NAB Trends

What’s Trending at NAB

Around this time of the year, you start seeing a lot of talk about what’s going to be released at NAB. It’s always interesting to look at some of the larger trends that are out there. Of course, what’s trending for Digital Anarchy is Beauty Box 3.0. The photo version just got released (see below) and the video version is not far behind. But beyond that…

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There are some of the obvious ones:

4K is coming whether we need it or not. Having seen some of it at CES I’m not especially blown away by it. It’s better, for sure, but the imagery I saw wasn’t so much better that I wanted to run out and spend $20,000 on a new TV. Or even $1000 for that matter. However, I guess as we move towards everyone having a 90 inch TV, the extra resolution will matter. So there’s already been no shortage of announcements of 4K cameras with more to come I’m sure. I can’t really complain since it’ll certainly increase demand for Beauty Box Video. If people thought they looked bad in HD… ;-)

The Cloud. Nobody knows exactly what the hell that means, but it’s big. And fluffy. Adobe has some potentially interesting collaborative solutions. Not sure how  well that works in the real world, but better collaboration tools are probably needed as more people work remotely. The one thing I don’t think you’ll see is professionals editing video in the cloud. This is more of a bandwidth issue than anything else. You just can’t move gigabyte files around the internet effectively. On the consumer side you’ll see more of it though as the files are smaller since, if you’re broadcasting on YouTube, compression isn’t so much a concern.

One of the smaller trends is content curation. With all those YouTube and Vimeo videos how do you find things? It’s hard enough finding something with 500 channels. Add in the unlimited number of YouTube channels and it’s a daunting task. So anyone producing content needs to almost approach it as a website and consider SEO to be a critical part of the production. There seem to be a variety of firms popping up to help with that.

The Second Screen trend is also very interesting. Lots of people are watching TV with a laptop, tablet, or phone next to them. How is that changing the way we view TV? What kind of ancillary content makes sense for these devices? How can we use mobile devices to interact with what’s on the big screen? (and yes, ‘big screen’ now means that 108″ 4K flat screen in your living room) NAB has a day long sub-conference devoted to this. Looks like it might be worth checking out if you’re concerned about such things.

Of course, the most interesting thing at NAB will be Beauty Box Video 3.0! Maybe we should rename it Beauty Box Video 4K. The Beauty Box 4K Cloud? The mind boggles.

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