By Keith Lissak
The 2023 NAB Show wrapped up its 100th anniversary on April 19th, with what NAB says were 65,000 registered attendees and 1,200 exhibitors. While I hadn’t attended the show since 2019, the year before the pandemic, it felt strangely natural to be back at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
I’ve now been to more than 25 NAB shows during my career, which pales in comparison to some industry folks, like Dave Van Hoy, president of post solutions provider Advanced Systems Group, who has been to more than 40 of these events.
What keeps him coming back after all these years? For starters, the change in the scope of NAB, says Van Hoy. “When I went to my first show as a 19-year-old in 1979, it was clearly a broadcast show. The two dominant vendors were RCA and Ampex. SMPTE timecode was brand-new. Minicomputers were controlling tape decks and switchers to perform edits in real time and record on tape decks. It was all about over-the-air and cable. Today, I would call NAB an overarching content creation and distribution show.”
For me, my career wouldn’t be the same without the NAB Show. We all remember our first time. Mine was in 1987 in Dallas, the year a freak spring blizzard nearly shut down the city. At the time I was a green PR guy working for an agency that counted Ampex among its clients. Two years later I was at the Atlanta show, perhaps best known for coinciding with the Grateful Dead’s 1989 spring tour. Who can forget all of us in business attire running the gauntlet through thousands of tie-dyed Deadheads to reach the convention hall?
And then there was the 1996 show, when I was with Tektronix, parent company of Grass Valley and Lightworks at the time. Booth staff had to wear these ridiculous vests patterned with hand-drawn graphics of our various solutions. We looked like we should be working at an ice cream parlor rather than attending the calendar’s most important event for broadcasters and post pros. Talk about a fashion faux pas!
In 2006, after spending some time outside the industry, NAB is where I went looking for a gig that would bring me back. Walking the show floor I learned that Harris Broadcast (now Imagine Communications) had recently acquired Leitch and was looking for a marketing communications manager in Burbank. It was the ideal spot for me at the ideal time, and I landed it.
Show Veterans
This was the 35th year as an exhibitor at NAB for Atto Technology, which showed its newest generation of storage and network connectivity solutions for media workflows. Marketing director Peter Donnelly said that Atto keeps coming back to NAB because it’s “still the place for people to find out what’s new and what’s interesting. This is also where we get our best ideas. When we connect with our customers here, they tell us what they need, and we put that right back into our development pipeline.”
Interra Systems provides QC and monitoring solutions for multiplatform content delivery. With more than 20 NAB appearances under its belt, the company considers the show to be its best annual opportunity for meeting with customers. “There is no substitute,” said Anupama Anantharaman, VP of product management. “The kind of conversations we have here let us better understand what the customer needs and better convey our value propositions for solving their challenges.”
Evaluating the ROI on exhibiting at a big event like NAB is a legitimate question for vendors. Bryce Button, director of product marketing at AJA Video, pointed out that NAB has had a significant impact on the company’s bottom line over the past 25 years, despite its costs. “The show brings the greatest minds in M&E together in one place for conversation and provides an environment where our customers can get hands-on with the equipment and connect one-on-one with the product managers to ask questions,” he said. “While the team is always accessible via email and phone, there’s nothing quite like those in-person interactions to help grow the business.”
This Year’s First-Timers
Over the years I’ve seen some amazing things at NAB, beginning with my very first look at HD video in the Sony booth in 1987. I’ve seen a US president speak, and, in 2017, the first live 4K broadcast from space. On April 20, 1993, I watched in horror as live video demos broadcast the government’s 51-day standoff with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, which came to a fiery and deadly conclusion. In 2010, I commiserated with colleagues who couldn’t get home after the show due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, which disrupted air travel across western Europe.
But the show isn’t just for seasoned veterans like me. A first-time exhibitor I came across this year was Perifery, a new division of software-based storage innovator DataCore, that was showcasing its ecosystem for helping content creators leverage the benefits of AI. Periphery GM/COO Abhi Dey described the technology as a solution for “solving the data lifecycle problem, when it comes to launching a video, archiving it, preserving the content, and using the captured intelligence to make critical workflow decisions.” Periphery is one of the first tools I’ve encountered that simplifies the use of AI-enabled functions such as closed captioning and facial recognition so that they’re more than just talking points.
In another first, I ran into a guy named Tanner outside the LVCC’s Central Hall who was attending his very first NAB show. He was talking excitedly about the Unreal Ride, a virtual production experience from Vū Technologies and Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC). Tanner directed me to sit astride a motorcycle stationed in front of an LED wall that was projecting backgrounds created with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine real-time 3D creation system. In front of me was an MRMC robotic camera. As the camera tracked the background video software, I saw myself riding the motorcycle across multiple futuristic landscapes, no greenscreen required. Very cool.
The excitement of seeing new technologies like virtual production at the NAB Show, and connecting with old friends and colleagues, are among the most cherished memories of my career. But can I really be old enough to have attended nearly 30 NAB shows? Yikes.
Keith Lissak has more than 30 years of experience as a marketing and communications professional in the media & entertainment technology space for companies including Avid, Harmonic, Harris and Tektronix. You can reach him at keith@lissak-comms.com.
