With little to differentiate it from last year, NAB, which took place at the end of April, was reckoned to have generated little buzz. The inevitable IP revolution is in full swing but old news, argued the panel.
It added that Ultra-HD seems to be driven by marketing whims rather than good engineering principles.
IP distribution and workflow efficiencies, particularly with relevance to the future of broadcast engineers, dominated the discussion at the RTS event.
The joint event – organised by the RTS Centre and IABM, the international trade association for suppliers of broadcast and media technology – was chaired by Dick Hobbs.
It featured a cross-section of industry luminaries: a vendor/service provider, Mike Knowles from Ericsson; consultants, Bruce Devlin from Mr MXF and Broadcast Innovation’s Russell Grute; a customer, former BBC and Disney executive Keith Nicholas; and IABM’s John Ive.
The television set and viewing of our childhood are gone.” So said Google’s President of Global Partnerships, Daniel Alegre, in his closing keynote to the broadcast equipment trade show NAB, adding: “A newer, better TV is rising from the ashes.”
While Alegre was referring to the rise of globally popular online content creators such as PewDiePie, the focus of the Las Vegas event was on the disruptive potential of internet technologies, higher picture resolutions and panoramic video streams.
NAB Review co-hosted with the IABM UK Council
The NAB trade show, held every April in Las Vegas, used to bill itself as the place to see kit manufacturers parade their newest wares to broadcasters and producers. Headline-grabbing black boxes that perform cool, new tricks are, however, increasingly rare.
Today's production and post-production tools tend, instead, to be software. They are, therefore, open to incremental and regular upgrades, and not tied to the cycle of trade shows.
Even the hardware is designed to evolve with tweaks to the central chip set, rather than a wholesale redesign.
