Call of Duty: NEXT 2026: Five Years of Broadcast, Creators and Community

Five years. Thousands of creators. One global Call of Duty community.

OS Studios marked its fifth year working on Call of Duty: NEXT in 2026, continuing a partnership that has helped build one of gaming’s biggest annual live moments.

Broadcast live on August 21, Call of Duty: NEXT 2026 served as the global showcase for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, bringing together major reveals, developer insights, live gameplay and creator broadcasts from around the world.

For OS Studios, it also marked five years since the very first NEXT and another evolution of a show that has grown far beyond the traditional definition of a gaming broadcast.

One Global Call of Duty Moment

Call of Duty: NEXT exists at the intersection of broadcast, gaming and creator culture.

The main show gives the global Call of Duty community a shared place to experience what’s coming next, while creators simultaneously get hands-on with the game and broadcast their own experiences directly to their communities.

In 2026, NEXT became the central command center for Modern Warfare 4, providing the first major opportunity for players around the world to see the game in action ahead of its October 23 launch.

The show combined reveals and conversations with the developers at Infinity Ward with extensive live gameplay, giving audiences a deeper look at the maps, modes, weapons, progression systems and experiences coming to Modern Warfare 4.

And when the broadcast ended, the experience didn’t stop.

NEXT led directly into the Modern Warfare 4 Early Access Beta, turning a major entertainment and marketing moment into something the community could immediately experience for themselves.

That relationship between watching, creating and playing is a huge part of what makes NEXT different.

More Than a Broadcast

Producing an event like NEXT means thinking beyond a single program feed.

At its center is a major live broadcast bringing together hosts, developers, gameplay, graphics, packages, reveals and conversations.

Surrounding that is an enormous creator ecosystem.

Creators aren’t simply guests at NEXT. They’re part of how the event reaches the world.

Across individual streams and channels, audiences can experience the same launch moment through the personalities and communities they already follow.

It creates something much bigger than a traditional one-to-many broadcast: one global event experienced through thousands of different perspectives.

For a production team, that creates a very different challenge.

The infrastructure behind the event has to support the polished experience of the primary broadcast while simultaneously enabling a huge number of creators and players to capture, stream and share their own experiences.

Broadcast. Gameplay. Creators. Technology. Connectivity. Content. Distribution.

Everything has to work together.

Built for the Way Gaming Audiences Watch Today

That approach has become increasingly important over the five years OS Studios has worked on Call of Duty: NEXT.

Gaming audiences don’t experience major launches through a single screen anymore.

They might watch the main broadcast, move to a favorite creator’s stream, see a gameplay clip on social, join a conversation in Discord and then jump into the game themselves.

NEXT is designed around that behavior.

The broadcast creates a shared global moment, while the creator ecosystem allows that moment to travel organically across platforms, communities and audiences.

For OS Studios, that’s also representative of how we think about the future of live production.

The question isn’t simply how many people watched the broadcast?

It’s how far the moment travelled.

How many communities experienced it? How much content did it create? How many conversations did it start? And how effectively can one live production become thousands of pieces of content across the internet?

The best gaming broadcasts don’t end when the credits roll.

They become the raw material for everything that happens afterwards.

Five Years of NEXT

OS Studios has been part of Call of Duty: NEXT since its inception.

Across five years, the scale, technology and creative ambition behind the event have continued to evolve alongside Call of Duty itself.

What has remained consistent is the ambition to bring the Call of Duty community together around a genuine moment.

That’s what makes reaching year five particularly special for our team.

Every edition of NEXT represents months of planning followed by an enormous collective effort across creative, production, broadcast, engineering, gameplay, talent, developers, creators and partners.

And every year presents a new challenge.

For OS Studios, that’s exactly what makes projects like NEXT exciting.

We build live experiences for audiences that expect broadcast-quality storytelling alongside the immediacy, interactivity and unpredictability of the internet.

NEXT brings all of those worlds together.

The Team Behind the Show

No production of this scale happens because of one company or one team.

It takes an enormous group of talented people working together, often across different disciplines, organizations and locations, to make a global live moment feel effortless to the audience watching at home.

We’re incredibly grateful to our friends and clients at Activision and Call of Duty for the continued trust they have placed in OS Studios over the past five years.

And a huge thank you to everyone who made Call of Duty: NEXT 2026 possible: the Activision and Call of Duty teams, Infinity Ward, our production and technology partners, the OS Studios team, crew, developers, talent, creators and the countless people working behind the scenes.

Five years of NEXT.

What a show. What a team.