Strada Connect at NAB 2026 – BRAW Browser Playback and Remote Editing Preview

by Alexandra ThompsonApril 30^th, 2026

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At NAB 2026, Strada CEO Michael Cioni walked CineD’s Johnnie Behiri through a technical first: a 28GB Blackmagic RAW file streaming live inside a web browser, debayered on the fly, with the source drive sitting on a Mac Studio in California while the playback ran in Las Vegas over half a megabit of show-floor internet. Strada also detailed where Strada Connect goes next, including Finder-level remote editing across Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, plus free commenting and broader RAW camera support.

Strada has been a regular fixture in our coverage since brothers Michael and Peter Cioni founded the company in 2023, with the original beta launch, the Cloud Workflows Best-of-Show Award at NAB 2024, the unveiling of Strada Agents at NAB 2025, and the strategic OWC investment in late 2025 all marking the company’s path toward its first proper consumer-facing product. At NAB 2026, that product is Strada Connect, and the booth sits in the North Hall (N2373) alongside OWC.

A different bet: making local drives behave like clouds

Rather than trying to make cloud storage feel more like a local drive, Strada is going the other way around. The thesis Michael laid out is that operating systems should let users invite collaborators directly into their own folder structures with proper, granular permissions, without ever copying media to a third-party bucket. The Strada Agents service runs on a local machine or NAS and exposes attached storage as a virtual drive to authorized users, with the kind of folder-level access control that cloud platforms already offer.

That works across SMB and NFS shares, RAID arrays, NAS, and SAN environments, and it does not require dedicated hardware. According to Michael, the service is happy running off a camera card, a bus-powered drive, a small RAID, or a large RAID, and the team’s argument is that if you have already paid for the storage, you should not be paying monthly cloud rent on top of it. He pointed to small teams quietly burning through four-figure monthly bills on Frame.io and LucidLink subscriptions as the typical pain point, and Frame’s cloud-only collaboration as a fundamental misread of how operating systems should handle remote access.

A 28GB BRAW file, played back in a browser over half a megabit

The most striking part of the demo was live web playback of Blackmagic RAW files. According to Michael, this is the first time anyone has been able to debayer a RAW file in a web browser, since Chrome, Safari, and Firefox only natively decode RGB. Strada has cracked that step inside its web app and rolled it out for BRAW first.

The numbers are worth pausing on. The clips on screen ranged from 11GB to 28GB in size, and Michael noted that Blackmagic RAW 12K can run at upwards of 9 gigabits per second at high-quality and high-frame-rate settings, while the show-floor connection during our chat was at about half a megabit. Despite that, scrubbing was responsive, take-to-take navigation was effectively instant, and Michael showed the source drive’s activity light blinking only when playback was active in the browser. He said the entire round trip takes around 200 milliseconds.

The technical sleight of hand is what Strada calls an ephemeral file. Cloud platforms typically solve the bandwidth problem by transcoding a smaller proxy that lives next to the original, doubling the storage footprint and forcing an upload step. Strada instead presents a virtual file that does not exist as a discrete copy on disk; it is generated on demand from the source on the remote machine. No upload, no proxy, no duplicated media. The company has filed a patent on the technology stack.

From the browser into the Finder

Strada Connect already operates at the Finder level for everyday media. A remote California desktop showed up directly in macOS Finder during the demo, and Michael dragged dailies straight from that desktop into a Premiere Pro timeline, with immediate playback off the remote drive and no download step. Right-clicking a clip and choosing Show in Finder confirmed the original file was still living on the remote M4 Mac Studio in Los Angeles, untouched. The same files dropped cleanly into Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve timelines, and because the approach operates at the Finder level rather than as a per-application plugin, it is editor-agnostic.

The next step, according to Michael, is bringing the same browser-side BRAW magic into the Finder itself. The goal is that a 28GB BRAW file dragged from a remote drive into a Premiere timeline would behave as if it were already an H.265, no proxy generation or upload required. In Michael’s words, Strada wants to “reinvent the Finder,” opening up native file access to remote collaborators with the same granularity that products like Frame.io offer in the cloud.

Replacing transfer tools, then commenting, then more cameras

The current Strada Connect deployment is already replacing tools like Signiant, MASV, WeTransfer, and Aspera in some workflows, according to Michael, who argued that peer-to-peer transfer can be both cheaper and sometimes faster, since there is no upload-then-download step in the middle. Strada says TV shows are using the platform for production transfers, and the company recently demonstrated a six-editor session working off a single drive across the country.

The roadmap focuses on closing the remaining gaps that keep teams reliant on third-party tools. Strada has already shipped upload links so external collaborators can send files in without installing software. Download links are now in development, followed by free commenting, which the company says will not cost users anything because the storage, compute, and bandwidth all sit on the user’s own gear. After that, the team wants to expand RAW camera support beyond Blackmagic, with a stated goal of streaming an 8K RAW file to a phone over LTE.

The build-in-public approach

Strada has stuck to a build-in-public philosophy from day one. According to Michael, every new user gets a personal welcome email, and tech support requests route to his phone rather than to a help desk: no chatbots, no AI deflection, no autoresponders. He framed that direct feedback loop as the only way a small startup can credibly take on a full collaboration platform rather than a single-purpose point solution. The booth footprint tells the same story: a corner of Atlas Lens Co’s space at the company’s first NAB, a 10×20 floor at NAB 2025, and now a full presence with OWC at NAB 2026.

Price and availability

Strada Connect is available now on macOS, with Windows support planned for later in 2026. Subscription tiers start at $8 per month, and according to the company, basic functionality is free, with no per-user fees and no storage caps imposed by Strada itself. The free commenting layer mentioned above is expected to follow the next round of link-sharing features.

For a real-world deployment of Strada Connect on a recent feature-style project, the team’s FUJIFILM GFX ETERNA 55 vs ARRI ALEXA 35 comparison short film used the platform for the full post-production pipeline.

Could browser-based RAW playback and Finder-level remote editing change how you set up your next remote post pipeline? Let us know in the comments!