Media technology revenue fell 2.4% in 2025 despite vendor optimism

The persistent mismatch between vendor forecasts and actual market absorption is triggering a wave of defensive consolidation. As product revenues stagnate, suppliers can no longer rely on organic growth to satisfy capital requirements or investor exit timelines. This creates an immediate need for vendors to pivot toward managed services and high-efficiency AI infrastructure to maintain margins. For the broader ecosystem, this indicates that established vendors must either aggressively take market share or diversify into adjacent verticals like enterprise video to survive. Watch for a rise in secondary market transactions as private equity firms adjust to lower-than-anticipated growth in their media tech portfolios.

Devoncroft's 2026 Market Sizing Study, presented at the NAB Show Executive Summit in April 2026, found that aggregate media technology sector revenue declined 2.4% in 2025 to $67.3 billion, with managed services projected to account for 55% of total industry revenue in 2026 and grow approximately 1.1%, partially offsetting continued declines in product categories tied to legacy operations. The study covers more than 200 product and service categories across nine high-level segments, making it the most granular annual sizing of the global media technology market.

The mismatch between vendor forecasts and actual spending has become a defining tension at industry events. At the NAB Show Executive Summit, Devoncroft presented findings showing that roughly two-thirds of vendors have expected double-digit growth each year since 2021 while aggregate product revenues remained flat to negative, a gap the firm's CEO Josh Stinehour described as a mathematical unlikelihood that forces suppliers to explain how their products capture share of flat-to-down budgets. The summit drew more than 400 senior executives and set the analytical frame for the week's floor conversations, with Stinehour noting that operational efficiency arguments would close more deals than capability roadmaps in 2026.

Devoncroft's broader framing positions the current downturn as the end of an era. The firm declared at its Executive Summit that the proof-of-concept phase that defined much of the industry's technology conversation since the mid-2010s is largely over, signaling that buyers are now demanding measurable returns on existing deployments rather than funding new pilots. This shift has direct implications for how media technology vendors structure their go-to-market strategies and justify capital allocation to investors who have been expecting growth rates incongruous with the sector's actual performance.