NAB 2026, Via LA, and the Future of NDI|HX
While all the world is in turmoil, it almost seems like the broadcast and streaming world is, well, boring in comparison. We’ve figured out streaming—even the big companies are able to do ad-hoc sports and event streams without crashing down like the first few.
The industry is busy eating its own tail with big companies going into debt buying other big companies, and other typical big company stuff.
AI (and Alleged AI) at Center Stage
The AI label is being slapped onto everything—even things that did tasks without AI now are labeled AI because, well, I guess they think it sounds cool. Human tracking has been a thing for nearly 20 years with PTZ cameras, but now it’s AI tracking and, well, it still gets it wrong sometimes. Even on the expensive PTZ cameras. There's just no substitute for a human operator.
What would be nice to see in production is some way to take a professional spherical 360° camera and deliver multiple windowed outputs from that, even ones that dynamically resize to include additional people. Much as Apple’s Center Stage uses an oversampled wide angle camera to deliver a “windowed” version from that sensor as the actual deliverable. I’d love to put an 8K spherical on stage and deliver multiple HD shots that, because they’re all there all the time, I can actually cut between them. But alas, that’s still not a thing.
Via LA, AVC, and the Future of NDI
NDI is 10 years old, and while SMPTE 2110 is gaining adoption at the high end, many are indeed realizing that there's a lot that goes into establishing an entirely new, very robust data infrastructure to handle the dozens of pathways that big-bandwidth IP requires to be useful. NDI has actually gone in the other direction, delivering 4K in even lower bandwidths using H.265 in NDI|HX3. You can push multiple 4K signals around an existing schoolroom or church network, making implementation far easier for the vast majority of IP video users. But this may be in jeopardy.
Via Licensing Alliance (Via LA), the patent pool administrator for H.264/AVC since May 2023, recently restructured its streaming license fees and replaced a flat $100,000 annual cap with a tiered system that tops out at $4.5 million per year for the largest platforms, as reported by Jan Ozer in Streaming Media in March 2026. The new fee structure applies only to previously unlicensed implementers seeking a license starting in 2026.
Ozer’s article focuses primarily on video content streaming providers, but Via’s changes also affect hardware. In early 2026, both HP and Dell are shipping hardware with HEVC disabled. This, after the licensing fee per device apparently went from 20c to 24c per device. Yes, a 4c increase made the computer manufacturers disable it. Now end users can buy a $1 app to enable what was 24c for the computer maker.
But the bigger question to me is what this will mean in the world of NDI hardware, apps, and even the suite of tools from Vizrt itself. This suite is free as of this writing, and is distributed worldwide in the millions I would expect. But because it involves encoding, presumably it is subject to the new fees. Hardware cameras, encoders, switchers, and more are all leverage NDI|HX, with some even completely ignoring NDI|FX, which does not use H.26x but rather Newtek’s SpeedHQ codec. VIA has noted existing licenses are grandfathered (for now), but new hardware needs to consider what new licensing costs, and terms will be.
Even as a longtime fan and proponent of NDI, I feel this puts the entire future of HX on shaky ground. Seeing Dell and HP freak out over just a 4c increase makes you wonder about the viability of cameras and switchers with H.26x-based NDI. How much will the prices change? Maybe VizRT should open talks with Open Media Transport, an NDI alternative introduced in 2025, with regards to licensing an alternative codec. While not as efficient as H.26x, VIA making the future more uncertain means having a backup lined up is a very worthwhile idea.
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