NAB: a century of showing up
From radio to render farms: 103 years of the world’s biggest production show.
Hi Everyone —
Eddie AI v3 won best of NAB 2026. Woot woot.
I was talking to a new customer today and he was asking me how was NAB. I told him it was a moving experience. The number of customers who came up to us and told us how they use Eddie AI and how it has made a difference to their work was so cool.
Not too long ago Eddie was an idea.
Then it became a product.
Now it has active users.
Many who use it daily and for whom it has become indispensable. We are working hard to make even more so for you. And for those new users or not-yet users, we are working hard to make Eddie better for you too.
It’s the early stages of this journey. I’m grateful you all are here.
—Shamir
CEO & Co-founder of Eddie AI
Also this week:
Hollywood employment has dropped 30% from its 2022 peak, a YouTube creator who self-distributed his horror film to $50 million at the box office is now pressing DVDs from a machine in his house, and a man in Singapore gets arrested for leaking the new Avatar (no, not the Cameron one).
Render Reel
Vimeo’s new pricing is here and it’s worse than expected: Legacy Plus users are being auto-upgraded to a $70/month Professional plan which is a 670% increase. Downgrade to the $10 Creator plan and you lose password protection, player branding, and shared folders. Small businesses on older plans are reporting forced transitions to $20,000/year enterprise tiers. If you’ve been putting off the Vimeo breakup, the renewal email might make the decision for you.
Disney laid off over 1,000 workers: including much of Marvel’s Visual Development department, the long-term illustrators and character designers. Those roles are shifting to project-based freelance. Meanwhile, Disney’s stock rose 1.6% on the news and Josh D’Amaro, (the new CEO) has a compensation package just under $45 million.
LaCie launched a 32TB Thunderbolt 5 RAID array: eight bays, speeds up to 2800 MB/s, backward compatible with Thunderbolt 4, and it ships with a two-month Adobe Creative Cloud Pro subscription. Designed for 8K workflows where a single shoot can fill a drive before lunch.
A man in Singapore was arrested for leaking the unreleased Avatar: The Last Airbender film: he allegedly gained unauthorized access to a media server, downloaded the rip, and posted parts of it online. He was arrested within a day and now faces up to seven years in prison and a $50,000 fine.
A filmmaker built a clearance-ready digital prop app called Prefx: scrollable social feeds, messaging UIs, and news layouts that actors can interact with on camera in real time. Also includes Kelvin and RGB lighting controls so the screen doubles as a practical light source. $9.99/month or $99 lifetime. If you’ve ever lost hours in post replacing a phone screen, this pays for itself on the first shoot.
Markiplier is building a YouTube distribution system for indie filmmakers. After self-distributing Iron Lung to $49.9 million at the box office, he’s now setting up an aggregator that would let other filmmakers sell their films through YouTube Movies & TV. He’s also installing a DVD/Blu-ray machine in his house to self-produce physical copies.
What actually is the NAB?
NAB 2026 wrapped in Las Vegas last week, which felt like a good time to look at what the show actually is and where it came from.
In 1923, a group of radio station owners met at the Drake hotel in Chicago because ASCAP was about to sue them into oblivion over music royalties. Twenty-three people showed up. They lost the legal fight but built the organisation that would become the broadcast industry’s central nervous system for the next century.
The convention has since become the launchpad for almost every technology your production depends on.
In 1956, Ampex debuted the first ever commercial videotape recorder and generated $5 million in orders over a single weekend.
In 1982, Sony introduced the Betacam and killed the two-person ENG crew overnight. In 1999, Apple launched Final Cut Pro and shattered Avid’s monopoly by letting editors capture DV footage through a single FireWire cable instead of $30K in proprietary hardware. (It also launched FCPX at NAB 2011…which is another story.)
In 2006, RED showed up with a 4K camera inside what attendees described as a milk crate and sold thousands of deposits at $17,500 which was a price point pretty much unheard of at that time.
This year, 58,000 people showed up in Las Vegas which is up from 55,000 in 2025, with content creator attendance surging 140%.
That last number is a sign of the times.
The 2026 floor was dominated by “AI” and cloud-native production platforms. Metadata automation will be table-stakes. Conversations that used to be about signal routing and codec specs are now about how to add “AI” to workflows and with companies like Eddie AI painting a big future of AI editing agents working 24/7 to liberate pros to focus on craft and story.
NAB was built by and for broadcast engineers but now nearly half the floor is first-time attendees, and a growing share of them have never touched an SDI cable in their lives.
Ultimately, it’s always been about, and in service of, the story.
Hollywood employment has dropped 30% from its late-2022 peak: and the work that remains is increasingly leaving the country. In 2021, the US produced 251 big-budget productions. In 2025, 159. The rest of the world produced 249. Behind-the-scenes workers logged 36% fewer hours last year than in 2022. LA on-location production days nearly halved. The industry is lobbying for a 15% federal tax incentive to compete with the UK, Canada, and Australia, but will that solve the issue?
This week we’re watching:
Mora - the viral horror short from YouTube’s Grimoire Horror channel that Neon just picked up for a feature adaptation. The premise is a struggling artist searches for a mysterious woman who keeps appearing in gruesome AI-generated images.
It’s the kind of concept that could only exist right now, and Neon clearly agrees.
Two years ago these creators were uploading shorts and hoping the algorithm noticed but now distributors are watching their channels like scouts at a showcase.
Retail Therapy: GoPro wants to be a cinema camera now
The MISSION 1 PRO is GoPro’s attempt to be taken seriously, coming armed with a 50MP 1-inch sensor, 8K capabilities, and a new GP3 processor built for sustained recording without overheating.
It ships with an accessory ecosystem that includes wireless mics, powered grips, and an I/O expansion module, which is the kind of offering you’d expect from Sony or Blackmagic, not the company that built its brand on being strapped to a helmet.
The release comes at an inflection point in GoPro’s future.
They recently cut 23% of their workforce, lost 93% of their stock value and the founder even put $2 million of his own money in, to help finance GP3.
Whether filmmakers who’ve spent years choosing between RED, ARRI, Sony, and Blackmagic will look at a GoPro and think “yes, that’s my A-cam.” is up for debate.
Starting price is $499.99 for GoPro subscribers.
Reserve now at gopro.com.