Multiviews on Live Sports Streaming at NAB 2026
Perhaps the booths that cropped up on my NAB 2026 itinerary and the sessions I squeezed in between simply skewed this way, but it seems like everyone’s favorite sport in streaming this year is, well, sports. Certainly, when it comes to live, the pinnacle of achievement appears to be seamless delivery of premium sports events at global scale, with an eye to “meeting fans exactly where they are”—crossing national, lingual, and cultural borders via localization, and transcending generations through autogenerated highlights and verticalized mobile delivery. And when it comes to traditional landscape sports video streamed to conventional CTV glass, multiview more than ever seems to be the name of the game in 2026.
The first session I caught on the show’s opening day occurred in a section of the streaming—heavy West Hall I could have sworn was dedicated to booths last year (another telltale sign of viewer vendors was the new business-class widened aisles). Titled “The State of Sports Media: Rights Reach, and Revenue,” the session featured influential sports streaming players who are also true believers: the first line I heard from Sanjog Gupta, CEO of the International Cricket Council as I joined midway through was “We need to believe in the power of sport.” (It’s not hard to see why he believes as he operates in a diasporic sport that may fly a bit below the radar in the U.S. but boasts a staggering 2.8 billion fans worldwide.)
“Sport,” Gupta went on to declare, “delivers scale and passion.” And when it comes to feeding that passion, he said, maximizing fan access is key. “The entry gate needs to be so low that every fan you have can be on your journey.”
Meeting Mobile Fans Where They Are
Another striking stat Gupta offered came in a snapshot of the Indian media market. While India lags behind much of the world in terms of the CTV installed base per capita with only 60 million sets, he said, there are 650 million smartphones in India, and 649 million of them stream cricket.
While most of the markets Streaming Media readers follow and operate don’t skew anywhere near so dramatically toward mobile In terms of devices in use (or such a unitary obsession with a single sport), pointing the lion’s share of technology and product development toward CTV, however tempting, is a foolish market strategy. Indeed, many of the vendors I encountered were showcasing new offerings designed to court the mobile-first demographic, particularly Gen Z users whose tastes run to highlights over live games and “swiping over zapping,” as Synamedia Fellow Software Engineer Avi Fruchter characterized the difference between a mobile and remote control-based touchpoints for accessing and choosing content. Swiping can deliver instant access to “an iconic moment in every swipe,” as opposed to a click that takes you to the beginning of a show or an event or deposits you wherever the action happens to be in the case of live TV.
Synamedia’s new GO Shorts offering, though not specifically sports-oriented, is a new addition to Synamedia’s Go OTT platform that’s designed to ensure that “iconic moments” are only a swipe away for mobile users by turning “an operator’s existing content library into a personalized, mobile-first, short-form experience [leveraging] infrastructure already in place.” GO Shorts is part of the trend evident all over the slice of the streaming world I saw at NAB pointing toward courting a highlights-centric audience, next-gen tech overtly designed to appeal to Gen Z content consumption tastes.
AWS was advancing in the same direction with its Elemental Inference solution, which AWS Media Services Head of Product Regina Rossi described as designed for “taking video in real time and creating clips to reach a new audience using the same productionworkflows and scale as in Elemental.” She told me the NBA has already put Inference to work on 63,000 hours of live content from the just-wrapped 2025-26 season.
Lean-Back Interactivity
A Streaming Summit session on “Building Personalized Fan Experiences” brought together NASCAR Managing Director, Live Event Technology Patrick Carroll and Dolby VP of Product and Business Strategy Paul Boustead to discuss how NASCAR leveraged Dolby OptiView to personalize the onsite experience for NASCAR fans by adding (among other things) POV video and in-car audio to NASCAR’s Track app. Boustead made a fascinating point about what they were going for in the UX (a type of needle-threading we’re seeing in the design of multiview implementations as well), describing it as “lean-back personalization”—the idea being that fans who just want to kick back and take in the race can augment the experience without having to work for it.
Carroll described a fascinating arc for the in-car A/V experience in the app from its pre-Dolby days when audio and video were both available but coming from different origins with different latencies and thus no sync, meaning they had to be experienced separately. Not only are the feeds synced now, but he said the latency is low enough that fans can essentially look up from the app where they’re getting the in-car view and engine sounds and see the same action in the race happening in real time.
Achieving this latency is an ongoing challenge, since NASCAR events are outside and don’t benefit from, say, the sort of betting-worthy in-arena private 5G infrastructure available at basketball and hockey stadiums. For a NASCAR track in Chicago, available bandwidth is fairly solid, but for more remote and rural events, they need to bring more bandwidth in, and even then delivering a satisfying experience remains challenging, particularly at the beginning of events when vast number fans are posting selfies and so forth before the action gets underway.
Because of rights issues, the content experience Carroll and Boustead described is available only to fans who are geofenced into the onsite event.
It’s All About Context
On the monetization side, everyone was talking about L-Bars and squeezebacks and all of the clever in-stream monetization technologies and strategies that are shoring up the prospects of sports events that are increasingly expensive to license and deliver but won’t accommodate more disruptive ad breaks to offset those costs. As Harmonic Sr. Director, Global SaaS Solutions Jean Macher explained it, one particular advantage of in-stream ad insertion is that even if it doesn’t replace traditional ad breaks, it provides “incremental revenue on top of the regular ad load.”
On the monetization side, Macher also contended that a transition is underway in live sports streaming from the familiar direct sales approach to more efficient programmatic sales. What makes that possible in this high-stakes context is context itself—specifically, contextual metadata that enables “theme-based contextual targeting” that makes it more likely to offer the type of relevancy that’s more often but more labor-intensively achieved through the direct approach,
Macher highlighted a recent partnership with IRIS.TV to being scene-level contextual targeting to live sports to enable advertisers to monetize critical, high-drama moments in games when fan attention peaks. Macher gave the example of a game that goes into overtime, a point where that game would normally be over. Without contextual data, he said, an advertiser would never know OT was happening, but this contextual approach allows them to capitalize those moments.
Multifaceted Multiviews
Most of us had our first exposure to multiview sports experiences either on Olympics broadcasts, where lots of events are almost always happening simultaneously, or on YouTubeTV’s March Madness coverage, which was critically important to fans on the first weekend and had diminishing value thereafter as the simultaneous action rapidly ebbed.
Multiview implementations seemed to be everywhere at NAB 2026, and unlike many engineering marvels hailed and hyped over the years, this one doesn’t seem to be a solution in search of the problem. One thing that was encouraging to see in multiple Multiview deployments, such as those from Broadpeak, Comcast Technology Solutions, and MediaKind, was the ability to customize the screen layout so that one game (or show) is the focal point—and seeing it happen without delay or disrupting the action. “When you do it at the packager level,” Broadpeak VP Products & Solutions Marketing told me, “you introduce no delay. It’s almost instantaneous when you change layouts.”
Sterkers also demonstrated how Broadpeak is monetizing its Multiview deployment with in-stream ads and shoppability.