ARRI’s New Owner Thomas Riedel, with Chris Richter and David Bermbach: Exclusive NAB 2026 Interview

by Nino LeitnerApril 19^th, 2026

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At ARRI House during NAB 2026, just five days after signing the deal, new ARRI owner Thomas Riedel sat down with CineD for an exclusive video interview alongside ARRI Managing Directors Chris Richter and David Bermbach. Watch the full conversation above, covering the industry reaction, Eurovision in Vienna, the HONOR partnership, ARRI Rental, education, and what ARRI might look like in 2031.

The contract was signed lastMonday night after what Thomas Riedel described as a very long notary session. By the time he arrived in Las Vegas for NAB 2026, the ink on the paperwork was barely dry, and yet the announcement of the Riedel acquisition of ARRI had already set off a wave of reactions across the industry. The combination of an unusually clean ownership structure (a sole proprietor buying with his own capital), a shared German heritage, and a stated plan to keep ARRI operating independently has answered many of the anxieties that followed months of sale speculation.

The ink is still wet

Five days in, Thomas Riedel is still processing the scale of what he has done. “The reactions were overwhelming,” he told us, noting messages from people he had not spoken to in years. What struck him most, he said, was that the response was uniformly positive, whether it came from inside ARRI, inside Riedel, or from the outside world.

That matters, because the preceding year had been anything but reassuring for ARRI. The company sold its Claypaky stage lighting subsidiary to EK Inc. and then cut 150 jobs while closing two German facilities. The Bloomberg report confirming that the Stahl family was exploring a sale had triggered a long list of potential buyers in the rumor mill, but Riedel’s name never came up. He said he liked the fact that no one really knew. Several cooperation projects between the two companies had been quietly running in parallel, which in retrospect looks like the groundwork for exactly this outcome.

A circle closing back to Lillehammer

Riedel’s connection to ARRI goes further back than most people realize. As a 15-year-old hobbyist, he used ARRI theater spotlights as loaners: too expensive to own, but already admired. The origin story he usually tells about his own company centers on the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, where Riedel Communications found its breakthrough after helping out ARRI in the last moment, when ARRI wasn’t prepared for the intercom requirements of the opening ceremony, for which they supplied the lighting. What he rarely mentions is that ARRI was the one to pull him into that project. His job in Lillehammer directly led to Riedel’s entry into Formula 1, so he feels like he can attribute much of his success back to ARRI, decades before acquiring them.

That is something which now closes a circle, and that’s so nice really, almost emotional for me. – Thomas Riedel

That personal history, combined with nearly four decades of running Riedel, is part of why the acquisition was structured the way it was. Thomas is 58, the deal is 100 percent his own capital, and he has publicly said on the OMR Podcast (in German) that he would never sell Riedel because he does not know anyone who said selling was a good idea. When asked what he learned from the Stahl family, which had just made the opposite decision, he declined to comment on their reasoning. His own position was clear: he is not buying ARRI to flip it. “I’m here for a very long time,” he said, adding that his main concern is simply his own age and how long he can stay fit enough to drive this forward.

Cinema stays top-end, but the next generation matters

The question cinematographers have been asking most loudly since the deal was announced is whether ARRI’s cinema business excites the new owner as much as the broadcast and live side does. Thomas Riedel said people should not worry. Riedel already has products, such as the Bolero wireless intercom, running on high-level productions, even Hollywood sets. ARRI will continue to be a top player in cinema. The addition of live and broadcast is, in his framing, complementary rather than competitive.

David Bermbach, ARRI Managing Director, was explicit about where the cinema business sits in the new setup. The top end is home, but it is also the future, because there will always be a market for the best image, the best cameras, and the best systems in the world. At the same time, the industry is changing. Young filmmakers do not start with 16mm; they start with their phones, then move to more prosumer tools, then into professional gear. ARRI’s answer to this is partnerships rather than a sub-€10K ARRI cinema camera. The recently announced ARRI and HONOR collaboration, which will first appear in the HONOR ROBOT PHONE, is the clearest example. Bermbach described it not as badge-selling but as a mutual technical and strategic collaboration built around image, workflow, user experience, and AI.

Someone definitely needs to do the top end anyway. Even though the quantities might be small, someone needs to do that. And in this field, we believe it’s us. That doesn’t mean we are not going down as well. – Thomas Riedel

Chris Richter, also Managing Director of ARRI, added that capturing emerging filmmakers early, bringing them into the ARRI ecosystem, and ensuring ARRI image quality is available at more accessible price points is crucial. Making sure that the image, the image processing, and the quality that ARRI stands for reach that audience is the work ahead. He confirmed there are exciting projects in the pipeline, though none the team could discuss yet.

What end-to-end solutions mean for the DP on set

Thomas Riedel has long argued that the future is about end-to-end solutions rather than individual products. For a DP on an ALEXA 35 set, that could translate into wirelessly connected devices, shared data, video, and control across the crew, and shot footage already available to producers who are not physically on location. Riedel’s RF expertise will flow into ARRI as technology building blocks.

David Bermbach picked up the same thread from the DP’s creative-control angle. As studios push toward higher efficiency and more industrialized workflows, networking and communication have become the biggest trouble points on set. Reliability drops, complexity rises, and the creative people spend more time managing the technology than the story. The ARRI approach, he said, is to build a bubble of technology around the creatives so they do not have to worry about it, extending all the way to cloud-based workflows for faster turnaround. ARRI’s existing tools already hint at this direction: the ARRI Camera Companion App for remote control, the ARRI Film Lab plugin for analog film emulation in DaVinci Resolve, Baselight, and Nuke, and upcoming Unreal Engine tools for digital-twin productions.

Rental and services: different philosophies, shared opportunity

Both companies run significant service arms alongside their manufacturing businesses, but they come at it from opposite directions. ARRI Rental operates one of the largest cinema rental networks in the world. Riedel’s Managed Technology division serves clients like Formula 1 and SailGP, where either the scale or the complexity is beyond what a normal rental provider can do. Crucially, Riedel’s philosophy is not to compete with rental-company clients who buy Riedel equipment.

Asked whether this thinking might change anything on the ARRI side, Thomas said the honest answer is that he does not know yet. But he sees opportunity in it, and he is not a strong believer in the model of selling equipment to rental houses while also competing with them at rental.

ALEXA 35 Live cameras at Eurovision 2026 in Vienna

Perhaps the most visible showcase of the Riedel-ARRI combination is already in build-up: this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. CineD is the official behind-the-scenes partner of ARRI for Eurovision (you’ll see more videos on that soon!), and cameras are already being rigged in Munich and Vienna. Thomas Riedel confirmed he was the one who initiated getting ARRI cameras into the production. He had been talking to the Austrian state broadcaster ORF, a long-standing Riedel client, and pitched the idea of bringing a cinematic look to what he called the largest music TV show in the world. ORF agreed, and the deal with ARRI followed.

Thomas said there will be 26 ARRI ALEXA cameras in the live environment, alongside Riedel infrastructure. NEP, the broadcast production company responsible for Eurovision’s trucks, told the CineD team during the first shooting days of the behind-the-scenes documentary that integrating the ARRI ALEXA 35 Live multicam system into the broadcast workflow was no different than integrating standard broadcast cameras. Concerns about complexity had evaporated once the engineering work was done. For Thomas Riedel, this is effectively the perfect showcase for the vision he is selling: one set of products, one combined infrastructure, one live production that millions will watch.

Education and the long-term pipeline

Education came up as one of the areas where the new ownership might accelerate rather than change course. The ARRI Academy has trained generations of cinematographers, and its certified online courses are hosted exclusively on MZed, CineD’s sister education platform. Thomas Riedel said he is very committed to education in general and open to continuing and expanding the ARRI Education Program. David Bermbach framed education as social responsibility, noting that a healthy, self-reinventing industry is the basis for everything ARRI does commercially.

Where will ARRI be in 2031?

Asked where ARRI will be in five years, all three leaders answered slightly differently but arrived at the same picture. Hardware will still exist, but more of ARRI’s value will come from software, services, and integrating technologies. The hardware camera, as David Bermbach put it, may become more of an entry point into an ecosystem for producing content, one that works hand in hand with virtually produced content, AI tools, and everything that is generated on computers. LUKA for Unreal Engine, the ARRI Film Lab software, and the licensing relationship with HONOR are the visible first steps into that more hybrid universe.

Chris Richter added a promise that will interest a lot of readers: ARRI intends to claw back more of its lighting business, with exciting new lighting products coming this year. High-end motion picture cameras remain what he called the DNA of the company. Workflows, however, are where the real efficiency gains of the next five years will be won. High dynamic range, he noted, is not only an aesthetic tool but a production-speed tool, relevant also particularly in live scenarios where lighting conditions cannot be controlled at all times like on a film set.

I see us clawing back some of our lighting business. There’s going to be exciting new lighting products coming out this year. – Chris Richter, ARRI

Thomas Riedel closed with what sounded almost like a request: watch the journey, ask in between, and if the combined Riedel-ARRI entity loses track, help get it back on course. For an industry that has spent the last few years watching RED absorbed into Nikon, Leica’s future floated as a billion-euro question, and ARRI’s own parent navigate a difficult restructuring, a single owner publicly inviting scrutiny is its own kind of statement.

Does the Riedel era for ARRI inspire optimism, or do you see risks we have not discussed? Let us know in the comments below!