NAB 2026 Wrap-Up: ARRI Under Riedel, the Cinema-to-Broadcast Shift, and Is NAB at a Tipping Point? – Focus Check ep113

by Nino LeitnerApril 23^rd, 2026

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On the final day of NAB 2026, Johnnie and I were joined by Graham Sheldon and returning guest Michael Cioni (Strada) at the B&H podcast studio for a wide-ranging reckoning on a show that looked and felt meaningfully different from prior years. Practical AI integration, Chinese manufacturers pressuring Japanese incumbents, the quiet relief of ARRI landing with Thomas Riedel rather than a private equity fund, Blackmagic’s pivot toward 100G broadcast, and an uncomfortable conversation about NAB’s own shrinking footprint anchor the ninety-minute conversation. Let’s dive into our NAB 2026 wrap-up.

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Recorded in the podcasting studio that B&H hosted at its central-hall booth, this year’s NAB wrap benefits from a fifth perspective that has become something of a CineD tradition: Strada founder Michael Cioni returning for a second consecutive NAB recap. Between the four of us we shot close to fifty videos across four days, most of which will be staggered out over the coming two weeks, so this conversation intentionally ranges across the macro trends rather than cataloguing every product. Here are the themes that emerged.

AI stops being a separate category

Michael opened with what is probably the cleanest read of the show. Four years ago the AI companies were new businesses nobody had heard of, housed in the West Hall almost intentionally sequestered from the rest of NAB. This year the West Hall is largely empty and AI has been absorbed into tools filmmakers already know. DaVinci Resolve 21 is the obvious example, with de-aging, tracking, IntelliSearch, and CineFocus shipping as practical features rather than AI-for-AI’s-sake showpieces. Our DaVinci Resolve 21 hands-on at NAB 2026 covers what the features actually do on the floor.

Michael’s forward-looking prediction: rhythmic editing assistance. The feedback “can we speed up the pace” or “slow down the pace” is one of the most common creative-director notes on a first cut, and it is the perfect task for AI, not to replace the edit but to move cuts per minute in a few seconds instead of three or four hours. That, he argued, is where integrated AI inside timeline solutions will go next. Graham distilled the consensus: AI is helping creatives, not replacing them.

Chinese manufacturers are no longer chasing, they are setting pace

Johnnie took the conversation to cameras and lenses, and argued this is the first NAB where Chinese brands are genuinely competing with Japanese incumbents rather than filling leftover niches. Kinefinity finally showed what amounts to a real pocket cinema camera, with the Kinefinity Vista teasing full-frame 6K open-gate recording, a built-in 240GB SSD, and a sub-$3,000 target price. Alongside it, Pixboom continues its move to democratize high-speed cinematography, with the Pixboom Spark shipping in May and 12-bit RAW plus ProRes RAW firmware updates lined up for later in the year.

Nino’s read is that DJI, Insta360, and Pixboom have been smart to pick categories the Japanese have never really built for. DJI’s Pocket line did not exist before DJI invented it. Pixboom is turning high-speed into something that can live permanently on set for a production rather than requiring a Phantom Flex rental. Johnnie’s concern is whether Japanese manufacturers wake up in time, before their situation mirrors European car makers faced with Chinese EV competition, which he described as a point of no return for parts of that industry.

One structural observation kept returning: many Chinese brands now actively solicit customer input through public landing pages with direct contact addresses. Good luck finding a phone number for Sony, Graham noted, as the Sony booth sat literally and figuratively as a black box next door to our podcast studio.

The sales culture problem, and why innovators leave

The discussion turned to a decades-old Steve Jobs clip from his NeXT era that Michael cited: when sales and marketing start driving a company, they promote each other upward, and innovators get displaced because they are harder to promote than boisterous salespeople. The outcome in large brands, whether camera companies, movie studios, or GoPro in its maintenance-iteration years, is a culture that treats innovators as a footnote and the roadmap as something customers should wait for rather than shape. Nino connected that directly to Hollywood’s sequel-and-prequel fatigue, and Graham added that professional managers rather than writers or cinematographers are now running most of the major studios.

Johnnie pushed harder: the core business should be innovation. If you do not try things, they never leave the building. Sometimes the market says no, he said, but that is how you learn. Michael added a broader warning about sunk cost fallacy. Apple shelved what is reportedly around $10 billion of car project rather than ship something it did not believe in. Most companies would struggle to abandon a $100,000 commitment, and that inability is exactly the mistake.

ARRI’s new era, and what it signals

With the ink on Thomas Riedel’s acquisition of ARRI barely dry, we used day zero of the show to publish a forty-minute exclusive interview with Riedel alongside managing directors David Bermbach and Chris Richter. Community reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and Graham summed up why: this is a safe acquisition in the sense that the worst outcome, a private equity owner optimizing for exit rather than brand, did not happen. A sole-proprietor German buyer with shared cultural language and a stated plan for operational independence is almost the best realistic outcome the community could have hoped for. Background on the deal is in our initial coverage of the Riedel acquisition.

The harder conversation at our table was about what got ARRI into a position to be sold at all. Michael’s diagnosis was not primarily the writers’ strike, which in his reading simply marked a turning point already visible on the graph. The more fundamental problem was overbuilding for peak TV, when 2017 to 2019 produced more Hollywood-style content than has ever been produced in any era, against the backdrop of roughly twenty years of zero-interest-rate financing. When the market right-sized, $100,000-plus cameras with seventeen stops of dynamic range no longer had enough productions willing to pay. Michael’s sharpest observation: ARRI should have built an Alexa Micro, not an Alexa Mini. The Mini sold into the same client base as the Alexa XT and Alexa 65. A legitimate $10,000 Micro using the older ALEV 3 sensor at 60fps, ProRes-only, at 3.2K, would have brought a generation of young filmmakers onto the brand. Nothing at that price ever came.

Cinema contracts, broadcast expands

The other story of the week is that the cinema market is contracting at the top while becoming fuzzy at the edges, and almost every serious manufacturer is pivoting some portion of its effort toward broadcast and live. ARRI’s broadcast direction under Riedel is only the most visible example. Blackmagic Design did not launch a new cinema camera at NAB 2026; instead, the company went all-in on 100G Ethernet and SMPTE-2110, upgrading its entire lineup for live production.

ZCAM, often off our immediate radar, turns out to be supplying hundreds of cameras to Olympic-association and live-event production, having identified the IP-based box camera niche earlier than almost anyone. Michael’s blunt summary: the single biggest missing feature in cinema cameras today is proper Ethernet-based control and access. Blackmagic is essentially alone in crossing that bridge with a full cinema solution. Mirrorless cameras are now normal on major documentary productions and even at the Olympics, which means large-sensor acquisition is becoming the baseline across broadcast too. The practical question Graham raised: as traditional film and television contracts, should operator friends in Los Angeles actively look at broadcast as a career avenue? Probably yes.

The speculative outcome: there may never be a Sony Venice 3. There may be a very long life for Venice 2, with everything else aimed at the direction Riedel’s ARRI and Blackmagic are moving. The long-anticipated Sony FX4, widely expected to slot between the FX3 and FX6, is still conspicuously absent.

NAB itself is at an inflection point

This was the conversation the room kept circling back to. Michael argued that attendee quality was visibly higher this year, with very few tourists and almost everyone being a genuine user or buyer. That is a real positive. Johnnie’s counter was more alarming: quality alone does not sustain an exhibition this size. If repeat exhibitors see empty booths, they rethink next year. If enough of them rethink, the snowball reverses. The NAB Creator Lab, literally behind our podcast studio, was deserted, and international attendance was visibly lower than in previous years. Michael’s comparison was to the Great American Mall: once Sears and Dillard’s leave, even Apple eventually pulls out, and the cascade is faster than anyone expects. All it would take, he estimated, is another ten or fifteen percent of booking drop for the domino effect to accelerate.

The diagnosis all four of us landed on is that NAB has a customer-definition problem. Is the show for YouTube creators? For broadcast buyers? For Sony and Canon procurement contacts? For cinema? The spray-and-pray attempt to be all of those things simultaneously, Michael argued, is what erodes gravitational pull for any of them. Graham raised the complementary point: local community events and regional shows, where you actually meet end users who want to touch equipment and ask specific questions, are consuming some of the oxygen that used to belong to NAB. Nino pointed out that the same contraction is visible at IBC in Europe, so this is not a purely American phenomenon.

Gaussian splatting and 4D video stole the floor

If one category of technology surprised all of us, it was 4D video. Two companies showed working implementations: the Chinese camera maker Opspot, whose Tail2 PTZ camera accepts both data and power through a single Ethernet cable, partnered with 4DV AI, which uses Gaussian splatting to interpolate between dozens of simultaneously filmed cameras arranged around a subject and generate a navigable 3D recording (full-scale studios use up to 300 cameras). Radiant Images demonstrated essentially the same idea using iPhones. You can move through the space with a mouse on a computer, or walk around a virtual dancer or cat on a Meta Quest or Vision Pro. We have written about Gaussian splatting before in our bullet time and volumetric capture deep-dive, and the workflow is also central to our MZed course The Efficient Filmmaker: Scan and Plan, which is continuously updated alongside the technology.

Blackmagic’s URSA Cine Immersive 100G belongs in the same conversation, delivering 8K per eye at 16K total for Apple Vision Pro capture, with a new New York episode of the Elevated series released during the show that Nino called the most convincing immersive content he has seen. The difference with 4D volumetric capture is that it is not a static viewpoint: combined with CGI, and given the likely demand from gaming studios rather than only cinema, it is probably a larger downstream industry than anything immediately adjacent to us.

Favorites from the show

Graham chose two lighting products. The Profoto 3×2, priced around $15,000, addresses a niche the ARRI SkyPanel S360 historically owned, at roughly a quarter of the weight, which makes it a plausible flagship key light for the network productions he shoots in the US. His honorable mention was the NANLUX Evoke 5C, a pocket-sized IP67 point source with optional underwater housing rated to ten meters, CRMX receiver modules, a full magnetic accessory system, and pricing that starts at $219 per unit or $2,950 for a loaded eight-light kit case.

Johnnie’s favorites reflected his recurring theme: things that fit into a bag stay in the kit, things that do not stay behind. The Kinefinity Vista, the NANLUX Evoke 5C, small capable lenses, and Iodyne’s new Pro Mini SSD all fit that philosophy. As we get older, he noted, nobody wants to schlep heavy gear on a shoulder all day.

Michael’s pick was outside CineD’s usual remit but, he argued, entirely relevant to the creative process. Suno, the AI music composition tool, behaves differently from generative video AI like Sora: instead of a finished black-box output, it generates the composition and exports MIDI stems so a musician can bring the material into Logic, Nuendo, or Pro Tools and keep working. Michael plays nine instruments and framed Suno as the opposite of random, rewarding actual compositional intent rather than prompt lottery. For a broader perspective on ethical AI in filmmaking, Drew Geraci’s Directing the Future: Ethical AI Video for Filmmakers course on MZed continues to be updated as the tools evolve.

Nino’s own top-of-show pick was the 4D video work described above, along with the Photo page arriving in DaVinci Resolve 21, which eliminates the Photoshop-to-Lightroom-to-NLE round trip that has defined still-to-motion workflows for twenty years. Michael added OWC’s Envoy Ultra, a hermetically sealed drive with a captive cable, no vent, and the whole chassis acting as a heat sink, built specifically for DITs working in dust and water. Every unit leaving the factory is tested individually, which is exactly the kind of detail only a real user-feedback loop surfaces.

Over the next two weeks, roughly five videos per day will continue to roll out of our NAB 2026 coverage pipeline, so keep checking the site for hands-on looks at the cameras, lenses, and lighting products referenced above. The full Focus Check ep113 episode is available on CineD and on all major podcast platforms, and last week’s Focus Check ep112 on the LIT DUO 1 and building a lighting company in Europe is worth catching up on if you missed it.

Chapters and topics in this Episode:

00:00 Intro — NAB 2026 special episode
0:06 Welcome & meet the guests
1:30 Overview: 50 videos, staggered releases
2:19 Michael Cioni: AI integrating into real tools (Resolve 20.1)
4:36 AI assisting editors, not replacing them
5:00 Graham: cinema glass, anamorphics & T1 primes
6:39 Johnny: Chinese cameras challenging Japanese dominance
8:00 Kinefinity & Bosma — affordable full-frame cinema cameras
10:21 DJI, Insta360 & finding niche markets
11:31 PixBoom high-speed camera — making slow-mo accessible
13:00 Japanese companies: conservative culture vs. fast-moving rivals
14:00 GoPro as a cautionary tale — fads, trends & standards
16:00 Why companies stop listening to customers
17:00 How to synthesize real user feedback
19:00 Steve Jobs on why sales culture kills innovation
20:09 Marvel sequels, peak TV & the overbuilding problem
21:40 The ARRI acquisition — who bought it & why it matters
25:00 ARRI’s decline: writer’s strike, peak TV & the ZERP era
27:44 Alexa 35 pre-orders, layoffs & the lighting division
29:04 Thomas Riedel — a safe pair of hands?
31:00 Why private equity would have been the worst outcome
33:31 Red sold to Nikon — smart exit or low price?
34:09 Should ARRI have built a consumer camera?
35:20 Adobe’s multi-front war — Canva, CapCut & Evoto
38:00 ARRI’s Germanic perfectionism vs. iterative releases
40:10 Canon in the high-end: lessons learned
40:32 Sony Venice — succeeding where others haven’t
41:01 ARRI pivots to broadcast — collision course with Sony?
42:12 Alexa 35 Live at Eurovision 2026 — CineD media partnership
45:19 Is broadcast the new lifeline for cinema camera makers?
47:10 Blackmagic Design — going all-in on ethernet & broadcast
49:31 Small HD, Evoto & attacking one vulnerability at a time
51:31 Michael Cioni on building Strada in public
53:20 Sunk-cost fallacy — knowing when to change course
55:00 Tiny product teams & the power of iteration
57:12 NAB show floor highlights — what inspired us
57:39 Graham: GoPro’s Hail Mary & entrepreneurs taking risks
1:00:43 Michael: quality of NAB attendees is up, numbers are down
1:02:44 Nino: fewer international visitors, missing creators
1:04:04 Johnny’s red flag — is NAB heading for an inflection point?
1:06:00 Michael: NAB needs to find its ideal customer profile
1:08:14 The great American mall analogy — cascading effect
1:09:38 IBC, South Hall & the shrinking show floor
1:11:30 Streamers buying live sports rights — what it means
1:12:01 Blackmagic immersive camera & the Vision Pro
1:13:37 Nino’s favorite: 4D video & Gaussian Splatting studios
1:18:00 Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive — 16K for VR
1:19:20 DaVinci Resolve 20.1 photo page — bad news for Adobe
1:20:00 Michael’s favorite: Suno AI music composition
1:28:46 AI as a creative superpower, not a replacement
1:31:33 Graham’s favorites: Profoto 3×2 & NanoLux 5C
1:33:02 Johnny’s favorites: small capable tools & Kinefinity Vista
1:34:38 Wrap-up & goodbye from NAB 2026

Does the cinema-to-broadcast shift change your own kit planning, and is NAB still relevant to you next year? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below! Let us know what you think about our NAB 2026 wrap-up.