My three-day trip to the NAB Show this week in Las Vegas was a tiring one. My feet and back won’t forgive me for going through all the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. So, what did my Motrin-craving wandering among those booths of visual overload make me think?
Weather is a bright biz. There were quite a few large and small weather services companies. Even NOAA was there. It seems like consumers are eager to consume all the real-time weather-related information out there, whether (woo, gotta watch my spelling!) via TV, web or mobile.
Hardware is still the king at NAB. You’d think that as the Generations X, Y, and Z (yes, Z, those born between 1992 and 2000) embrace more and more web-related content, these broadcasting-related companies would make the move. But not quite. NAB2011 was still about these slick and serious-looking cameras, camcorders, server boxes with rows of blinking lights and gold-plated cables, editing suites with zillion buttons, satellite dishes, and yeah, neck massage gadgets.
3D was “D”efinitely IT. There were 3D cameras, monitors, conversion systems, content and more. It felt like at every corner, you’d see some booth that had “3D” on its signage. Wow, I thought I had headaches only at the 3D theaters, but NAB2011 taught me otherwise.
Interactive streaming. What’s that? I found it profoundly interesting that whenever I mentioned interactive streaming to these broadcasting biz folks, many were just unaware of how “powerful” it is for people to “interact” with web and mobile content, eh hem, unlike on-air one-way content. Streaming? Yes, they knew. But interactive streaming? Not exactly.
All in all, it was an impressive display of technology. But I felt that NAB2011 was about “more new ways of doing the old things”. Broadcasting in its most general sense is experiencing a dramatic paradigm shift from on-air to web and mobile, but you wouldn’t know it by being at NAB2011.
I think it’s time for an “interactive revolution” at NAB. Wanna be the “bad boys” of NAB next year?
