NAB 2017

In addition, Jordan Wertlieb is elected TV chair and Randy Gravley elected radio chair.

The approximately 100 ESPN layoffs announced during this year’s NAB Show left panelists and audience at the convention’s “Sports and the Business of Broadcast” session sad and disappointed (the cuts follow some 300 in 2015 and 300 in 2013), but the mood soon turned positive.

The decision to invest in technology upgrades doesn’t rest with engineers alone. Chief financial officers were at NAB, looking at technology for the next-gen TV standard ATSC 3.0, advanced advertising and more. L-r: Moderator Josh Stinehour, Devoncroft; Tribune Media’s Mike Tuvell; NBCU’s Christine Dorfler; and Sinclair’s Lucy Rutishauser.

Howard Homonoff: “After years of hopeful whispers and crossing of fingers about “advanced” TV, signs of it were everywhere at the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Las Vegas last week. Despite my disappointment at having to leave Vegas without seeing Ice Cube (he plays the Strip this week), I did come away with several important takeaways about the broadcasting business and the relevance of the venerable NAB convention, all in some fashion related to the evolution of the TV business.”

The 1,700 companies that populated last week’s NAB Show exhibition continued to experience relatively slow growth in the aggregate in 2016. But they look forward to spending resulting from the spectrum repack, ATSC 3.0 and the much discussed transition to IP.

From speeches, sessions, cocktail parties and bars, I gained some insight that I can share with you on Chairman Pai’s deregulatory initiative, the repack’s reimbursement fund and deadline, an ATSC 3.0 fissure and the network-affiliate OTT agreements.

In the future, traditional broadcasters and social platforms that are emerging as key video destinations could team up on bidding for sports rights. That was the vision that emerged at the NAB Show during a panel discussion featuring Craig Barry, chief content officer at Turner Sports; Chris Granger, president of the Sacramento Kings; Todd Goldstein, chief revenue officer at AEG; and Keith Wachtel, chief revenue officer for the NHL.

ATSC 3.0 was everywhere at the NAB Show this week, and it’s no longer simply an interesting technical exercise. Broadcasters are serious about building their future on the next-gent TV standard, and the annual industry gathering in Las Vegas gave them ample opportunity to see how.

Top technologists at Al Jazeera, Sinclair and Nexstar predict the cloud will help producers break news more quickly, while artificial intelligence and Big Data will help them mine their archives for information, not just about news trends, but about how to shape stories for different audiences and distribution channels including mobile, social and OTT.

Comcast Technology Solutions, a division of Comcast Cable that serves advertiser, content provider, global operator and technology markets, introduced Linear Rights Metadata Management (LRM). The new offering lets content providers and their distribution partners solve the increasing complexity of the accurate delivery, entitlement and representation of content across mobile screens and live multichannel broadcasts. At the forefront […]

AccuWeather introduced the AccuWeather Digital Content Partner Program, providing exclusive, interactive digital content to participating partners. This new program provides unique, engaging content to support partners as a top source in providing breaking news and weather content from AccuWeather’s library of interactive severe weather videos and explanations of weather events to proprietary AccuWeather Ready preparedness […]

Lucid VR displayed its LucidCam. Offering an enhanced user experience, resolution and frame rates equipped for underwater and livestream, the LucidCam is the first 4K 3D point-and-shoot camera for virtual reality that lets users easily capture two 4K overlapping spheres to create depth, and broadcast it through HDMI or Wi-Fi to any phone or VR […]

Bexel Global Broadcast Solutions unveiled the Bexel Clarity 800 camera, the world’s first miniature, high-frame-rate (HFR) point-of view camera for live production. Building on its unrivaled experience in live broadcast, Bexel developed the standard-setting Clarity 800 camera system to meet sports and event producers’ increasing demand for high-quality, real-time HFR video. “Our own experiences supporting […]

TV broadcasters have a lot on their minds this year at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. New efficiencies enabled by IP video transport as well as IT technology and next-gen TV made possible by ATSC 3.0 are near top of mind. But no issue facing over-the-air TV broadcasters at this year’s gathering tops the FCC-mandated repack of the television spectrum. Above: Few transmitter sites will require dealing with logistical issues as complicated as those that had to be overcome at One World Trade Center in New York. (Photo: ©2016 John M. Lyons. Used with permission.)

Ten years ago, as he was getting his company off the ground, Avi Cohen wrangled an NBC News executive to a suite at the Renaissance Hotel near the Las Vegas Convention Center where the NAB Show was under way. Cohen didn’t have the money, or credibility, to take out space on the exhibit floor, but he was confident that if just one TV executive saw his product, LiveU, it would take off.

Glodina Connan-Lostanlen of Imagine Communications and Yvonne Thomas of Arvato Systems’ Broadcast Solutions division were presented with the annual Women in Technology Leadership Award and Technology Women to Watch Award, respectively. Above, Connan-Lostanlen (left) receives her award from TVNewsCheck Publisher Kathy Haley. (John Staley photo)

TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell was a recipient of a 2017 Ward L. Quaal Leadership Awards today presented by Broadcasters Foundation of America in recognition of career contributions to the broadcast industry and the community at large (the complete list of winners is here, The awards were handed out at the group’s annual luncheon during the NAB Show in Las Vegas. L-r: Jim Thompson, Broadcasters Foundation president; Jessell; and Dan Mason, Broadcasters Foundation chairman.

This year’s NAB Show is the first since IMT’s parent company xG Technology acquired Vislink in February. The combined company is tackling how to more closely integrate ENG crews with the newsroom via an IP network set up on BAS channels. Above, at the show, IMT unveiled NewsNet, which leverages BAS channel connectivity and IP networking to extend TV newsrooms to ENG crews in the field.

Driving the addressable TV market’s growth, which some estimates put at 50% this year, is advertisers’ satisfaction with their campaigns there. Michael Bologna, president of One2one Media, estimates about 54 million U.S. TV households currently have the necessary technology for such ad insertion. Another 30 million-40 million televisions are expected by year’s end.

Nexstar CFO Tom Carter is optimistic that a more deregulated era is dawning and the company will be acquiring more stations, though he won’t pin down a growth target. He’s also bullish on ATSC 3.0, and sees the repack as a kickstarter to get it in place.

NAB Show attendees liked what they heard from the new FCC chairman today, the introduction next month of an overarching review of the commission’s broadcasting, cable and satellite rules. “Broadcasting remains an indispensable part of America’s communications landscape. And under my chairmanship, broadcasting won’t be seen as a speed bump. We’ll want to hear which rules you think should be modified or repealed as part of this review, and why.”

At an 8:15 a.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday at the NAB Show, ATSC board members officially opened the NextGen TV Hub powered by ATSC 3.0 to show the entire television industry that the future of TV has arrived. Above: Mark Richer, ATSC president (center); NAB EVP-CTO Sam Matheny (right); Brian Markwalter, SVP, research and standards at CTA; flanked by ATSC board members officially open the hub.

NAB is honoring The Durst Organization’s John Lyons with its 2017 Television Engineering Achievement Award on Wednesday during its technology luncheon. Lyons spoke with TVNewCheck Tech Editor Phil Kurz about what it means to receive the honor, the effort to bring TV broadcasting to One World Trade Center and what broadcasters and tower crews will face when they begin mounting new antennas to meet their TV spectrum repack obligation.

A broadcast test is underway at Fox O&O WOFL Orlando of the Verance Aspect open watermark solution integrated into Triveni Digital’s StreamScope MT-50 analyzer.

The announcement comes after the successful completion of joint project by Sony and Crispin to create a cloud-based ingest operation for Tegna, called the Media Clearinghouse, and an earlier project, Public Media Management, which provides master control and cloud-based distribution service for PBS.

At the Imagine Communications NAB Show press conference in Las Vegas, the company unveiled its Open Zenium initiative to further advance adoption of IP workflows and discussed how IP and the cloud can be used by broadcasters looking at how to deliver personalized, targeted content and ads in an ATSC 3.0 future.

As the demand and diversity of non-traditional broadcast services continues to grow, it’s to be expected that the emphasis on quality of production and viewer experience will also intensify. These developments were much in evidence during Harmonic’s pre-NAB press conference Sunday, where a host of new or expanded solutions for OTT and mobile were unveiled.

As broadcasters’ infrastructures evolve to accommodate IP, UHD and HDR, it stands to reason that vendors will necessarily to need to support workflows that — to various extents, and for various possible durations — are in a state of flux. Evertz indicated that it was up for the challenge in a press conference on Sunday that touched on its latest developments in areas including SDN, playout, compression, remote production and more.

At its NAB 2017 press conference on Sunday, Ericsson unveiled how it plans to “transform TV” with new OTT dynamic-ad insertion technology, MediaFirst video processing solutions, cloud-based-captioning services, content-discovery tools, and its Unified Delivery Network.

Fresco, an upstart platform that connects news organizations with “citizen journalists” for video content, is taking over the bulk of video production for Anchorage, Alaska’s KTBY. The station’s COO projects up to 40% cost savings — including from layoffs — in making the move.

At the Avid Connect 2017 event in Las Vegas Saturday, company Chairman and CEO Louis Hernandez Jr. announced major steps on a journey to the cloud where broadcasters, post houses and other media professionals can realize greater operational efficiencies, easier collaboration and much-improved workflows.

Ahead of the NAB Show, which begins Saturday, the organization’s President-CEO Gordon Smith discusses working with new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the next steps following the spectrum auction.

Artel Video Systems | Booth N4511 | Website: www.artel.com  Artel Video Systems, a provider of real-time, multimedia delivery solutions has partnered with Black Box, a technology provider of high-performance KVM, professional A/V signal distribution and extension and switching solutions, at the 2017 NAB Show to demonstrate IP interoperability and full KVM access for remote production.  […]

Haivision |Renaissance Hotel, Suite Ren Deluxe–B | Website: haivision.com/NAB  Haivision will demonstrate a breakthrough in live 4Kp60 HEVC software-only performance video streaming, leveraging the unparalleled quality of x265 software encoding, while running at a performance level that was previously only possible with dedicated hardware. Through the use of commodity off-the-shelf processing capabilities, Haivision will showcase how x265 […]