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In this last article on digital storage at the 2026 NAB show we will cover more storage system vendors as well as cloud and service providers announcements at the show.

Archiving and data preservation are important for the M&E industry because this content is a cultural archive, reflecting who we are and what we have done. It also has continuing monetary value. Older analog and digital storage formats on physical media are decaying and a lot of historical rich media content has been lost due to various factors.

Coughlin Associates estimates that, worldwide, there are about 42 million hours of rich media content on older digital and analog storage that hasn’t been converting into modern digital formats. Converting this content to a modern digital format before it disappears is a race against time. Several companies at the 2026 NAB show were showing products for helping to preserve this content.

EditShare was showing a number of digital storage products for the M&E industry at the show, particularly their various EFS products. These included SSD storage in portable systems for the field and HDDs for studio workflows as shown below.

Editshare was also showing a collaboration with Lasergraphics film archiving and restoration as shown below. The EFS NVMe storage products were being used to capture film scanned content at resolutions up to 16K and 30 frames per second.

I met with Mark Gray from Greymeta in the West Hall and talked with him about their products. Graymeta has long be involved in creating and managing rich media content with various meta-data tools. The company also has continued the SAMMA digitization services. SAMMA stands for System for Automating Migration of Media Archives and was developed for the Library of Congress to efficiently digitize videotape collections.

I met briefly with Digital Bedrock at the show. The company provides managed and secure digital preservation and archiving services. After helping to analyze the content to be preserved to help with metadata they write your data on 3 independent LTO tapes in an open non-proprietary format and then store these in geographically dispersed vaults for disaster recovery.

Speaking about archiving. At the show someone showed me one of the hermetically sealed storage containers from Atlas for storing data on synthetic DNA, shown below. The sealed container keeps oxygen and water from the dried DNA until it is reconstituted and read.

I also met with several companies’ providing cloud storage related services at the NAB. LucidLink announced its LucidLink Developer Platform. This enables technical teams to automate their operations using LucidLink. They also announced LucidLink Connect. This enables teams to access and stream external content directly inside LucidLink, whether it lives in object storage, cloud repositories, review platforms, productivity suites or other workflow systems.

Qumulo was showcasing its high-performance cloud-native file data platform at the NAB show. They were also talking about hybrid cloud data technologies for seamless data access between on-premises and public cloud environments. They also had a NeuralCache technology for accelerating performance and cost savings in hybrid cloud environments.

I also met with Dhaval Ponda, Global Head of Media & Entertainment, Tata Communications. He said that the company focuses on being ready for 5-year out problems and as a consequence they don’t have a shortage of digital storage products to support their workflows, unlike other companies. They also use AWS S3 storage. He said that they are especially active in sports video and he said that one way or another they are probably involved in 67% of sports video. He also said that they have been working with Nvidia to create AI cloud services for M&E.

I also met with AWS. They said that AI could help reduce storage requirements as well as streamline workflows, one example was vibe coding with generative AI .

Wasabi announced its acquisition of the Seagate Lyve Cloud business and demonstrated high-speed cost-effective hot cloud storage for media archiving, post-production and live event coverage. They also showed Wasabi AiR, a media storage service designed for fast searching and metadata auto-tagging of large video archives.

Backblaze was also at the NAB show. They were demonstrating AI-driven media workflows and B-to-B cloud storage solutions with several partners like HiScale and ToolsOnAir. They also focused on active archiving, S3 storage and reducing cloud costs for media production.

NAB featured content preservation and archiving, digital storage solutions and cloud services and storage to support the growing needs of the media and entertainment industry.