Sunday- Partner Meeting Day!

Sundays at NAB are madness for resellers and partners such as ourselves! There are many more meetings to try to get to than is humanely possible, and even with four of us here you still end up missing a couple!

Anyhow, having distilled the collective wisdom of the industry's great and good, there are some common themes arising. Of course, as I said in my first post, 4K is the flavour of the month. Haven't gotten into too many specific products yet- I think we'll probably do a roundup after the show- but I think its interesting to see where the consensus lies in future production formats.

Secondly, clouds are everywhere! If you don't have a cloud strategy, your just not at the races! Now I, like a lot of people, would tend towards the sceptical side of this debate- are the broadcasters of the world going to trust their facilities to a remote, anonymous site? I would have said not a chance, but I'm starting to re-evaluate that viewpoint. It's not that I think that we're going to see everyone move to the cloud today or tomorrow, but I think I can start to see a real practical future for centralised media centres with the broadcasters being the content & schedule publishers.

It's already a reality, and has been for years, with service providers such as Technicolor and Arquiva, but I'm beginning to see the potential for a SaaS model for companies which doesn't require the long term commitment to contracts and bespoke centres. With the arrival of services such as AWS and the development of software from companies like Harmonic, Telestream, and Snell to support "on demand" encoding, transcoding, and shortly playout management, I think we will see a model where a broadcaster can set up with relatively modest investment, and rent the technical facilities as needed, scaling up or down to meet demand. So we could, for instance, see a broadcaster set up a dedicated channel for a short period- say around a major local cultural event- and run it for a couple of weeks just. Regulators equally will have to find a way to regulate this environment, and we all know how long that could take!

This presents a lot of opportunity for new players to enter the market, and equally presents a challenge for traditional broadcast models. It's not that we'll see the demise of the BBC's and RTE's of the world, but they will have to change their model to remain competitive in the new world order.

Having said all that, the old truism that content is king remains valid, and no matter the cost base, if the content is rubbish, then the viewer won't stick with it.

So, where does that leave us looking into the future? Well it's still anyone's guess, but I think if we project forward 4 or 5 years we will see a very different landscape to the one there today, and the forward thinking organisations will start to dip their toes in the water of experimenting with maybe niche content delivery via the new services as they come on stream.

Our job will be to help ensure these new services maintain functionality and quality, and we're looking forward to learning and participating in the developments as they happen

That's my thoughts for the end of Day One (I know the show doesn't officially open till Monday, but us workers have been at it all day Sunday- honest!)

Hopefully tomorrow will bring more insight, and I'll try to keep you all posted with my observations and thoughts as we see more announcements and presentations.

I'm deliberately staying away from straight product announcement posts- there's a million bloggers, PR companies, and newsletters doing that- and I think there's maybe more to be learned for delving beneath the business case for our industry across its various sectors. I hope you agree with this strategy, and if you think I'm on the right track, I'd welcome any feedback.

Till tomorrow (hopefully - but no promises!)

Kevin