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Observations on technology trends from
the latest conferences and seminars.
In This
Edition:
· Back in Las Vegas for NAB
· It's a soft world
· Show highlights
· Next stop, Interop
Greetings from the desert (or is that
dessert - I'm never really quite sure). I'm
here in Las Vegas attending the 61st annual
National Association of Broadcasters
conference. If you're not familiar with it,
NAB 2007 "...is the world's largest
electronic media marketplace featuring
solutions across the entire spectrum of
content creation, management and delivery."
From my perspective though it will always be
the place where broadcast engineers go once
a year to confirm that there are indeed
other people on this planet like them, and
where they all figure out what to buy in the
years ahead. (People other than engineers do
attend, but it's truly a geek show.)
Personally, NAB is the first large
conference I ever attended, and this is my
18th year going. Below are some observations
and highlights - but as with all of my
newsletters, not necessarily what you will
see in the general media coverage.
My first thoughts upon entering the exhibit
floors (yes floors - as there are over 1600
exhibitors covering nearly 1 million square
feet in four enormous halls) are of how much
broadcasting has changed. The anchors of
these exhibit halls used to be giant booths
from Sony, Ampex, Grass Valley, Tektronics,
and all the other hardware manufacturers.
Some of them are still there, but for the
most part the new giants are Avid,
Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Quantel, etc. The
world's gone soft on us, with applications
more prominent that gadgets. It takes an
entirely new skill-set to keep up with this
industry than it did when I attended my
first show.
It was amazing to see that the NAB finally
took charge of the layout of the exhibitors.
More so than ever before one could tell that
efforts were made to keep the manufacturers
grouped into categories, so one could almost
compare all the manufacturers from a
specialty in a single area. We've been
asking for that for years. On another note,
it was also sad to see that the Radio
exhibits that used to fill the entire North
hall are now only a tiny fraction of what
they once were - sort of an appropriate
commentary on all of radio.
Here are some other items of interest from
the show:
· NBC - Universal rejoined the NAB
organization after a seven year absence -
NBC had withdrawn from the NAB in 2000 over
policy disagreements concerning industry
deregulation.
· The Harris broadcast group has dropped the
names of all of the companies they purchased
and rebranded just about every product under
their Harris name. Their slogan is "One
Company, One Direction, The Future." The
names Leitch, Videotek, Louth, Exigent,
Astra, etc. were no where to be seen. One
gets an ominous feeling walking around in
their booth that they've grown a little bit
too big, too fast - time will tell
· In an indirect dig to Apple's Final Cut,
Avid was showing a large number of their
systems running on MACs. It's a real war out
there between Avid and the new Final Cut
Studio.
· It was very interesting to see Qualcom's
MediaFlo system up and running. They had two
models of telephones on display with these
teeny- weeny program guides and eight
channels of TV programming. This service is
live in Las Vegas and a number of other
cities. If you're not familiar with it,
MediaFlo is Qualcomm's new technology to
broadcast TV programming to portable devices
such as cell phones and PDAs using a
separate overlay frequency unrelated to the
one used for voice and data. It competes
with the European DBV-H solution. While it
remains to be seen if anyone will watch
long-form programming on their mobile phone
or PDA, the technology to accomplish this is
no longer in doubt.
· The buzz-word of the show this year is "Podcasting".
There are now podcasting microphones,
podcasting editors, podcasting management
tools, podcasting kitchen utensils and
podcasting anything-you-can-think-of. Same
stuff in every case, just a new name. The
word "Podcasting" will now take its place
etched on the side of the NAB Las Vegas gold
slot machine next to such past winners as
"Fiber-Chanel", "Media Server", "Tapeless",
"Digital", and many others.
· Let's all have a moment of silence for the
Trinitron. Sony has introduced two new lines
of monitors for both high end broadcasting
and for the "professional" market. Their new
BVM-L230 is a 22.5-inch HD LCD video
reference monitor employing a newly
developed LED backlight system and a 10 bit
display engine capable of producing 1,024
levels of gray scale. Their new Luma series
of LCD monitors use new DSPs and have built
in waveform and audio meter displays. No
more tubes.
· My "pick-hit" of NAB 2007 is a new series
of wireless microphones made by Zaxcom. They
have always had innovative, high quality
digitally encrypted wireless microphones.
This year though they've introduced digital
recorders as an option for all their
lavaliere and hand-held transmitters. Pop a
mini SD card into the transmitter, start the
recording and then use the microphone as you
normally would. If you have a drop out or
some RF interference that interrupts the
signal, that in-microphone local recording
serves as a back-up that retains your audio
content. Popping it out and into your PC
allows you to recover the missing or bad
section of audio, saving any future needed
use of that content.
Look for the next View in about a month from
now, from Las Vegas again, where the INTEROP
conference will be taking place.
A View From The Road is written by David
Danto. David has spent 29 years in the audio
visual and broadcasting industries. He has
designed facilities for firms such as AT&T,
Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley and NYU.
He is currently the Director of Global
Multimedia Engineering for Lehman Brothers
and the MCCA's Director of Emerging
Technology. Email David at David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com
About IMCCA
The Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative
Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a
not-for-profit user application and industry
focused association with membership
comprised of service and product providers,
consultants, and users. Members benefit from
the understanding and the use of various
interactive and collaborative communications
technologies in their professional and
everyday lives.
For further information please contact Carol
Zelkin, IMCCA Executive Director, at
516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit
the IMCCA web site at www.imcca.org
Carol Zelkin
Executive Director
Email czelkin@imcca.org
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