In August we published Agentic AI in Media: Control is the Story, arguing that the story in media technology was control. Not which model wins, but who owns the layer that decides what a system is allowed to do. We built it from two methods that had no reason to agree. Lorenzo ran a corpus of 148 NAB 2026 exhibitor announcements and found that the top word was control, co-occurring most with IP, with AI sixth behind cloud. I walked the floor for five days and heard the same thing in private that the corpus found in public, which was that the marketing was about AI features and the roadmap conversations were about wiring and position in the stack.
We closed by naming four things we would watch for at IBC and promising to publish the verdict either way. The four tests are at the end of Part 1, for anyone who wants them.
Here it is, and it …
