IBE Feature | NAB Highlights
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
Joe O’Halloran | Correspondent
It may have not been fear and loathing in Las Vegas but there was definitely change in the air around Sin City. Our correspondent Joe O’Halloran gives us his highlights from NAB 2013.
Joe O’Halloran Correspondent, IBE
This year, Las Vegas felt different. Just as the city often reinvents itself, things were on a different track: from the huge price hikes in basically everything, and the ubiquity of hotels on The Strip selling $1000 Rimowa suitcases, to the almost by-stealth advance of City Center and the upgrade of the once defiantly sticky-carpeted Imperial Palace into maybe something a bit better. And just up the monorail from the hotel it was the same at the LVCC for NAB 2013.
Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and after nearly 20 years of April’s pilgrimage to the techno- savannahs of South Hall and North Hall, one could be tempted to hit autopilot. But this year was different. Quieter for sure, but no less important for that. In fact, NAB reflected a broadcast industry where less is more – and will be so for the foreseeable future.
Connectivity
Meme is a good word to get collective heckles raised, yet NAB 2013 did have a number of them. And many of them were more or less connected to, well, connectivity.
The near ubiquity of mobile devices capable of supporting high quality broadcast video experiences, plus high speed fixed networks and increasingly – in the US at least – 4G wireless networks capable of supporting such services, has been a game-changer. It was no coincidence that Day Two’s keynote was given by Lowell
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McAdam, chief executive of leading US telco Verizon Wireless. LTE infrastructures such as those offered by Big Red are now creating big business opportunities with McAdam hinting that Verizon may resurrect a mobile TV bouquet.
Throw in a new online video standard that ensures only half the current bandwidth is needed to support services and the almost daily launch of videocapable connected devices, and then everything does seem different. Back in the fixed world it seems that 3D is dead and 4K UltraHD is just around the corner.
Evidence for this change in the industry could be found just before you entered the halls. Outside in the parking lot with its own technology tepee was premium online video publishing, analytics and monetisation technology provider Ooyala, which used the occasion to reveal the findings of a special edition of its quarterly online video industry index showing a continuing shift of premium content from traditional distribution to cross- device.
The Global Video Index: Broadcaster Edition also highlighted how the aforementioned ubiquity of connected devices has driven ”dramatic differences“ in time spent with live content compared with VOD services, and prime time online viewing hours compared with traditional TV.
According to the data, people tune into live video 2.5 times longer than VOD content on broadcast and entertainment networks. More than three- quarters of time spent watching mobile video in March 2013 was with videos longer than ten minutes in length, while nearly half of all tablet video consumption was with video at least 30 minutes in length. Showing how much the platform has become a true second screen, tablet viewers were found to have spent twice as much time watching video from broadcasters online.
A brave new world
Highlighting this theme was a dedicated section at the show, Connected Media World, showcasing how content consumption experience occurs across IPTV, mobile, social and cloud technologies and connected devices.
One of the companies at the heart of the section was Exterity, whose CEO Colin Farquhar expressed satisfaction that the dedicated focus enabled the firm to present new products, further increasing the value of NAB. “Each year NAB increases in relevance as Enterprise IPTV gets more share of voice alongside the traditional broadcast focus of the show”, he commented.
“The level of enquiries from visitors at the show was very good. The broadcast industry, for which we provide in-house IPTV services, is showing resilience during current challenging
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