postPerspective Update

NAB 2023 Impressions: Back
to Vegas and Back to Normal

By Mike McCarthy

I traveled to Las Vegas for this year's NAB Show, the first since 2019 for me. I missed last year's event, which was the first NAB I have missed in over a decade. I was happily surprised to see that things have returned to business as usual, as I joined 65,000 of my closest friends in the industry to wander the halls and booths of the recently expanded Las Vegas Convention Center. The addition of West Hall and the closing of South Hall for renovations have led to a reshuffling of booth locations. Most of the post-related vendors were moved to the North Hall, which also housed NAB's Main Stage.

Here are just some of my takes on NAB 2023 — from hot topics like IP Video to my thoughts on the latest from Adobe, Nvidia, Dell and several others...

IP Video Options
The big theme that I saw throughout the show was video over IP in a variety of forms. SMPTE ST2110 uncompressed video, packetized for networks, is by no means a new standard, but it's being used more broadly outside of large traditional broadcasting workflows. And that meant there were many new products supporting this workflow on the show floor.

From here on out, I will just refer to it as "2110," because it comes up a lot, and it just means uncompressed SDI data being transmitted over a standard IP network. I personally think that many use cases don't actually need uncompressed data, but it is the lowest latency (and most expensive) solution to implement at the networking level. Compression decreases the bandwidth requirements by at least an order of magnitude, and I would imagine that 90% of content outside of movie theaters is now viewed as H.264 or similar highly compressed streams anyway, but it does add latency.