Streaming Summit 2026 frames five tracks around unit economics, not growth

The 2026 NAB Streaming Summit (April 20–21, West Hall) organizes its roughly 85 speakers across five substantive content areas: cord-cutting and the new TV bundle; FAST, AVOD, and SVOD business models; OTT churn, retention, and engagement; best practices for optimizing the video workflow for cost and quality; and strategies for content discovery and personalization.

The agenda weighting is a clear editorial signal. The streaming industry's central anxiety in 2026 is not growth but unit economics — how to retain subscribers, control workflow spend, and monetize across fragmented business models. Sessions on packaging and distribution for profitability sit alongside advertising measurement and video-at-scale delivery. For the first time, none of the five primary tracks is titled around subscriber acquisition or market expansion.

Chaired by analyst Dan Rayburn and priced at $699–$849, the Summit pulls in executives from Paramount Global, Amazon Prime Video, NBCUniversal, JioStar, and BBC Studios. The combination of five discrete editorial lanes and a roster of platform-side operators — rather than vendor-heavy panels — reflects how the Summit has shifted since its early years: the infrastructure conversation now runs through a business-model filter, and workflow optimization sessions are expected to carry explicit cost-per-asset framing.