Dan Rayburn
Streaming Media Industry Analyst, Writer and Consultant; Chairman, NAB Show Streaming Summit
Dan Rayburn is a 30-year veteran of the streaming media industry whose podcast, blog, and conference programming sit at the center of the streaming-tech beat. As chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit and a former Frost & Sullivan principal analyst, his weekly readouts on Q1 earnings, NFL rights renegotiation, and live-sports streaming production are the canonical primary read for the operator side of the business.
Dan Rayburn is the operator-side voice of the streaming-tech beat. The combination of his weekly podcast, his NAB Show Streaming Summit chairmanship, and a 15-year analyst tenure at Frost & Sullivan makes his commentary the canonical first read on streaming infrastructure, live-sports rights renegotiations, and CDN economics — a beat the trade press rarely covers with the same fluency on the technical layer.
The podcast cadence matters editorially. Same-day post-earnings readouts on Comcast’s Q1 2026 Peacock numbers (2M added, ending at 46M; $2B in revenue), Charter’s slowing pay-TV bleed (51,000 residential losses in Q1 2026 versus 167,000 a year earlier), and the WBD–Paramount Skydance shareholder vote each appear on his feed within hours of the disclosure, with the technical-architecture context the wire services don’t bring. His critique of the Netflix MLB opening-night stream production and his readouts on the NFL’s $110B domestic broadcast renegotiation seeking a roughly 50% increase ahead of 2026 are framings we cite when those stories cross our slate.
His congressional-testimony track record on net neutrality and telecom mergers, plus his founding-board role at the Streaming Video Alliance, give him standing on the standards side as well as the deal side. He is one of a small number of named-voice analysts whose framing is worth quoting on first reference rather than corroborating after the fact.