Large File Transfer

What We Saw, Heard, and Where Workflows Are Headed: NAB 2026

Jodi Carter

May 7, 2026

5 min read

Before the 2026 NAB Show, we wrote about a simple idea: media workflows are no longer defined by where content lives, but by how quickly teams can find it, access it, and take action. 

After a week in Las Vegas, that belief was confirmed by hundreds of customer meetings.  

Across conversations at the booth, sessions on the show floor, and discussions during our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting in February, the same patterns kept showing up: Workflows are expanding in every direction while expectations continue to tighten. Teams are managing more content, more versions, more endpoints, and more partners, all while working within shorter timelines and with less room for error. 

That tension is shaping how organizations think about infrastructure, workflows, and the tools they rely on every day. 

There is no shortage of innovation across the industry right now, with AI dominating the headlines, cloud capabilities continuing to evolve, and remote production now firmly part of how teams operate. However, when conversations move beyond the headlines, the challenges become even more practical. 

Teams are managing content across multiple clouds, on-prem storage, archives, and partner environments. Deliverables have become more complex, and the number of stakeholders involved in each workflow has increased. At the same time, expectations around speed and reliability continue to rise. 

Most teams are not looking to introduce new or more systems to manage this complexity. Instead, they are looking for greater clarity, fewer steps in their workflows, and a way to move faster without introducing additional friction. 

One theme that came up consistently at NAB is that many teams still lack a clear, unified view of their content. 

It is common for a single project to span several storage environments and multiple organizations. In that context, even basic questions can slow progress. Teams need to know where content is located, which version is correct, and whether it has already been delivered. 

While these questions may seem straightforward, they create real delays at scale. 

This aligns closely with what we heard during our first CAB. Visibility across distributed content is foundational to efficient workflows. When teams cannot clearly see their content, workflows slow down, duplication increases, and decision-making becomes more difficult.

There is also a clear shift in how teams are thinking about access. While speed remains important, the conversation is expanding beyond how quickly files can be transferred. Many teams are now focused on how to work with content where it already resides. 

This approach reduces unnecessary movement, minimizes duplication, and allows teams and partners to interact with content more efficiently. It also supports more flexible workflows across production, post, and distribution. 

This perspective was reinforced during NAB and CAB discussions, where participants emphasized the importance of simplifying how teams operate across existing systems rather than adding new layers of complexity. 

Once teams can see their content and access it efficiently, the next challenge is what they can do with it. 

At NAB, many conversations focused on improving how workflows operate in practice. This includes validating deliveries before they enter downstream processes, triggering workflows automatically, and connecting systems in ways that reduce manual intervention

Metadata, automation, and orchestration are central to these efforts, but the underlying goal is consistent. Teams want to reduce friction in day-to-day operations and make workflows more predictable and efficient. 

AI has been a major focus at NAB for years, but the tone of the conversation has shifted, with greater emphasis now on practical applications that improve operations. Teams are applying AI to make content easier to search and organize, to identify duplicates across large libraries, and to support automation that would otherwise require manual effort.  

At the same time, there is a growing awareness that adding new technology cannot come at the cost of added complexity. The traditional model of moving content into AI systems creates its own set of challenges; large media files can be expensive and time-consuming to move, duplication introduces additional storage and management overhead, and every transfer adds friction to the entire workflow. As content volumes continue to expand, that approach becomes even hard to sustain. 

This is where a different model is starting to take hold.  

Instead of moving content into AI models, teams are looking to bring AI to the content. That shift was a key part of what Signiant showed at NAB, enabling AI models and tools to operate directly on content where it already resides in Signiant-connected storage, teams can then search, analyze, and take action without first consolidating assets or triggering unnecessary transfers.  

Underneath that shift is a broader industry realization that efficiency comes from reducing friction, not adding new layers.  

The most meaningful conversations were not about adding more capability for its own sake, but about making workflows more efficient, more predictable, and easier to operate at scale. 

NAB continues to be a strong indicator of where the industry is heading. 

This year reinforced a clear priority for media organizations: Progress depends on reducing friction across workflows while maintaining flexibility and control. 

Teams need to see their content clearly, access it efficiently, and take action without unnecessary delays, regardless of where that content resides.