LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)
Richard Welsh, chair of 2016 NAB Show’s Future of Cinema Conference, co-chair of HPA Tech Retreat U.K., CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
R.W. Eight.
Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
R.W. VR/360 degree capture, cloud everything, HDR.
Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
R.W. Lots of 360-degree camera rigs on display, from all big-name camera manufacturers such as BlackMagic, GoPro, Canon etc., plus lots of stitching technology to transform 360 into VR such as SilverDraft. The launch of the Lytro Cinema camera is a step change in camera technology, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the move from black and white to color. This may have a huge influence on future camera design in general and in particular on “scene-based” capture facilitating VR.
There were a raft of DAM/MAM solutions and storage systems with cloud-based offerings, and big file transfer software vendors (Aspera, Signiant, FileCatalyst) offering integration to the major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud etc).
Lot’s of OTT and pop-up playout solutions leveraging cloud, and a big shift of focus to cloud software from on-premises. Even traditional hardware manufacturers were offering (behind the scenes) their boxes in the cloud by making their hardware available on-demand in data-centers.
Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
R.W. VR has the furthest to go but it’s obvious HDR and cloud-based media management/processing are here in a big way.
Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
R.W. Not sure I’ve seen anything I liked that didn’t make it.
