By Shirish Nadkarni
The streaming industry in 2026 is grappling with a crisis of trust, as misinformation on platforms like LinkedIn and exaggerated claims about AI are undermining credibility, and while live sports can drive up viewership it fails to guarantee profitability, leaving consolidation and clearer positioning as the sector’s next defining challenges.
In brief, is the streaming community experiencing an erosion of trust, both within its own ranks and in its relationship with the media, and with companies that promote products or services that do not actually work?
Streaming media expert Dan Rayburn, who was the Conference Chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit, delivered a blistering attack at the recent NAB Show 2026 against the reams of misinformation surrounding the digital entertainment business that are circulating on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
This time, the object of his ire was artificial intelligence (AI).
“The currency in any business world is not technology,” Rayburn said. “It’s accurate information. Facts. Words have meaning. Facts matter.
“And as AI is now making the finding of information fast and easy, the downside is that the information that is being presented to us is not accurate — and in our industry, every single day on LinkedIn, people continue to share factually inaccurate information, even when it comes to financials.
“AI is completely overblown when it comes to streaming. The place you see AI is in the video workflow. So, if there is a three-hour sporting event, the moment the event is over, you want to be able to chop up the highlights to only show the place where someone does something big, like hit a home run in baseball, or a six in cricket.
“That’s where AI can look at that video, automatically clip it and create a video and package. Whether it’s ingestion, contribution or coding clipping, those are the places where AI tools will come into the video stack over time. But right now, it’s still extremely early; and right now, AI is being much more of a nuisance than an aid, with its inputs of inaccurate information.”
Rayburn cited several examples, including a LinkedIn bio from a woman who claimed she was one of the top 1% of LinkedIn creators worldwide. “LinkedIn doesn’t rate people,” he said. And when he called her on it, she admitted it was a marketing ploy, calling it a “self-reported benchmark”.
“The best content strategy starts with trust,” he said. “I would say that 75% of everything I see everybody sharing in the industry on LinkedIn is wrong.”
He pointed to another example, a LinkedIn post that claimed Meta made US$201 billion in 2025. “No way!” Rayburn said. “Meta’s gross revenue was $201 billion. But its profit was barely 30% of that … it was $60.5 billion.
“Meta is a public company, and the correct number was in a press release as well as an SEC filing. And yet there are 47 people who shared this inaccurate post.”
Even more egregious, he said, was a post claiming Disney+ and Netflix had merged, which was an incorrect interpretation of the fact that the two streamers had agreed on a bundle.
“My sincere request to you — stop sharing information you haven’t vetted,” Rayburn said. “Stop sharing it. Take the time to actually see if the information is accurate.”
Another example is burning him, Rayburn said. A lengthy post attributed several quotes to him about Peacock’s Super Bowl stream, about things like rebuffering and a two-minute authentication lag. The source was ChatGPT, but the problem was, Rayburn never said any of it.
“To make things ‘better’,” he said, “this is ChatGPT with my name in quotes in the third quarter of the Super Bowl. I didn’t say anything about the Super Bowl until the game was over.”
Similar accuracy problems exist with Google Gemini. “I did a quick search the other day on how I change this setting inside Apple Mail, and it suggested I use an app that shut down 12 years ago,” Rayburn said. “In the Google setting it even said it had been shut down in the Google search result, but Gemini still sent it to me.
This is not to say Rayburn is against AI. It can be very useful, he said, if used under the right circumstances.
“In the streaming space, where are we really seeing good applications of AI pre- and post-production?” he asked. “Clipping of videos. You’re going to hear all kinds of examples. The PGA Tour — they’re going to tell you how they use AI to clip and create 7,000 videos a day.
“There are some great use cases for AI in the streaming stack. How do you create, capture, ingest, store, transcode, monetise, protect, play back, and deliver video — that’s our video stack. In some of those silos, there are some great use cases of AI, but we have to be realistic.
“Right now, the AI discussion is turning the human experience into a conversation about energy and math. People don’t want to be solved, they want to be understood. The conversation we’re having about AI right now is about technology, and it’s not about people.”
Rayburn asserted that, by the end of 2026, streaming platforms are likely to increase their coverage of live sporting events, as well as other live events. He pointed to Apple and Formula-1 signing a five-year exclusive streaming deal in the last quarter of 2025. Apple reportedly pays Formula-1 approximately $150 million annually, making the deal worth $750 million over its five-year pendency.
But while live sports are driving viewership on streaming platforms, it does not necessarily create a successful business. Rayburn cited Peacock’s fourth-quarter operating loss of $552 million. The main cause was NBCUniversal’s 11-year, $27.5 billion ($2.5 billion a year) deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), which began during the 2025-26 season.
“Peacock has a lot of sports. But look at how much money they lost during the last quarter of 2025,” Rayburn pointed out. “So, it’s great that you have a lot of sports, but how would it help the streamer if it were not profitable?”
While live sports are not a magic economic fix for streamers, they do help in three specific ways, namely to drive habitual usage, support premium advertising, and make a platform feel essential in real time.
“In a business where reducing churn is just as important as adding new customers, sports becomes a powerful strategic asset,” said Chris Hamilton, an animator, producer and artist, who is known for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), Jurassic World (2015) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
“Of course, the rights fees are eye-watering, but for the biggest platforms, the retention and advertising math is increasingly justifying the investment?”
Hamilton declared that, like 2025, there would be more subscription price hikes this year, more bundling offers and more streamer fatigue in 2026. What would make streaming in 2026 dramatically different from 2025 would be if Paramount Global could complete its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Hamilton predicted that, if a merger took place, the total demand for content on that platform would roughly match Netflix. “That would leave three services realistically competing to be the entertainment anchor for households – Netflix, Disney+/Hulu and a hypothetical HBO Max/Paramount+ combination,” he said.
“Everyone else would need to define their role more clearly, either as a specialist or as a service built around churn-and-return behaviour, rather than always-on subscription status.”
