NAB Show 2019

While most broadcasters and equipment vendors still view the annual NAB Show as an essential stop, attendance and exhibitors have declined the past few years. Show organizers are being proactive by tweaking the schedule of next year’s show in an effort to attract fresh traffic.

Transitioning from SDI to IP has enabled Canal+ to produce content more efficiently and to find new ways to reuse it, said Pierre Maillat, broadcast imagineer at the French pay TV provider. He spoke at a Cisco-sponsored event at the NAB Show where Roger Crothers, head of technology for BBC Wales, said the BBC’s first dive into IP workflow would create a roadmap for moving the rest of its six major broadcast centers to IP and that he anticipates new synergies to emerge when that happens. Ted Schilowitz, futurist for Paramount Pictures, added that IP better delivers the experience younger viewers have come to expect. A pair of video highlights of the session are here. Pictured (l-r): Dave Ward,  SVP chief architect and CTO of engineering, Cisco; Gene Arantowicz, solution engineering manager and media practice lead, World Wide Technology; Schilowitz; Maillat and Crothers.

Good feelings about the broadcasting business at the NAB last week were tempered by the slow pace of ownership regulations at the FCC and Justice Department and the threat from the ever-growing roster of direct-to-consumer streaming services. Some other random takeaways: Is the convention shrinking? | ATSC 3.0 felt more like ATSC 2.4. | There’s a repack disconnect. | Reporting on the Trump White House.

The NAB Show still features a mind-numbing sprawl of video cameras and booms and rigs, enough to overwhelm even the most rabid broadcast engineer. But NAB has truly evolved to become a gathering that now represents the present and future of media.

Questions about regulations from Washington don’t disappear just because you are spending time in Las Vegas, and this week’s NAB Show brought discussion of many such issues. Here’s a recap of news about some imminent actions on some  issues pending before the FCC.

A consortium of station groups pledges to launch the new next-gen transmission standard in top markets by the end of next year. But while broadcasters seem to have found consensus on how to get 3.0 signals on-air, their long-term plans for business models are still unclear. And there are also some tough decisions broadcasters will need to make about what kind of single frequency network they need to build out.

The official count from Las Vegas is 91,460, down 1.6% from 92,912 in 2018. The 2018 total was off 10.2% from 103,443 in 2017.

Looking ahead to big streaming service launches this year from Apple, Disney and WarnerMedia, a panel of providers at the NAB Show said the overall market will likely keep growing but everyone competing in it had better be at the top of their game.

TVNewsCheck honors six individuals for their contributions to television technology with presentations of its annual Women in Technology Awards. (Photo by John Staley)

The FCC chairman tells the NAB Show that when it comes to the commission’s review, “we will not be deterred by those whose regulatory views are not guided by facts and reasons, but instead were set in stone in the era of Laverne & Shirley, Starsky & Hutch and The Captain and Tennille.”

Complexities are shifting when it comes to building a streaming service, and user experience (UX) and latency — especially when it involves live content — are moving to the front of media technologists’ priorities.

FCC Commissioners Michael O’Rielly, Brendan Carr and Geoffrey Starks weighed in on localization and local broadcasters’ coverage of crises during an NAB Show panel session.

National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith put out the welcome mat Monday for “content creators, producers, distributors and technology companies from all corners of the globe,” suggesting they were all part of a next generation of storytellers — ”everybody has a story to tell,” he said. But he also signaled that Big Tech might not be on the same page.

Against market headwinds, OTT monetization won’t happen with a single scheme. Instead, it needs a flexible range of subscription models, advertising and even transactional approaches, experts say.

A broad coalition of television station groups as well as public broadcasters announced at the NAB Show on Monday that ATSC 3.0 will be rolled out in 40 U.S. markets by the end of 2019.

The top executives of Arista Networks, Imagine Communications, MediaKind and Belden describe a tough selling market as broadcasters try to maintain an eroding linear TV business while investing significant dollars in new digital platforms that are still largely unprofitable.

At NAB 2019, a year after a major corporate overhaul, the company unveiled a new maintenance program for customers with aging legacy equipment and announced a major customer win for its advertising software with Australian broadcaster Nine Network.

The inventor of TV’s first non-linear editing platform has reimagined the solution, adding a new UI, distributed processing, finishing and delivering capabilities and other features. It also brought to market a new cloud-based version of its storage platform, offering customers a free, three-month trial.

KCBS will be CBS Television Stations’ second station to launch an OTT stream, signaling the company’s confidence in the platform as both an essential conduit to new viewers and a potent future revenue stream.

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