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The final dramatic minutes of a Game 7 are probably a bad time for a streaming company to find out it actually didn’t provision for THIS much peak network demand. With billions of dollars being spent on live sports rights, we talked to network technologist Sid Luft, co-founder and CEO of edge-CDN company Netskrt, about protecting your six when streaming demand goes to eleven.

Will the $6.2 billion Nexstar-Tegna deal — if it actually happens — help NextGen TV?

Nexstar’s stalled $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna would seemingly give the long-gestating NextGen TV broadcast standard a much-needed boost

Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna remains on hold, even if the smaller chain is technically a wholly owned subsidiary, after the FCC and U.S. Department of Justice waved (waived?) through the deal despite its apparent violation of Congressional limits on TV market consolidation.

U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley ruled that DirecTV and eight attorneys general have a good enough case that their antitrust complaints should proceed without allowing Nexstar to integrate operations to a point that the suits become moot.

Regardless, Nexstar is moving to make its own stations more distinctively Nexstar-specific, replacing the national news feeds from various network partners with NewsNation, giving its somewhat right-of-center news organization some much-needed reach and heft.

Should Nexstar eventually succeed with the Tegna deal, it begs another question, and stop me if you’ve heard this before: Will this be enough to make NextGen TV matter? I call NextGen TV (née ATSC 3.0) the train that never quite arrives at the station. Yes, it offers many fine interactive capabilities, but adoption hasn’t been sufficient, never mind transformative.

SESSION HIGHLIGHT: 
At 12 p.m. Sunday, ATSC President Madeleine Noland will update NextGen TV deployment progress in the U.S., Brazil and other markets. The brief event will take place at the ATSC booth, Central Hall 1655 of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley told reporters at NAB back in 2018 that station-ownership caps should be repealed, so broadcasters could truly compete against Netflix and the tech giants. In truth, even if Congress and the courts dispense with those caps, could a Nexstar covering 80% of the U.S. TV audience make NextGen TV truly become a thing?

Probably not. For instance, recent saber-rattling over the NFL’s antitrust exemption, a naked political power play by Rupert Murdoch and broadcasters to keep their most valuable programming from heading en masse to streaming, was greeted by the league with, ahem, a bit of yawn (see Dan’s story below).

Its first deal in an accelerated reopening of its $110 billion in TV rights deals ended up with five NFL Channel games moving to YouTube. Those games will be even more widely available, for free, than on any broadcast network, and certainly anything on NextGen TV.

The technology now reaches 75% of U.S. TV audiences, according to Pearl TV, which will use NAB to unveil prototype converter boxes designed to cheaply enable the tech for an estimated 15 million American over-the-air TV homes. Such low-cost options are “key to completing the transition” to NextGen TV, a Pearl release headlines.

Maybe. As the old saying goes, you can lead an audience to NextGen TV, but you can’t make them watch. Regardless, NAB will feature a ton of NexGen TV sessions and events.

And presuming Nexstar finally jams through its Tegna deal, we’ll get a chance to see if scale is the difference in getting U.S. audiences to embrace this particular TV tech.

— David Bloom

Streaming live sports is hard. With over 500 events in the last year, we know 

Roger Goodell makes emphatic statement to Brendan Carr, the DOJ and everyone else — the future of the NFL will be mostly streamed

Also a sign of where this is all headed: the NBA’s huge audience growth in the first year of its streaming-heavy $76 billion national TV deal

The NFL recently learned the U.S. Justice Department, egged on by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, Rupert Murdoch and even some Democratic lawmakers, is going to challenge the 65-year-old antitrust exemption that allows all 32 of its owners to collectively bargain for, say, $16 billion in annual TV money.

Ostensibly concerned that consumers — already paying more for gas and healthcare — are being left behind as live sports in general migrates from free over-the-air broadcast to subscription streaming, the DOJ added Major League Baseball to the probe last week.

Does the 1961 Broadcast TV Act, which provides the big leagues with their limited antitrust exemption, still apply in the streaming era?

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell doesn’t look like he’s intimidated. The league has reportedly entered into advanced talks to expand its partnership with free-to-consumer YouTube. Under the described deal, YouTube would live-stream five games next season, usurping rival bidder Fox and the Murdoch Family, whose griping about the antitrust exemption seems to have gotten the DOJ investigation rolling in the first place.

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos confirmed last week that the subscription streaming giant is also in advanced talks to expand on its NFL live-game streaming package, which currently consists of two Christmas Day games.

SESSION HIGHLIGHT:
Puck sports media business guru John Ourand interviews Jon Miller, president of acquisitions and partnerships for NBC Sports in the Main Stage session “NBC Sports Playbooks: Rights, Partnerships and What’s Next” from 12:30-1:15 p.m. at N141.

Even if Congress were to strip the NFL’s limited antitrust exemption, the league would still need to be challenged in court. Just ask the class-action plaintiffs who won a $4.7 billion damages claim against the league two years ago over its Sunday Ticket games package on YouTube, only to watch the decision be overturned on appeal.

Frank Hawkins, former NFL media chief who now works for law firm Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, told ESPN the league has solid legal standing. “The NFL can sell its games to whoever it wants. They just have to be ready to defend it in an antitrust case. And they are the most fan friendly of the sports leagues in the way they set up their television, so they would have a good case.”

Bipartisan protestations from lawmakers about TV access to live sports in general have ramped up recently, but actual viewership data seems to tell a different story regarding consumer access and comfort level.

The NBA just reported its best national audience performance in 24 years for its just-completed regular season, its first under new arrangements with paid streamers Amazon Prime Video and Peacock. With 44% more NBA games televised nationally under the league’s $76 billion deal, average game audience sizes surged 16% to 1.78 million viewers per game.

The first two night’s of the NBA’s play-in tournament on Amazon last week averaged 2.69 million viewers, up 12% over the same games on TNT and ESPN last year.

As for baseball, the DOJ probe seems strangely timed: MLB currently has 15 teams that are recent refugees of failed regional sports networks. In addition to establishing direct-to-consumer streaming channels through MLB, most of these teams have also negotiated local broadcast TV contracts with station owners including Scripps and Gray to telecast select regular season games for free.

So baseball fans are getting more free access to their teams in many cases, not less.

— Daniel Frankel

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Warner Bros. may have gotten away, but it seems to have left Netflix with a newfound taste for M&A

Netflix got battered on Wall Street after Thursday’s earnings call, share prices dropping 9% Friday despite strong revenue and margin growth, a promising slate, and a $2.8 billion consolation prize after losing out in the Warner Bros. Discovery derby. Blame soft Q2 guidance for the latest curious wobble in Netflix shares’ slow post-WBD recovery, but competitors shouldn’t get too smug.

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the six-month pursuit of WBD “really built out our M&A muscle.” Indeed, after the WBD pursuit ended, Netflix completed one of its biggest deals ever, acquiring AI effects house InterPositive from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, for what Bloomberg reported was up to $600 million, including earn-outs.

Affleck is also now a Netflix senior advisor, a useful new relationship given how productive JLo’s double-ex has been as actor, producer, director and entrepreneur.

Sarandos said WBD and InterPositive proved the company could pursue bigger deals, keep executing on its main business, while containing ego and emotion and not overpaying.

Easy to read that as veiled criticism of the $111 billion in Paramount Skydance’s winning bid, whose likely final price will tick even higher, given burgeoning opposition from Hollywood notables, state attorneys general, Democratic politicians and some overseas regulators.

SESSION HIGHLIGHT:
In “Stand Up, Stand Out: J.B. Smoove and the Business of Being Funny” (5-5:45 p.m., W1566), the eponymous Larry David sidekick will discuss the entertainer as multi-platform brand with The Ankler’s Janice Minn.

More importantly, Netflix’s powder remains dry, so what next might the company pursue? Hard to say, but a good bet is more AI tools to further improve operations throughout the company beyond just production. Perhaps Netflix execs will be shopping the floors of NAB this week.

Regardless, the company will be doing any future deals without Reed Hastings, its visionary co-founder and long-time top executive. Hastings advised the board he wouldn’t run for re-election in June to the Netflix board, where he has been chairman since leaving the co-CEO roles to Sarandos and Greg Peters.

As Sarandos noted, it’s unusual for a founder to step aside at Hastings’ relatively young age (65), “but Reed is no ordinary founder.” Indeed, Hastings has somehow had a life beyond building Netflix from nothing into a company with a $450 billion market capitalization.

Notably, he has long championed education reform, serving on California’s board of education, financing school-bond reform measures, donating $120 million to Historically Black Colleges & Universities, and $50 million to alma mater Bowdoin College for a center for AI and ethics research. And that’s only part of his many interests. Hard not to acknowledge the transformative impact he has had on an entire industry these past three decades.

And, as part of touching encomiums from Sarandos, Peters and other Netflix execs during the earnings call, Sarandos promised Hastings’ influence will live on for years to come at Netflix through his influence on all of them and on the company’s unique culture.

Competitors, you’ve been warned.

— D.B.

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Vendor Vita: Product news from Amagi, Quickplay, Versos AI and Pearl TV

Amagi AdFlow Orchestrator: The leading tech company for setting content owners up with FAST channels, Amagi is working on what remains a core challenge for its constituents — adapting ad monetization schemes engineered for linear TV to free streaming. While linear TV feeds often include ad pods four to eight minutes long, FAST platforms often reject these bloated, oversized breaks. This causes chronic ad-server timeouts and plummeting fill rates ... and not for nothin’, viewers hate it, too. Amagi’s new tech automatically conditions and restructures SCTE-35 ad markers for each distribution partner, aligning broadcast signals with streaming platform requirements. This helps ensure that ad opportunities are valid, reachable and optimized.

AI training monetization specialist Versos AI partners with Tape Ark: Last year, we started hearing about all the money that niche nature-doc SVOD Curiosity Stream was making licensing its content — and video from third parties — to AI companies for LLM training. In March, we interviewed Chris Keevill, the founder and CEO behind Curiosity Stream’s key technology vendor for the revenue stream, New Brunswick-based Versos AI. By partnering with Tape Ark, a leader in large-scale media digitization, Versos continues to expand its capabilities. For content owners who own all of their IP, these guys are worth a meeting. But don’t ask Google AI Mode about them — it must have tapped into a little of the ol’ fear and loathing on the drive to Vegas.

Quickplay deploys Gray’s unified streaming platform: Last August, Quickplay announced major new business — a deal to unify the digital footprint of Gray Media, owner of 180 TV stations and lots of associated free streaming channels. At NAB 2026, Quickplay will show off the deployment of broadcaster’s coalesced platform, which consolidates 163 websites, 326 mobile apps and 815 smart TV applications on a system build around Quickplay’s orchestration infrastructure and Google Cloud’s unified AI stack. Quickplay also touted work on Television News Zealand’s streaming platform, TVNZ+, transitioning it to an AWS-based cloud-native platform.

Pearl TV shows off ATSC 3.0 converter box prototypes: The cohort of 20 million remaining users of over-the-air broadcast don’t tend to be the fastest at cycling through their television sets. And with the broadcast-industry consortium that backs the so-called NextGen TV standard needing to infiltrate more playback hardware at the, er, extreme edge of the network — right next to those rabbit ears — Pearl will be showing off ATSC 3.0 converter boxes from ADTH, Skyworth and Zinwell, designed for low-priced distribution at Best Buy and other electronics retailers.

— D.F.

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For the Hard Times:
So it’s your 101st visit to Las Vegas … How will you spend the hours?

Places to kill zombies and drink heavily with the director of the FBI

Want an NAB adventure that doesn’t require trudging between convention center halls? We have a couple of suggestions:

Area 15 is a hard-to-describe theme park, featuring more than 30 immersive experiences, ranging from killing zombies from the Netflix/Zack Snyder franchise Army of the Dead to throwing axes and Top Golf (ideally not simultaneously). Since last year’s NAB, Area 15 has doubled in size, but it’s still anchored by the wacky Omega Mart experience from artist collective Meow Wolf. Meow Wolf, which is opening a Los Angeles venue later this year, even comes with a new tie to NAB. At last year’s show, new CEO Matthew Henick was still SVP of consumer products for The Trade Desk, championing the DSP’s Ventura TV OS and OpenPass initiatives.

Fancy something slightly less out there? Secure an admittedly hard-to-secure invite to The Poodle Room social club atop the Fontainebleau Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. There you’ll have a good chance of seeing Kash Patel, the FBI director whom The Atlantic reports is a frequent weekend visitor despite his occasional duties in Washington D.C. And if seeing major law-enforcement figures in the (very) wild isn't your thing, the Fontainebleau features some excellent restaurants, particularly Asian-themed Washing Potatoes and Los Angeles chef Evan Funke's take on Roman cuisine, Mother Wolf.

— D.B.

Overly CinemaCon-fident? It was here just last week that the major studios made (overly?) ambitious promises about month-and-a-half-long theatrical windows

Yes, NAB starts this weekend, but last week Vegas was all about theater owners, their trade group now called Cinema United, and a newfound commitment to keep movies in theaters longer.

Both Paramount Skydance and Universal committed during CinemaCon 2026 to 45-day minimum theatrical runs for their movies. With PSKY’s plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, then use the combined operation to pump out an eye-blearing 30 movies a year, that’s a lot of product in theaters, for an extended period, for the first time since at least the pandemic lockdown.

It may be the lifeline theaters need to survive beyond ‘25. Certainly, getting to last year, after the lockdown and twin Hollywood strikes battered bottom lines, proved to be an oft-stated industry goal that ended up largely meaningless. Domestic box office remained basically flat, still more than 20% below the $11 billion-plus that theaters pulled in annually between 2015 and 2019.

But longer theatrical windows also may complicate life for the studios, most of which are struggling (Disney just laid off 1,000 people; no telling how many thousands go out the door with that PSKY-WBD merger).

As we reported a couple of issues back, a recent study by studio consultant Cinelytic suggests the “sweet spot” to maximize returns on a film is a theatrical run of between 26 and 45 days. That harvests most of the revenue most films generate in theaters (first three weeks is everything), while carrying over to streaming audiences the awareness and interest stirred up by a given film’s millions of dollars in theatrical marketing.

— D.B.

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