The broadcast convention played out against a backdrop of whipsawing markets as vendors braced for more volatility ahead.
LAS VEGAS — Conventions are often a bubble from the outside world, but at this week’s NAB Show, tariffs popped it.
Salvos in President Trump’s trade war were continuously fired, and news alerts buzzed over attendees’ phones. Market uncertainties compounded. A nervous fissure widened.
And while vendors said tariffs were seldom an explicit topic of conversations with their broadcaster customers gathered here, they colored everything.
“It feels unplanned, uncontrolled and unmitigated, and so we have to scramble,” said Jonathan Smith, business development director for cloud at Stockholm-based Net Insight, one of many international vendors at the show.
“The situation is changing every week and every day, if not every hour,” said Stephane Cloirec, VP video appliances and software product management at Harmonic.
“There is anxiety in the halls,” noted Michael Stantor, director, Americas, at Canadian-based Dejero.
That anxiety was exacerbated by a market crisis that refused to stand still, and it played out differently depending on vendors’ direct exposure to tariffs.
In hardware vendor-heavy South Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the issue was a no-go zone for discussion with reporters among some companies. “We don’t comment on that,” said Riedel spokesperson Serkan Guner.
Kim Brown, marketing manager for the Canada-based Matrox Video, simply sighed. “Honestly, we’re just taking it day by day,” she said.
Others, like Avid, looked to reassure customers that they’d be absorbing the tariffs’ impact, according to Craig Wilson, the company’s media and cloud product evangelist.
Telestream’s Mark Wronski, EVP products, said it, too, wasn’t planning to pass on any tariff-related costs just yet as the situation continues to evolve. “It would take several months before we would make a decision,” he said. “We’re not going to press the panic button.”
For an industry widely shifting from hardware- to software-based models, many vendors were quick to underscore that they weren’t in the tariffs’ crosshairs.
Chris Wilson, marketing director for Mediakind, said the company had already been doing extensive work to decouple its software from specific hardware, allowing the latter to be locally sourced as necessary. “That work is probably going to bear fruit quicker because of this situation,” he said.
But even companies that were “100% cloud-based,” such as Belgium’s Mediagenix, know they’re not insulated from knock-on effects. Mediagenix’s Eric Carson, managing director, Americas, said, “We think the cloud infrastructure is going to be impacted in some shape or form,” and noted that the company has already needed to reroute some of its business. “Some of our Canadian suppliers won’t be able to buy from our American entity, so we’ll have to shift that to our Belgian entity,” he said. “At least we have that capability.”
Harmonic’s Cloirec said his company is working on similar redistribution plans. “The good thing is as we are global, we can shift and move things around to try and mitigate things for our customers,” he said.
Tata Communications’ Kevin O’Meara, head of marketing for the media division, added: “It doesn’t impact us directly, however it does have a direct impact on a lot of our suppliers” and therefore its cost base. “We’re probably at the end of that chain, and that will have to be taken into account when we’re renegotiating contracts with our customers.”
Telestream’s Wronski noted that everything in the cloud also originates from hardware somewhere, and the more people using cloud means more hardware needed at the data center. “Somewhere, something gets hit,” he said.
Vendors repeatedly emphasized that unpredictability from the White House has made plotting new courses of action an impossible task for now.
“The fact that it’s very volatile means that we shouldn’t try to course correct too quickly,” said Net Insight’s Smith. “We have to look at the now. As a business, we shouldn’t make any rash decisions.”
One upshot, however, has been to bring vendors closer together, especially as interoperability has been an industry imperative for the last several years. “There’s a lot of camaraderie as an industry” to work through the crisis, said Sam Peterson, Bitcentral’s COO.
Another upshot vendors reported is that broadcast projects haven’t yet been impacted. “No one has implied they’re putting the brakes on what they’re doing with us,” said Frequency CEO Blair Harrison. “In general, everybody who walks into our room has decided to do business in our business.”
Some even saw deals close unexpectedly quicker in the face of prospective price rises from tariffs. “It certainly sped up some purchasing,” said Jeff Moore, CMO of Canadian-based Ross of some U.S. clients hastening their deals.
Other vendors said the tariffs had a chilling effect on NAB Show attendance among their international clients. Jean-Christophe Perier, CMO of Globecast, said the company was back on the exhibition floor for the first time since the pandemic and saw notable declines in customers from Europe and Latin America.
Vubiquity’s Nate Frink, business operations lead, had cancellations from international clients just days before the show kicked off. And Eric Radoff, director of global services at Ateliere, said meetings with Canadian and European clients were down.
But not all international attendees were pessimistic. Bridge Technologies Chairman Simen Frostad, whose company is based in Norway, was defiantly bullish about both the industry’s economic prospects and the NAB Show’s continued relevance as a global marketplace, one in which he, too, had unexpectedly closed some deals during the week.
“A lot of the panic and angst is mostly perceived,” Frostad said. “Don’t let fear dictate reality. That’s not a good playbook situation.”
