OTT Engine at NAB Show 2026: Notes from Our First Las Vegas Booth

We flew home from Las Vegas on Wednesday night, came back to Toronto with sore feet, a stack of business cards, three signed pilots, and far more questions than answers. NAB Show 2026 was OTT Engine's first time exhibiting — a 10×10 booth, four long days of conversation, and a steady stream of streaming publishers who wanted to talk. This is the honest version of how it went.

Where we landed on the floor

Our booth was W1724 — a 10×10 in the West Hall, one row off the main aisle. We had Ateme directly behind us, TVU Networks one space down, Pronology and Advantech as our row-mates, and across the aisle: Microsoft in a 40×50 island and Appear in another 40×50 next to it.

We worried about being the smallest fish in the pond. It turned out to be the best thing that happened to us. The natural foot-traffic flow came up our row from TVU Networks, past Ateme, and right to our booth — and a second wave drifted back from the Microsoft island the same way. We sat exactly where curious visitors slowed down, and that accidental adjacency drove 60% of our conversations.

What we put on the wall

We agonized over the booth message for weeks before the show. A roll-up banner gets one sentence. After more drafts than we want to admit, we landed on: "The automation engine behind your streaming platform." The banner anchored the booth; a QR code for the one-year-free-service Lucky Draw sat at eye-level beneath it; a single OTT Engine wordmark held the corner. The set-up was intentionally tight so the message could do the talking.

We also went into the show with several hundred black, OTT-Engine-branded show bags ready to go. Every visitor who stopped at the booth walked away with one — loaded with our one-pager, a couple of useful CTV references, and the Lucky Draw URL on the side. By Wednesday evening we had handed out almost the entire stack. Branded bags do not close deals on their own, but they do carry your wordmark across the rest of the show floor on the shoulders of people who already chose to talk to you. We watched our own bag walk past the booth couple of times over the four days.

The thing we did not anticipate: the tagline did most of our qualifying for us. Visitors who didn't operate streaming platforms walked past. Visitors who did would stop, read it, and say something like "wait — what does automation mean here?" That was the opening sentence of about three quarters of our best conversations.

The conversations we kept having

Once we'd done thirty or forty visitor conversations, the same three shapes kept showing up. We started keeping a tally on the back of a stack of business cards. By Wednesday night the leaders were:

1. "I have content but no engineering team — how fast can I be on Roku and Fire TV?" By a wide margin the most common opening. Mostly mid-sized faith broadcasters, regional sports rights holders, indie film catalogs, and a surprising number of YouTube creators who'd hit a monetization ceiling and wanted their own CTV presence.
2. "We're already on all the major platforms — but our cost stack is out of control." Publishers running channels across Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV but stitching together ingest, transcoding, packaging, ad insertion, and analytics from four or five different vendors. The line that kept landing: "we replace the stack with one platform, and the monthly bill drops while the launch velocity goes up."
3. "How does your AI actually help us — does it save real time?" Every booth in the West Hall has the word AI on it somewhere. We got pretty good at answering this honestly: OTT Engine automates the parts of the workflow that humans usually babysit — cue-point detection, editorial metadata, multi-platform packaging, ad-yield re-ordering — so a two-person ops team can run what used to need ten. The productivity story (not the model story) was what closed the room.

The 1-Year Free Service Lucky Draw

The promotion was simple: scan the QR code at the booth, drop in a name and email, and one entrant would get a full year of OTT Engine service on the house. We were nervous about it. Free-stuff giveaways at trade shows tend to attract everyone, not just buyers.

It worked better than we expected, for a reason we didn't expect. The QR code wasn't really a giveaway — it was a conversation hook. Almost every entrant scanned, then stayed and asked questions. The scan got people to stop. The conversation closed them (or didn't). We're going to keep that mechanic for the next show, just probably with a smaller prize.

The winner will be drawn and announced shortly after we have finished verifying the entries.

Five things we learned the hard way

1. 10×10 is the right size for a first show. The footprint worked. It was busy without being chaotic, the message stayed visible from across the aisle, and it forced us to be deliberate about what went on the wall. Next year we'd stay at 10×10 and put the upgrade into a proper huddle area instead.
2. The banner does the headline; the demos do the closing. We ran demos all four days — laptop, tablet, phone, live-channel pulls on a publisher's own content where they wanted to see it. The banner caught the eye and earned the stop; the demos sealed the conversation. The two work together; cutting either one would have hurt.
3. "What is OTT Engine?" is the wrong question to optimize for. Nobody asked us that. They asked "can it do X for my catalog?" Future booths should be organized around the X, not the brand.
4. Electrical outlets at the booth are sparse — bring your own. The drop we'd ordered was a single low-amp outlet at the back of the booth. By show open on day one we were running a laptop, a tablet, a phone charger, and the banner light off it. Pack a long extension cord and a multi-outlet strip; budget for an upgrade to a 20-amp drop if you can — you'll use it.
5. Take your photo on Tuesday, not Wednesday. By Wednesday we both looked like we hadn't slept in a week. (We hadn't.) The photo above is from Wednesday afternoon. Lesson learned.

The customers who said yes

We don't have permission to name names yet — those announcements will come over the next few weeks — but here is the shape of the new business the show generated:

• Three signed pilots already in build-out. One regional sports network in the United States, one international broadcaster with FAST ambitions, and one indie film distributor moving off a stitched-together open-source stack.
• Eight serious follow-up conversations with publishers in the 50,000–500,000-monthly-active-viewer range, the sweet spot for our Broadcast and Broadcast Network plans.
• Two reseller/integrator conversations with regional consultancies that want OTT Engine to be the platform layer under their custom builds.
• One existing OTT Engine customer walked up to the booth, introduced themselves, and stayed for an hour to share what is and is not working on their channel. That conversation was worth the whole show.

What we'd do differently next year

NAB 2027 is already on our calendar. The plan, give or take:

• Step up to a 10×10 with a proper huddle area and one wall dedicated to a "live channel running on OTT Engine" demo loop.
• Pre-book demo slots. We had at least a dozen visitors who wanted a deeper walk-through and we had to hand them a Calendly link in the moment. A handful never followed up.
• A printed one-pager per persona — broadcaster, FAST operator, indie filmmaker, SVOD founder. Trying to answer everyone with one piece of paper means answering nobody well.
• An off-floor dinner on Monday night for the top inbound leads of the day. The deals happen at dinner, not at the booth.
• The Lucky Draw stays — same prize, same mechanic. We earned it.

Thank you

To everyone who stopped at W1724 — whether you scanned the QR, asked us a tough question, drew a workflow diagram on the back of our flyer, or just wandered over because Microsoft's booth was too crowded — thank you. NAB 2026 changed how we describe what OTT Engine does, and the new customers we met there are going to change how we build it.

If you saw us at the show and have not heard back from us yet, please drop us a note — we got through every business card on the flight home, but trade-show pipelines are messy by definition and we'd rather hear from you twice than not at all.

See you at NAB 2027.

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