Clark’s Quest: Find Next Best Broadcast Tech

John Clark is NAB’s official gatherer of ideas.

As executive director of the association’s Pilot program (formerly NAB Labs), he says in an interview with TVNewsCheck, his job is to come up with ways that broadcasters can enhance their current businesses and perhaps develop new ones.

To that end, he seeks ideas through a variety of means, including partnerships with tech incubators and angel investors; relationships with vendors, media businesses and educators; and the “serendipity” that accompanies such outreach.

“For us, it’s about engaging with different people, different organizations, different groups and trying to figure out where, for lack of a better term, the synergies [with broadcasting] lie.”

On Tuesday, Pilot took a new tack, offering prizes for whoever comes up with the best business ideas for how broadcasters can “engage their communities with next generation content on any device, whether big, small or moving.” First prize: $20,000.

Clark says he recognizes that broadcasters are now packaging their content for digital media, social and otherwise, and so he is particularly attuned to digital opportunities. “To advance broadcast technology means to advance it not only in over-the-air signals and what we have traditionally done.”

On occasion, Pilot will recommend that NAB take a position in a company, Clark says. “We are looking to invest smart money early in people who are doing things that we think can have a positive impact on broadcasting. “

Pilot’s portfolio currently includes Yet Analytics, which crunches Big Data for marketing; Haystack TV, a personalized digital news service; and Antenna, which measures online engagement and audience sentiment.

Clark says NAB is not interested in telling the companies what to do. “We get an early and a very deep inside look at what they are doing and where they are having success. That allows us to figure out, OK, where are some other opportunities that we may not have known about six months previously?”

And there is a possible financial upside, he says. “These are equity investments and so if someone does hit it big and make billions of dollars that’s honestly good for us.”

But the most part, Pilot is not driven by the need to invest, Clark says. The pay-off of his efforts will come in other forms.

“We can work with companies on [NAB] projects using their ideas or technologies on test projects, prototypes or pilots. For example, Yet Analytics was a part of our Pilot Home Gateway at the NAB Show showing how to capture and display tracking data of usage of the Gateway.

“We can introduce new ideas and the people working on them to NAB members through presentations, gatherings, conferences and in many cases, one-on-one connections. We’ve had companies talk to our committee about location-based marketing and beacons, OTT delivery, and programmatic advertising, as just a few examples.”

NAB Labs was a misnomer. It never conducted research and development in the sense that Cable Labs does, spending millions to come up with transformative technologies like the modem that turned cable TV systems into high-speed broadband networks.

NAB Labs was, for the most part, a vehicle for making small investments in companies that NAB thought might benefit broadcasters.

With the hiring of Clark in January, NAB relaunched NAB Labs as Pilot, a word that better defines the program’s role as Clark describes it — exploring the tech world and leading broadcasters through it.

Clark was recruited by Sam Matheny, the NAB’s EVP of technology, to whom Clark reports. The two have known each other for years, having worked together at Jim Goodmon’s Capitol Broadcasting in the 2000s.

Clark joined Capitol’s WRAL Raleigh, N.C., in 1998, while still a communications student at Campbell University. Since he was young, he was given the duty of figuring out the internet and how the station might exploit it. “There was no better place to have been.”

He worked 13 years at Capitol. Along with Matheny, he was involved in some of Capitol’s entrepreneurial digital efforts, including DTV Plus, a datacasting initiative, and News Over Wireless, a mobile app venture.

In 2007, he was named general manager of wral.com and so was in charge of all of WRAL’s digital operations when he accepted a faculty post in 2011 at the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism.

In addition to teaching, Clark launched the Reese News Lab, which was dedicated to media innovation and entrepreneurship. “I worked with students who wanted to learn what it takes to create an actual media product, how to do it and what the pitfalls are, but also to create products for the local level because it doesn’t always get attention.”

At NAB, Clark says he’s spending a lot of time building relationship with people and companies that may have some benefit for broadcasting as it attempts to reinvent itself for the digital age.

“I am a firm believer in serendipity,” he says. “You go talk with one company about X and you never know what you are going to come out with — other introductions and other ideas.”

But there is also a more calculated dimension to Pilot’s outreach, he says, citing a couple of initiatives that preceded Clark at NAB.

One is a partnership with 1776, a Washington-based incubator that provides guidance and resources to tech start-ups. Through the partnership, Pilot tracks what the start-ups are doing and sees if there are any applications in broadcasting.

Although 1776 is not directly involved in media, it is working in important related areas like drones and cybersecurity, he says. In July, Pilot will be hosting a seminar on how the 1776 start-ups can work with media. “We are offering value back to those start-ups from our perspective as an industry.”

Another partner is the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, which, among other things, includes a network of angel investors.

Clark runs Pilot out Matheny’s science and technology shop without other dedicated staff. But he can draw on the expertise of three NAB committees — the Radio Technology Committee, the TV Technology Committee and the Digital Officers Committee.

Another resource is tech companies that have volunteered to be “members” of Pilot. They include Accenture, Akamai, Frankly, Google, Nielsen, Shareablee, Yahoo and, as of Tuesday, Lakana.

Clark says that the members do not constitute an advisory board, but, as he describes what they do, they sound like one.

“The are there to help us identify what some of those opportunities may be and they are going to be there to participate with us in some of the prototypes and actual demonstrations we do. “

Clark says that Pilot is open to adding more members.

Right now, the biggest thing TV broadcasters have going on the technology front is the implementation of ATSC 3.0, a new, more powerful broadcast standard. The NAB in April petitioned the FCC to permit its use on a voluntary basis and allow it to co-exist with the current DTV standard.

Pilot has big role in 3.0, Clark says. It organized the 3.0 demonstrations at this year’s NAB Show, Clark says. “That was a huge project, and we just did a webinar on ATSC 3.0.”

That webinar was another example of another Pilot function — education. For the NAB Show in April, it organized a day-long seminar on digital media, which was packed for most of the day.

In his hunt for the next big idea, Clark promises to be practical. He will heed the advice of management guru Peter Drucker and judge an innovation not by its novelty, but by its potential in the marketplace.

And, he says, he will be guided by a question: “What are things that we can do that serve our local communities, but at the same time continue to make us have great, growing and viable businesses?”

To stay up to date on all things tech, follow Phil Kurz on TVNewsCheck’s Playout tech blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @TVplayout.