud-based workflow can edit footage from their dorm room or from home, no longer needing to show up on campus two months early just to cover football camp. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s where we are.
Which leads me to what I think is an underappreciated opportunity in this space: universities and college athletic departments. The workflows we’re deploying for professional broadcasters and leagues are directly applicable to higher education. If the industry wants to cultivate the next generation of producers, editors, and broadcast engineers, etc. we need to get this technology into their hands while they’re still in school. The crossroads of engineering, technology, and broadcasting is more intertwined than ever, and that’s a great thing.
Cloud production is also integral to delivering much-craved personalization and variety to the broadcast experience. Industry leaders are keenly evaluating more effective ways to reach their audiences. Things like alternate broadcasts or content tailored to individual consumers will continue to grow. And the flexibility afforded by the cloud is a key catalyst.
Content monetization is the next frontier
Something I heard consistently across sessions and conversations was a growing focus on unlocking revenue opportunities that have been difficult to execute at scale like smarter ad placement, shoppable video, and better ROI on commercials. The industry is actively looking for more efficient paths to monetization, and there’s real momentum around solving it.
The connection to the archive point is direct. When you can intelligently surface, tag, and understand your content library, you also unlock its commercial value. The same AI tools that help a media manager find a clip help a business team identify content that can be licensed, monetized, or activated in new ways.
This is an area I expect to see evolve quickly in the next 12-18 months. The pieces are in place so it’s a matter of how effectively organizations can bring them together.
The immersive experience race is just getting started
This one’s a bit more forward-looking, but it was one of the more thought-provoking conversations I had at NAB. Post-COVID, live sports and concerts have bounced back remarkably well. Anyone who watched what the Eras Tour did for live music knows that people will show up when the experience is worth showing up for.
But movie theaters are still struggling to find that answer. And the broader question isn’t just about movies, but any content experience that has to compete with the increasingly high bar of what people can watch in their own living rooms. For live sports and concerts, you’re seeing live action. The same movies playing at theaters are now streaming the same day they’re released in some cases. So what’s your hook? What I kept hearing from content creators is a push toward immersive, interactive experiences that give people a reason to be there in person, not just watching at home. Think larger than traditional screenings. Think participatory. Think about the experience of being in a room where something unique is happening that you can’t replicate on a 65-inch screen.
These experiences at scale feel early. But they also feel inevitable. And it’s the kind of innovation this industry tends to embrace fast once it finds its footing.
NAB is always a reminder of how much this industry moves, and how exciting it is to be in the middle of it. Coming in as Presidio’s Sports & Media Industry Principal, being in a position to connect what we’re building with where the industry is heading – that’s a sincerely exciting place to be.
More to come.
Want to keep the conversation going? Connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more about Presidio Resonate.
Andrew Reich
Andrew began his career at MLB and NHL Networks where he spent 8+ years on the media services team. Andrew joined Amazon Web Services in January 2020 on the TMEGS Professional Services team, and spent two years in delivery, two years in the Sports Industry Specialty Practice and one year in the MEGS Business Unit. Andrew has led major cloud adoption initiatives and projects involving live and post-production, content data and analytics, media supply chain, MAM and archive migrations, and services deployments. Andrew is a seven-time Emmy award winner and graduated from Syracuse University.
