Next TMT Talks Partner Discussion:
You say you’re looking for a Gemini-powered solution to monetize your video in the cloud at scale? Oh honey, we all want that. And happily, Next TMT’s got a guy. Streaming tech guru Matt Smith, chief evangelist for Akta, took time out from his busy NAB schedule to show us how the kids with cool sport coats structure their OTT production workflows:

Verizon boldly goes where no enterprise-level TV production infrastructure provider has ever gone before

LAS VEGAS — They say you can judge a society’s relative level of sophistication by the production values found in its wilderness-based reality TV competition shows.

Tell all your friends that thanks to Verizon, you’re a proud member of an advanced species.

Verizon has now been developing its fiber and 5G wireless internet chops for a full decade now. The carrier has now developed its acumen of the technology beyond mere consumer wireless applications into mastering big enterprise solutions. 

At NAB 2026 this week, the company made two major application announcements around broadcast and streaming.

For one, Verizon will ply its expertise in fiber to the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June, supplying the international soccer organization with the high-speed network infrastructure  needed to digitally transport massive video file sizes originating on the pitch onto the servers of FIFA’s various TV partners around the globe. 

Verizon, an official sponsor of the world’s most popular live sports event, will also supply 5G fixed wireless network technology to the various World Cup-host stadiums around the world, allowing fans to share the terabytes of video they’re capturing on their socials and beyond. 

Also, Verizon’s 5G tech is being used by Fox Entertainment for the second season of Extraction, a reality show in which 12 survivalist are dropped into the rugged Canadian wilderness, competing with each other to see who can stay out there the longest. Verizon built a private 5G network in the outback of the Great White North, a place that doesn’t natively feature even a small fraction of a wireless internet service bar. 

On Monday, Next TMT caught up with Josh Arensberg, CTO of media and entertainment for Fox Business Group. He walks us through the basics of the Extraction case study here:

— Daniel Frankel

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Fox One jumps into the podcast battles in a big way

Add Fox’s new-ish subscription streaming service to the SVODs chasing loyal subscribers beyond the usual folks wanting to pay to stream, you know, TV.

On Tuesday, Fox One announced a “significant expansion” of its podcast offerings, adding eight programs from Fox News and Red Seat Ventures personalities including Sean Hannity, Riley Gaines, Brett Cooper, Jillian Michaels, Will Cain and Mike Baker. It is, Fox declared in a release, “the beginning of a curated podcast offering on Fox One.” 

“By leveraging the strength of our partners at FOX News Media and Red Seat Ventures, we’re able to offer subscribers even more compelling voices and perspectives, all in one place, while continuing to build a platform that delivers real value to our audience,” said Reagan Feeney, Fox One SVP of content strategy and planning . 

So what’s the appeal of low-cost, low-production-value programming like video podcasts? Well, engagement and frequency are two good reasons.

All the podcasters hopping on the Fox One train are producing, with one exception, at least two shows a week. And they tend to get a lot of return business, ensuring fans keep sticking around. In a time of endless churn for most SVOD services not called Netflix, that’s a blessing.

Of course, Netflix is jumping on this train, too, as are some competitors, never mind the presence on Disney’s ESPN of Pat McAfee, who continues to operate (and own) his own video podcast as part of ESPN daily programming while popping up on college football Saturdays and other parts of the ESPN program guide.

Fox One’s modest podcast offerings since its August launch have heretofore been mostly sports-focused shows, with the exception of Nancy Grace’s five-nights-a-week crime show.

Now the offerings will feature a decidedly conservative news presence, with five Fox News podcasts joining as of Tuesday, including Hang Out with Sean Hannity (twice a week); the Ruthless variety show (three times weekly); Will Cain Country (five times a week); The Riley Gaines Show (twice a week); and Planet Tyrus (two times a week). 

Fox-owned subsidiary Red Seat Ventures — which was created to build joint ventures with third-party influencers, brands and media partners — is adding three more: The Brett Cooper Show (four times a week); Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels (twice a week); and The President’s Daily Brief with Mike Baker (Saturdays)

The service’s launch marked yet another escalation of Fox’s streaming presence, which previously included only free ad-supported service Tubi an.

Now Fox One will have a much broader array of non-traditional programming that nonetheless may be catnip for fans of one of Fox’s largest and most loyal fan bases, its cable news giant. It’s certainly a much-needed differentiator for a late-arriving challenger in the crowded field of streaming services. Given its steep price and relatively narrow focus, though, it’ll be fascinating to see if the new additions move the needle for Fox One.

— David Bloom

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

Tech is experiencing a remarkable changing of the guard

One of the things with all those tech startups of the past few decades is their founders and CEOs were typically annoyingly young, likely to be running their world-changing creations for decades to come.

That makes news of the past few days particularly striking. CEOs from three major tech companies are departing, a changing of the guard that was inconceivable not long ago, but perhaps was forced by the demands and opportunities that AI is creating for a generation of leadership that suddenly may no longer be right for the job.

Last week, it was Netflix’s visionary co-founder and board chairman Reed Hastings, who decided at 65 not to run for reelection in June. The company he built into a $450 billion streaming giant will no longer benefit from his startlingly clear vision of where media is heading. No shock that the stock dropped 9% on Friday after the news, and fell a bit further Monday before recovering slightly.

At the marketing-focused Adobe Summit, which attracted 14,000 attendees to Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel, even as the even bigger NAB conference continued at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Adobe’s long-time CEO had something of a last hurrah before his own imminent departure after 18 years.

The summit has long featured CEOs from across tech and beyond (AMD’s Lisa Su, Eli Lilly’s David Ricks). But Narayan announced during Adobe’s last, not-very-reassuring earnings call that he would step down as CEO, while remaining board chairman, as soon as the company found a successor. That did little good for the company’s battered share price, down more than a quarter over the past year.

The lack of a ready successor is not much endorsement for Narayan’s acumen for building a bench of successors, but regardless, Narayan used the summit to feature an old friend, fellow immigrant kid turned tech superstar Jensen Huang of Nvidia, for what might be Narayan’s last on-stage CEO conversation.

The companies have collaborated on projects that weave Adobe marketing software into Nvidia’s AI and other operations (Adobe also announced a big batch of enterprise-focused AI offerings on Monday).

The key, Huang said, is AI will allow people like him to more fully utilize Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and other power tools to their fullest capacity, without having to become monastic specialists to master their capabilities. “For 99.9% of creators in the world, this is going to elevate your art, no question,” Huang said.

Maybe. Adobe is one of many software-focused tech companies that long profited from business models built on per-seat licenses. Now, those models are melting alongside AI tools that bill on usage, not seats.

Wall Street believes vibe coders and lots of online-first challengers can make a run at companies such as Adobe. It was both telling and quite sweet that Huang and Narayan embraced at the end of their conversation, and walked off into the dark together arm and arm.

Also on Monday came the stunning yet long-foreshadowed announcement that Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, to be replaced by hardware chief John Ternus, who’s 15 years younger and a highly regarded product guy. Cook was a logistics wizard when he took over for an ailing Steve Jobs in 2011, and transformed Apple into one of the world’s two or three most valuable companies. In the process, Cook has proved a remarkably nimble political navigator amid tariffs, tech shifts and much else, while overseeing Apple’s omnipresence in so many areas.

But Cook also has been roundly criticized for Apple’s inability to launch a credible AI option of its own.

Turns out, that might have been a feature, not a bug. While fellow tech giants spent hundreds of billions of dollars building their AI stack, Apple has continued to sell prodigious amounts of iPhones, which it turns out are a great platform to sell subscriptions to other companies’ AI tools. Cook also has shepherded Apple’s Services division into a monster of its own, reporting $30 billion in revenue in the last quarter. That number dwarfs most of Hollywood’s studios in scale.

Indeed, Cook grew Apple’s market value an astonishing $3.7 trillion during his time at the top. Only Huang and Nvidia have generated more value for shareholders in that time. Cook, 65, becomes executive chairman as Ternus initiates a new era. It will be fascinating to see where Ternus’s hardware instincts take Apple in this AI-befuddled era sitting squarely in front of us.

— D.B.

Grabyo: Live Cloud Production, Clipping and Distribution

Microsoft and Adobe enterprise M&E execs talk new adventures in GenAI-enabled workflows: faster, cheaper, and (hopefully!) in control

Microsoft is a bit of an OG on the NAB Las Vegas show floor, pursuing media and entertainment clients as far back as 30 years ago, when it developed some of the first video servers.

The little Redmond software company with the $3.1 trillion market capitalization is out in the market, these days talking about enterprise-level cloud- and AI-powered video solutions.

On Monday, Next TMT casually happened by the Microsoft booth, but quickly became captivated by the siren song of Chris Gordon, MS strategy director of telecom, media and gaming for Microsoft, moderating a discussion between Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft’s CTO and worldwide strategy director for M&E, and Kevin Towes, product director of Adobe’s Firefly enterprise video effort.

— D.F.

HubSpot's ex-Head of Paid shares his 2026 playbook

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With Chairman Brendan Carr a no-show, FCC staffers plead the fifth on the tough Nexstar-Tegna questions

Next TMT walked an ultramarathon Monday, traversing the expansive maze connecting the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall and the North Hall. Admittedly, few need the steps more than we do, and we simply didn’t it left in us to fend off the REM stages and endure mealy-mouthed responses from a bunch of FCC lightweights.

Happily, Deadline media reporter Dade Hayes dutifully covered this non-event so we didn’t have to. And the content lived down to the hype.

Not one of these policy wonks uttered a single useful syllable when responding to a tough but pretty reasonable question: Did agency Chairman Brendan Carr — a loquacious speaker here during early January’s CES event but conspicuously absent this week at NAB — have the authority override Congressional law? This is what happened when he approved Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, exempting the deal from the 39% cap on broadcast station ownership reach set by Congress.

And did the FCC establish a template for further matador-level regulating?

“That’s an active proceeding, and I’m not going to really comment on the substance of it,” said David Brown, FCC video division chief, responding to moderator Larry Walke, NAB associate general counsel.

“I’m OK with the question, but I think that from a bureau perspective, you can look at the Nexstar-Tegna merger order, we discuss legal authority there. I think that’s an accurate statement of where the bureau is. I’m not going to speak for the chairman or what ultimately will come out.”

Deputy Bureau Chiefs Evan Morris and Alexander Sanjenis also expressed their inability to speak on Carr’s behalf. 

— D.F.

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Vendor vita: NAB news from Cineverse, Telestream, Vubiquity, Eluvio, TVU Networks and Tencent Cloud

Workflow tech specialist Telestream announced its expanded support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling its clients to operate its tools on Oracle’s enterprise cloud platform.

Innovative entertainment studio slash M&E tech company Cineverse is touting the introduction of Matchpoint Hex, what it describes using redundant adjectives as being “a groundbreaking advanced intelligence layer for film and television that encapsulates the full Human Experience.”

Vubiquity and Eluvio are demo-ing a joint solution that combines the former’s media management acumen and the latter’s streaming tech.

Cloud-native video solutions provider TVU Networks announced a partnership (yup, a “strategic” one) with Tencent Cloud to launch a new cloud-based media production and distribution platform.

Wowza is touting the “general availability” of its Wowza Video Intelligence Framework, a solution designed to enable media and sports organizations to generate within their AI-powered workflows real-time metadata, clips, alerts and “machine-readable event signals while the stream is still live.”

— D.F.