Our Partnership with Synamedia at NAB 2026: Fluid EdgeCDN, Quortex Switch, and What Comes Next

One of the best parts of NAB is finally sitting down in person with partners you have been trading calls and emails with for months. For us, one of the highlights of the week was spending time with the Synamedia team at their W2851 booth.

Synamedia and NetActuate have been working together on a joint infrastructure story since IBC 2025 in Amsterdam, and NAB 2026 was the moment it came into public view. The shape of it: Synamedia's Fluid EdgeCDN brings smart, cost-efficient CDN capability right out to the network edge, close to the viewer. NetActuate provides the global infrastructure substrate underneath it (45+ points of presence in every major media market, fourth largest network in the world by peer count). Synamedia’s Quortex Switch multi-CDN orchestration layer ties it into the customer's broader delivery strategy.

Why this combination works

Synamedia describes Fluid EdgeCDN as a set of "smart and cost-efficient CDN technologies" for content providers who need elastic cache to manage traffic peaks without over-provisioning. Paired with Quortex Switch for multi-CDN management and ContentArmor for content protection, the Synamedia edge CDN portfolio is already one of the most complete in the market. What NetActuate adds is the global reach and the pre-integrated infrastructure layer: customers can activate CDN capacity on demand in any region where we have a POP, scale it for an event, and release it when the event is over. Just-in-time capacity, deployed in seconds, all orchestrated through Synamedia's control plane.

Robin Oakley, Synamedia's Senior Director of Edge CDN Solutions, walked through the story on camera with Mark de Jong on Monday afternoon. Robin framed it well: the industry is moving away from rigid, expensive delivery models toward something much more flexible and efficient. Customers can scale into new markets, handle peak events, and optimize cost, without increasing complexity. That is the shift this partnership is built for. We will share the full video and the behind-the-scenes clips as they go live.

Synamedia's week at NAB 2026

Synamedia had a big show. A few pieces worth calling out.

Fluid EdgeCDN was front and center at the booth, and for good reason. It is the foundation of the just-in-time CDN story we are building together, and the one product in the portfolio where the integration with NetActuate's network lands most directly. Synamedia also announced that MoMe has selected Fluid EdgeCDN to launch Spain's first streaming-optimized CDN service. That is a meaningful deployment in a market that has been looking for exactly this kind of option.

Quortex PowerVu had a new release on April 13. Cloud-controlled edge playout, IP-native, software-based, and cutting cost and operational complexity for national broadcasters and their 200 to 250 affiliates by up to 80%. The minimum on-site footprint is a single 1:1 Media Edge Gateway (MEG). Synamedia already powers a significant share of U.S. C-band satellite distribution, so this release lands directly in the middle of the transition the whole industry is navigating.

AI by Quortex was announced April 7. It is a just-in-time AI plug-in framework built on AWS (Bedrock, EFA) that triggers model inference only when meaningful changes are detected in a live stream. Synamedia's own number on cost reduction for live video understanding is up to 10x. Philosophically, it is the same just-in-time thinking Fluid EdgeCDN brings to CDN capacity: apply intelligence when it delivers measurable value, and do not apply it when it does not. A consistent product philosophy across the portfolio, which we appreciate because it is the same one we bring to infrastructure.

ContentArmor Edge Watermarking was announced in March and made its NAB debut this week. Ten years in the making, it is the industry's first server-side edge watermarking solution, cutting end-to-end session disruption time for pirated live streams to under five minutes. The first CDN integration is Fluid EdgeCDN. Piracy was a running theme at NAB this year, and edge watermarking is one of the more concrete answers to this problem. 

Kenelm Deen and the C-band conversation

One of the people we had the pleasure of spending time with during the week was Kenelm Deen, Director of Solutions Management, B2B Distribution at Synamedia. We caught up with Kenelm on Tuesday morning just before he took the stage at Hive Group's The Future of Satellite Replacement breakfast panel, where he joined speakers from CBS Paramount, Fox, Fox Sports, Disney, LTN, Zixi, Eluvio, AWS, and Globecast to talk through what the U.S. industry actually does as C-band runs out. Kenelm's framing of the Quortex PowerVu update as the minimum required on-site hardware for a national broadcaster's affiliate fleet was one of the sharper architectural moments of the panel. His BEIT Conference paper on multipath last-mile connectivity across satellite, fiber, 5G, and LEO was the other, and it is very much worth reading alongside the Hive Group whitepaper if you are working on this transition.

If you want my full take on that morning, I wrote it up as a standalone blog: Some Honest Thoughts After "The Future of Satellite Replacement". The short version of the C-band story is that the replacement is a hybrid of multiple transports, the last mile is where it gets won or lost, and partners like Synamedia who have already been in this market for 30 years are the ones the industry will be leaning on to get it right.

What comes next

It was also great to connect with Ed Allfrey, EVP and General Manager of Synamedia's Video Network. Ed has spent decades in this industry (he launched the world's first catch-up TV service in UK cable) and his perspective on where global video distribution is going is one of the reasons this partnership is where it is.

Huge thank you to the whole Synamedia team for making this week so productive: Robin Oakley, Virginie Ledevin, David White, Thomas Fayoux, Anne-Cecile Soularue, Kenelm Deen, Ed Allfrey, and everyone behind the scenes holding it all together. 

More from NetActuate and Synamedia is coming. The shape of what we want to bring to broadcast and streaming customers jointly in the second half of 2026 is taking form. More announcements through the summer and into IBC 2026 in Amsterdam.

If you want to dig into the joint solution, reach out via our contact/schedule-a-call form and ask for me, Mark de Jong, or Mark Price, and we will walk you through it.

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