Report Analysis

The State of Video 2026

By July 29th, 2026No Comments

What the Wistia State of Video Report 2026 means for medium and enterprise businesses in New Zealand

Letter from Kaushik

When Wistia released its State of Video Report 2026, our first reaction wasn’t “these are interesting video statistics.” It was “something bigger is happening.”

Over the past year we’ve spoken with more than 50 business leaders across New Zealand. CEOs, founders, marketing directors and subject matter experts across professional services, technology, healthcare, engineering, manufacturing and construction. Different industries, remarkably similar challenges. Marketing teams are under pressure to produce more with the same resources. Senior leaders wanting to share expertise without becoming full time content creators. Businesses that know they’re good at what they do but struggle to communicate that value before a sales conversation begins. And buyers who now research providers long before speaking to anyone.

The Wistia report validates much of this. It surveyed nearly 1,000 professionals and analysed more than 13 million videos. Educational content is one of four formats pulling ahead. LinkedIn has become the dominant platform for B2B video. AI is changing production workflows. And tellingly, video demand is rising while budgets are not.

This isn’t a summary of Wistia’s research, nor a replacement for it. It’s our interpretation of what the findings mean for organisations selling expertise, trust and complex services in New Zealand. Throughout, we present Wistia’s findings with page references back to the original, then explain what we believe they mean for you.

Our hope is that leadership teams use this as the start of a conversation. Not simply about video, but about how their organisation captures knowledge, builds trust and creates long term advantage. Because while cameras, platforms and AI keep changing, one thing holds. The businesses that explain their expertise most clearly are usually the businesses buyers trust first.

Kaushik Kumar, Commercial Director, Dark Matter

Executive Brief: The report in five minutes

If you read one section, read this.

The Wistia State of Video Report 2026 shows business video has entered a new phase. The question is no longer whether video works. It’s how organisations use it to communicate expertise more effectively, and more sustainably, at a time when budgets are tightening.

That last point deserves the C-suite’s attention first.

The defining tension: demand is up, budgets are not. The share of teams planning to increase video spend has fallen from 57% to 40%, and 51% are now holding budgets flat or cutting them. (Wistia, 2026, pp.8–9.) Yet viewing demand keeps climbing. The organisations that win the next few years won’t be those producing the most content. They’ll be those that extract the most value from the expertise they already have.

Five takeaways for decision makers:

  1. Educational content is one of four formats pulling ahead. The video landscape is consolidating around educational, product, social and webinar content, the formats teams make most often and plan to keep investing in. (Wistia, 2026, p.11.) The market is shifting from promotion to reducing buyer uncertainty.
  2. LinkedIn is the front door. 81% of B2B teams rank LinkedIn as their top channel for sharing video, ahead of YouTube, and it also leads for repurposed clips (67%) and paid video ads (62%). (Wistia, 2026, p.36.) Trust is increasingly built there before a buyer ever reaches your website.
  3. The constraint is capacity, not ideas. The biggest barriers to producing more video are company resources (66%), cost (44%) and technical capability (26%). Only 14% cite a lack of ideas. (Wistia, 2026, p.10.) Most organisations already hold extraordinary knowledge. The challenge is a system to capture it.
  4. AI is amplifying expertise, not replacing it. 52% of teams are increasing their AI budgets this year, and AI is most common in pre-production: planning, scripting, ideation. Fully AI-generated footage has not reached mass adoption. (Wistia, 2026, pp.21–22.) As production gets cheaper, authentic experience gets more valuable.
  5. Systems are replacing campaigns. Blended in-house and outsourced teams are becoming the norm, repurposing is standard, and webinars keep delivering plays up to 12 months after the live event. (Wistia, 2026, p.3.) Advantage belongs to repeatable expertise systems, not one-off pushes.

Why this matters commercially. Every significant B2B purchase begins with uncertainty: can they solve our problem, do they understand businesses like ours, can we trust them. Those questions used to be answered in sales meetings. Increasingly they’re answered before the first conversation, on LinkedIn, in webinars, in your executives’ content. For New Zealand businesses competing against larger players, this is the opening. We may not outspend them. But we can out-teach them, and on flat budgets that’s the more durable advantage anyway.

Chapter 1: The Shift: why this isn’t really a report about video

The biggest mistake a leadership team could make after reading this report is to conclude they simply need more video. That isn’t what the data says.

For years, organisations treated video like advertising. A brief, a campaign, a launch, then start again. Video was an event. The Wistia findings point somewhere different: blended production teams, repurposing as standard, AI-assisted workflows, and a more sustainable publishing rhythm, with monthly now the most common cadence as daily and weekly production decline. (Wistia, 2026, p.12.) Video is becoming infrastructure rather than campaign. Campaigns are temporary. Infrastructure compounds.

The organisations pulling ahead have stopped asking “what video should we produce next?” and started asking “how do we consistently capture and communicate what our organisation knows?” That’s a different question, and the answer isn’t another campaign. It’s a system.

The reason this matters now is scarcity has moved. Every major business advantage has been driven by what’s scarce. Once it was manufacturing capability, then distribution, then access to information. Today information is abundant. Your customers can search almost anything and AI can summarise an industry in seconds. What remains scarce is interpretation, experience, judgement and context. The organisations that win won’t necessarily know more than competitors. They’ll be better at helping customers understand what they know.

Executive insight. Information has become abundant. Understanding remains scarce. The businesses that consistently create understanding will increasingly be the businesses buyers trust.

This plays directly to New Zealand’s strengths. We’ve always competed through expertise rather than scale: software firms, advanced manufacturers, specialist engineers, professional services and healthcare innovators that beat much larger organisations. Their advantage isn’t budget, it’s knowledge. The problem is that most of this knowledge never reaches the market. It lives in meetings, client conversations, technical workshops and project reviews, and is then forgotten. Every educational video, webinar, executive interview and case study turns a fraction of it into durable intellectual property.

Questions for your leadership team:

  • What percentage of our expertise is currently visible to prospective customers?
  • If a buyer spent an hour with our content, would they understand how we think?
  • Where does valuable knowledge disappear inside our organisation every week?
  • Are we funding campaigns, or building a long term expertise system?

Chapter 2: What buyers reward: educational content and LinkedIn

For two decades B2B marketing revolved around talking about products: what they do, how they differ, why to choose them. The Wistia data shows buyers now reward something else.

The format mix is consolidating, and educational content sits at the centre of it. The four formats teams make most often and plan to keep investing in are educational, product, social and webinar. Customer testimonials and podcasts are gaining ground, with podcasts up 29% on last year. (Wistia, 2026, p.11.)

We don’t think educational content is growing because buyers enjoy learning. It’s growing because uncertainty is the biggest barrier to purchase. Every enterprise decision carries risk: will it work, can they deliver, have they solved problems like ours. Traditional marketing answers those questions with claims. Educational content answers them with evidence. Every useful explanation demonstrates competence. Buyers don’t have to believe you, they get to experience your thinking, and over time that becomes trust.

This also changes the economics of trust. Historically trust was built one conversation at a time, which meant expertise didn’t scale. One educational video can now answer the same question for thousands of prospects, and a webinar recorded once keeps working: Wistia found on-demand webinars still draw plays up to 12 months after the live event, making them the second most impactful format. (Wistia, 2026, p.3.) For organisations with long, considered sales cycles, that means buyers often arrive already understanding how you think, which shortens the path from introduction to trust.

Executive insight. Buyers rarely trust organisations because they claim expertise. They trust them because they’ve experienced that expertise before the buying process begins.

LinkedIn is now where that experience starts. 81% of B2B teams rank LinkedIn as their top channel for sharing video, ahead of YouTube, and it leads for repurposed clips and paid promotion too. (Wistia, 2026, p.36.) This isn’t really a finding about LinkedIn, it’s about discovery. Buyers no longer begin on your website. They begin where they already spend time, and by the time they reach your site they’ve often formed a view. Your website increasingly validates trust. LinkedIn increasingly creates it.

The practical implication is that your people, not your pages, now create the first impression. A managing director explaining an industry shift, an engineer discussing a recurring technical challenge, a consultant sharing an implementation lesson. This is why executive visibility matters more than ever, and why it’s better understood as reducing organisational risk than as personal branding. When buyers repeatedly encounter thoughtful insight from your leadership, the business feels more familiar and its expertise more tangible. In New Zealand, where relationships still carry enterprise decisions, that’s especially valuable.

Executive insight. Your website explains what your business does. Your people explain why it’s worth trusting.

Applied across industries, the pattern is identical: stop announcing, start teaching.

  • Professional services. Instead of “we’re a leading advisory firm,” teach “the five commercial risks we see most often during acquisitions.” The expertise becomes obvious without self-promotion.
  • Technology. Instead of “our platform now supports automated workflows,” teach “why ERP implementations fail, and how to avoid it.” The product becomes the logical conclusion, not the opening line.
  • Manufacturing. Instead of “we make high quality components,” teach “the five design decisions that determine product lifespan.” Teaching demonstrates capability more convincingly than claiming it.
  • Healthcare. Instead of listing services, answer the questions patients ask before a referral. Educational content reduces anxiety while building trust.
  • Construction and engineering. Instead of “500 successful projects,” teach “the procurement mistake that adds months to construction timelines.” Experience becomes visible.

Common mistakes: mistaking promotional content for educational content; explaining products before explaining problems; building content around company news rather than customer questions; measuring educational content only by short term lead generation.

Recommended actions:

  1. Identify the twenty questions customers ask before they engage you. That list is your educational content strategy.
  2. Audit your last twenty pieces of content. How many educate versus promote? Make education the dominant category.
  3. Ask each subject matter expert one question a month: “What’s one thing you wish every prospective customer understood before speaking with us?” Record it, publish it, repeat.

Chapter 3: Doing more with less: systems, AI and flat budgets

The central tension in the entire report is financial. Demand for video is rising, but only 40% of teams plan to increase spend, down from 57% in recent years, and 51% are holding budgets flat or cutting them. (Wistia, 2026, pp.8–9.) The arithmetic only works if the approach changes. Flat budget against rising demand isn’t a reason to skip video. It’s a reason to be far more deliberate about which formats earn the spend and how much value each one returns. As the report puts it, the focus for many teams has shifted from growth to efficiency.

The good news is that the same report shows the constraint isn’t ideas. The biggest barriers to producing more video are company resources (66%), cost (44%) and technical capability (26%), well ahead of any shortage of ideas at 14%. (Wistia, 2026, p.10.) Most organisations aren’t short of things to say. They’re short of a system to capture and reuse what they already know.

Executive insight. Most organisations don’t have a content shortage. They have a knowledge distribution problem.

Campaigns create spikes. Systems create momentum. Traditional marketing works in bursts that start from zero each time. Educational content compounds instead. One video answers a question today, next month and next year. A webinar keeps drawing plays for 12 months. A LinkedIn video may introduce your organisation to a buyer who converts eighteen months later. These assets accumulate rather than expire, which is exactly why a system beats a campaign on a flat budget.

A practical model. Rather than asking marketing to invent ideas every month, build a repeatable loop that turns internal knowledge into assets:

  1. Capture. Identify recurring customer questions and interview your experts.
  2. Clarify. Turn the conversation into explanations a non-expert understands.
  3. Create. Produce a long form educational asset.
  4. Repurpose. Break it into LinkedIn videos, an article, a newsletter, a webinar and sales enablement.
  5. Distribute. Publish where buyers already are, led by LinkedIn.
  6. Learn. Use questions, engagement and sales conversations to improve the next cycle.

The economics are the point. If a managing director spends 45 minutes on a topic they know deeply, without a system that knowledge reaches only the people in the room. With one, the same 45 minutes becomes a long form video, several LinkedIn clips, an article, a webinar segment, sales enablement and onboarding material. The cost of acquiring the knowledge hasn’t changed. The value extracted from it has. That’s the leverage flat budgets demand.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn’t. AI dominates the report, but not as people expect. 52% of teams are increasing their AI budgets this year, and the most common use is pre-production: planning, scripting and ideation. The most buzzworthy use case, AI footage generation including avatars and generative backgrounds, has not reached mass adoption. (Wistia, 2026, pp.21–22.)

The bottleneck in thought leadership was never the idea. It was everything after: drafting, editing, captioning, formatting, repurposing. AI removes much of that friction. The expert still provides the thinking. AI reduces the administrative effort of turning thinking into assets. That changes the economics of communication without changing the value of expertise.

In fact it raises it. As production becomes abundant, its value as a differentiator falls, and the scarce qualities move elsewhere: judgement, experience, context, original thinking. Two engineering firms can run the same AI tools and generate similar articles. What they can’t automate is twenty years of solving customer problems. As AI lowers the barrier to creating content, buyers place more value on organisations demonstrating genuine experience rather than simply publishing more. For marketing teams, this frees time from production and redirects it to the higher value work: interviewing experts, understanding customers and sharpening messaging. Marketing becomes less a production function and more a knowledge function.

Executive insight. AI doesn’t make expertise less valuable. It increases the return on the expertise you already have.

A note worth flagging to your team, given the budget squeeze: blended production is now the norm, with in-house teams growing and outsourcing rising at the same time. (Wistia, 2026, p.3.) The winning model isn’t “hire internally” or “use an agency,” it’s deciding which work stays in-house (regular social and educational clips) and which needs external craft (flagship brand, thought leadership, launch pieces).

Common mistakes: using AI to generate expertise rather than document it; publishing AI output without expert review; treating every recording as a single asset; viewing repurposing as recycling rather than amplification; measuring production volume instead of knowledge captured.

Recommended actions:

  1. Map the recurring conversations happening in your business every week. That’s your content pipeline.
  2. Build the content calendar around customer questions, not campaigns.
  3. Make every expert interview produce multiple long term assets across marketing, sales and customer success.
  4. Decide, deliberately, what stays in-house and what goes to a specialist partner.

Chapter 4: The 90-day playbook and how it applies to your industry

Most reports are easy to agree with and hard to act on. This chapter is the opposite. It’s a practical sequence a medium or enterprise business can start on Monday, with no restructure required.

Days 1 to 30: understand what your organisation already knows. The first month is discovery, not production.

  • Identify your experts. Not just executives. Include sales leaders, engineers, consultants, product specialists, customer success and operations. Ask one question: who do people inside the business go to for answers? Those people are your greatest marketing asset.
  • Audit customer questions. Pull them from sales calls, support tickets, proposals, onboarding and account management. Recurring questions are recurring across the market too. That’s your strategy.
  • Review existing content. Sort every asset into educational, promotional, product, customer story, news. Most organisations discover they talk about themselves far more than they help customers understand the problem. That insight alone reshapes the next year.

Executive insight. Don’t start with a content calendar. Start with a knowledge audit.

Days 31 to 60: build the system. The objective is consistency, not volume.

  • Run an interview programme. Interview one expert a fortnight, led by curiosity, not a camera. Useful prompts: “What misconception do customers have about your area?” “What do you wish clients understood before engaging us?” “What mistake do you see repeatedly?”
  • Design every conversation for repurposing. One interview should never become one video. Plan the outputs before you record: a long form video, several LinkedIn clips, an article, newsletter content, sales enablement and onboarding material. Note that 76% of teams already resize video for different platforms, so build that step into the plan rather than treating it as an afterthought. (Wistia, 2026, p.38.)
  • Introduce AI carefully. Point it at transcription, chapters, first draft summaries, captions and translations. Keep experts responsible for ideas.

Days 61 to 90: make it a habit. Turn the process into recurring routine: monthly interviews, a quarterly webinar programme, content planning tied to customer questions, regular syncs with sales and customer success. The aim is for marketing to be connected to the knowledge the organisation creates, not separate from it.

Measure what matters to the business. Engagement metrics still count, and note that social engagement nearly doubled as the top success metric in a single year, from 12% to 22%. (Wistia, 2026, p.35.) But for executive teams, also watch the leading indicators of commercial impact: are sales conversations getting shorter, are prospects arriving better informed, are objections changing, are customers referencing your content. These often reveal more strategic value than impressions.

After 90 days you should have: a documented list of experts; a library of recurring customer questions; a repeatable interview programme; a repurposing workflow; AI supporting production rather than replacing thinking; and educational content as a regular part of customer communication. Most importantly, marketing should no longer begin with “what should we post this week?” but with “what should our customers understand next?”

One compliance note for the C-suite. Accessibility has moved from best practice towards expectation, and increasingly regulation. 90% of teams are already taking steps, most commonly captions: 71% add closed captions and 69% use AI for captioning. (Wistia, 2026, p.39.) If your organisation sells into or operates across regulated markets, this belongs on a risk register, not just a marketing checklist.

Chapter 5: Looking ahead and the cost of doing nothing

The Wistia report is a snapshot of where video stands. It’s also a signal of where business communication is heading, and the direction is consistent enough to plan around.

Expertise will outweigh awareness. For years marketing optimised for reach and impressions. As AI drives the cost of content towards zero, content becomes abundant and awareness becomes a weaker differentiator. Expertise does not become abundant. Experience can’t be automated, judgement can’t be generated, context can’t be manufactured. Organisations that consistently demonstrate real expertise will increasingly outperform those relying on visibility alone. For New Zealand firms with modest budgets but deep, specialised knowledge and close customer relationships, that’s an advantage, not a disadvantage.

Marketing becomes a knowledge function. As AI automates scheduling, editing, captioning and repurposing, the competitive edge of a marketing team shifts from producing content quickly to identifying valuable expertise, asking better questions and translating complex knowledge into language customers understand. Strategic capabilities, not production ones.

Buyers will expect you to teach before you sell. The buying journey already runs on independent research before procurement begins. Organisations that lean on promotion will find it harder to build early trust. Those that teach will shorten the journey.

The cost of inaction is gradual, then sudden. Businesses that stay promotional will get harder to differentiate. Their expertise stays invisible. Sales teams keep answering the same questions. Knowledge keeps walking out the door when experienced people leave. Meanwhile competitors building expertise libraries strengthen their position quietly, and the gap widens slowly, then quickly, just as websites and then social media went from optional to expected. Educational expertise is on the same path.

The encouraging part is that this is a leadership challenge, not a technology one. The expertise already exists. The conversations are already happening. The customer questions are already being answered. The opportunity is to treat those moments as strategic assets rather than operational activity.

A question for your next board meeting. If our organisation stopped selling for the next twelve months, would our expertise keep teaching the market? If yes, you’re building a durable advantage. If no, the biggest opportunity may not be more marketing. It’s making what you already know visible.

References

Primary source: Wistia. (2026). State of Video Report 2026. Based on a survey of nearly 1,000 professionals and analysis of more than 13 million videos totalling over 79 million hours of viewing data (p.4). Data partners: Webflow, Storyblocks, HubSpot and The Marketing Meetup.

  • Budgets: the share of teams planning to increase video spend has fallen from 57% to 40%, with 51% holding budgets flat or cutting them (pp.8–9)
  • Barriers to producing more video: company size and resources 66%, cost 44%, technical capabilities 26%, lack of ideas 14% (p.10)
  • The four consolidating formats, educational, product, social and webinar, with podcasts up 29% year on year (p.11)
  • Production cadence settling, with monthly now the most common rhythm (p.12)
  • AI budgets increasing for 52% of teams; AI concentrated in pre-production, with footage generation not yet mainstream (pp.21–22)
  • Social engagement rose from 12% to 22% as a top success metric (p.35)
  • LinkedIn is B2B’s top video channel: 81% rank it first for sharing, 67% for repurposed clips, 62% for paid ads (p.36)
  • Distribution: 76% of teams resize video for different platforms (p.38)
  • Webinars are the second most impactful format, with on-demand plays continuing up to 12 months after the live event (p.3)
  • Accessibility: 71% of teams add closed captions and 69% use AI for captioning (p.39)

About Dark Matter. Dark Matter helps medium and enterprise organisations turn internal expertise into educational content that builds trust, strengthens positioning and shortens the path to commercial conversations. We believe every organisation already holds enough knowledge to become the obvious choice in its market. The challenge isn’t creating more expertise. It’s making the expertise you already have visible.

Share