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MillimeterNAB for Everyone
Mar 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Cynthia Wisehart, Editorial Director
NAB. Apparently, You Gotta Go. In fact that's often how I feel when I'm on the show floor, power-walking from booth appointment to booth appointment.
In one of its more imperative marketing campaigns, the National Association of Broadcasters is sounding the clarion call to gather the troops in Las Vegas. This is a good thing, despite the amusing choice of slogans. An “A” for Enthusiasm, and I hope it works. You could say it's gotta work.
NAB (The World's Largest Electronic Media Show) does not by itself determine whether it will be a good year for electronic media. But it is where many people form a powerful image of how promising or bleak the immediate future is going to be. NAB is the tribal gathering where we tell each other stories about what will work, what won't, what's hot, what's up with business, and increasingly whether anyone can stay in business until…well, until someone can wrangle the unruly digital herd into an orderly migration to something. Or figure out how to make money out of the mess.
In the meantime, enthusiasm is a basic requirement, as the NAB seems to have understood. They're also continuing to understand that there's a wide array of people from prosumer videophiles to Hollywood directors who gotta go. This year you can attend sessions on topics that are only remotely broadcast-related, from digital dailies to authoring DVDs, and there are literally hundreds of exhibits on motion picture and film, video production, broadband, and computer graphics. The NAB even promises 100 exhibits on Projection/Audiovisual Equipment.
According to NAB press representative Stacy Perrus, the video production attendee segment is actually the largest part of the NAB audience. Last year's total official attendance was 92,000 souls. Of the people who responded in the registration questionnaire, 46 percent were in video production (38 percent in TV broadcast). Bearing in mind that people could check more than one category, it still indicates that video production professionals have fueled the near doubling of NAB attendance since 1989.
Obviously one show component that addresses our crowd is the DV Video Production Workshop. This year's programming is almost overwhelmingly post-oriented. Interestingly they cover topics that echo the world of high-end post, including compositing and color correction. Not surprisingly, these sessions revolve around some key desktop tools from Avid, Apple, Boris FX, Ultimatte, Pinnacle, and Adobe and concentrate on the increasing power of the desktop and the new renaissance skills that people in video production must have.
It's also interesting to note that the opening Super Session is also about desktop video, featuring Microsoft's top video guy, VP of Windows new media platforms, Will Poole, Adobe's senior VP of graphics, Bryan Lamkin, and Intel's VP of sales and marketing, Deborah Conrad. This is obviously a manufacturer-driven session. However, since NAB provides for only five of these sessions in the schedule, it does indicate that NAB rates desktop video production on par with interactive TV, broadband and wireless, webcasting, and Wall Street.
Also tipping into our arena, NAB's Multimedia World conference has survived the ups and downs of its dotcom courtship and is now in its eighth year. The topic formerly known as streaming is actually more important now than it was during its days in the spotlight.
Ironically, as interactive TV and wireless assume their position at the leading edge, desktop video and Internet video have settled into practical realities. As Perrus points out, Covergence has now happened, so NAB had no further need for the Convergence Marketplace slogan. Now, you just gotta go.
