Event Recap January 2026

CES 2026: What We Learned as First-Time Exhibitors

The presidents of Korea's three major broadcasters walked up to a small booth built around an audience-prediction game. That single moment said more about where the industry thinks it's headed than any keynote on the main stage.

By the MEGATALK Korea team

This year was our first time exhibiting at CES. Running our own booth in the Venetian meant we could only make it to a handful of pre-scheduled sessions at C Space, the section of the show focused specifically on the content business — but even that limited slice was enough to sharpen our sense of where interactive content is actually headed.

The booth itself drew a real mix: general attendees, investors, and broadcasting professionals with a specific interest in interactive technology. Letting people actually play a round of the Agreement Rate Game — not just watch a demo reel — turned out to matter more than any pitch deck. Real tension, a real prediction, a real result on screen: that's what convinced people faster than an explanation ever could, and every conversation at the booth helped sharpen the product itself.

Three broadcaster presidents, in person

On the traditional-broadcasting side of the show, at C Space, something notable happened: the presidents of KBS, MBC, and SBS — Korea's three major broadcasters — all showed up in person. It's worth pausing on that. What brought them here — genuine excitement about a new vision for the medium, or a more serious sense of crisis about where TV is headed? Probably some of both.

3Korean broadcaster presidents attended in person
1sttime exhibiting at CES
2026Agreement Rate Game showcased live

A notable partnership, and a bigger question about ATSC 3.0

One meaningful development at C Space: an agreement between Sinclair, a US broadcast station group, and SBS — under which SBS content is expected to be carried directly across the US through Sinclair's terrestrial network. If it works, it could open a genuinely new expansion path for Korean content.

Sinclair also presented its ATSC 3.0 business strategy — the next-generation broadcast standard, whose underlying technology development and commercialization Korea itself has led. Even so, in a market that's already reorganized itself around OTT, it's fair to ask whether television-side technical innovation alone is enough to be the real turning point for the industry. That question is worth its own deeper look — and it's one we come back to elsewhere in these Insights.

Interest from outside broadcasting entirely

EdTech companiesInterested in the Agreement Rate Game's fit for classroom and training use cases, not just entertainment.
University visitorsSaw immediate applications in campus events and orientation-style programming.

We live in an era where communication is technically possible at any moment, with anyone, anywhere — and yet communication education is being emphasized in schools more than ever. That's not really a contradiction; it's a direct consequence of a hyper-connected, smartphone-driven society. It feels like the right moment to try genuinely new approaches to echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the spread of confirmation bias, rather than assuming more connectivity alone will fix what more connectivity helped create.

Perhaps that's why so many people responded to the idea behind the Agreement Rate Game: a format built to expand real human-to-human communication, whose actual power comes from encouraging participants to genuinely listen to each other.

As people grow more dependent on AI for everyday judgment, we're heading toward a future where human trust could erode and AI-driven bias could intensify in parallel. That's part of what convinces us that services genuinely built around human connection and collective reasoning — not just efficient answers — deserve real investment now, ahead of that future arriving.

Innovation starts

In the end, the next step for television and media won't be decided by the technology alone — it will be decided by how people actually share their thinking and participate, once that technology is in their hands.

A booth, a game, and three broadcaster presidents who stopped to play it.