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NAB Cancellation Thread: From Adobe, AJA, and Avid to Zaxcom. And of course NAB themselves!
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Well, NAB is officially canceled. So, NONE of us are going.
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I can imagine holding a virtual NAB show floor right here on the COW. Come on, Tim!
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E3 Cancelled too?
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[Mark Suszko] “I can imagine holding a virtual NAB show floor right here on the COW. Come on, Tim!”
Discussions already very much underway, Mark. ☺
We don’t talk about this often, but every month, 10 times more people come through the COW than attended the biggest NABs, so we can definitely get a few things cooking.
I don’t mind saying that we’re not looking to cash in on this. We know that everybody’s money is going to be tight, so we’re looking to advance the interests of the entire community here. Yes, we were hoping the show would be canceled this year, but we don’t have any illusions that anybody’s life is going to be easier as a result, or that they’re suddenly going to have more money in pocket as a result of not going. Quite the contrary.
Details to follow, of course. People are just starting to think about this stuff, and it’s still 5 weeks from NAB’s originally scheduled date, but whether folks are going to be holding their own online events (say, AJA and Adobe, who’ve already announced that this will be their approach), or need some help putting something together, we’ll be accommodating them.
More soon!
Tim
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Can you make it in VR so I can put on a pair of goggles, some too-tight shoes, and watch it on my treadmill? 🙂
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[Mark Suszko] “Can you make it in VR so I can put on a pair of goggles, some too-tight shoes, and watch it on my treadmill? :-)”
You read our minds!
Okay, kidding aside. You’re now in charge of the NAB Show. What are you thinking about for the rest of 2020?
The Twittersphere was circulating a rumor about rescheduling for the summer, which strikes me as a bad idea for a number of reasons (not least of which is THE DESERT IN THE SUMMER), doubling down on NAB NY in October (assuming that it comes to pass), or NAB marshalling their vast resources to record and stream presentations of….something/anything. (I’m sure that they could get Todd Rundgren to help if they asked.)
The challenge isn’t just for NAB alone, although it certainly starts there. We’ve already heard from SxSW that the revenue loss from canceling their three Austin festivals (movies, music, and tech) has led to cutting a third of their staff already, and serious questions over whether the festivals will be back next year. That’s surely not going to be quite the case for NAB (right? like I know, though), but we’ve considered the folks who run the show and conferences to be our friends, and we sympathize with their challenge.
But there’s also the responsibility that I know that they feel to the many partners who time their product development and release cycles to the April show. Some of them clearly have the resources to mount major streaming initiatives on their own, but some of them could use a boost from NAB…somehow…to help them recoup the investment they’ve made in development in ways that support NAB, and now look to NAB for support in creating something resembling the splash they would have made during the show.
(I won’t even try to count all the press releases we’d already gotten from folks announcing what they were bringing to the show. Some, I’ve been able to edit and still have them make sense, say, for products with a firm ship date, or shipping now. But quite a few were speaking about specific things they were planning to DO at the show. Those stories are going to have get rewritten after the strategies do.)
So, you’re NAB, thinking about what you can do for your own organization, and what you can do for some of the companies who count on you…what would YOU do?
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I’m probably the wrong guy to ask, having attended nary a single NAB. It was all because it was in Vegas. Anywhere else, I might have talked the admin into subsidizing the occasional trip. When you work for a government department, there’s en extra layer of scrutiny to everything you do, and for decades, our management would not allow us to go to NAB on the public dime for fear of a muck-racking columnist making a cheap shot headline out of it: “your tax dollars wasted on employee junkets to Vegas“. So… we could go… but only if we took vacation time and funded our trips out of pocket. Never could afford that. So actually finding and using the COW back in the day was how I first got to vicariously see and learn about what you folks got to actually experience in the Real. Only without the foot pain, the heat, the crowds getting in the way of you getting a better look. Was I jealous of you all? Yes. Did I still end up learning enough to advise my bosses on future purchases? Yes.
I love the TED talk format for making presentations. I am also a huge fan of Pecha_Kucha Night presentations, which are timed talks linked to 20 powerpoint slides. Each slide is locked in at a 20 second length. 20 slides, 20 seconds each, no stops, no do-overs, no extensions, and you are done. It’s fast, it promotes efficient communication, it’s like presentation haiku, and it’s fun. Check out https://www.pechakucha.com
So, if I was building a portal site for a virtual NAB booth-crawl, I’d standardize the format for maximum info in the minimum time, to say, two minutes of overview and key features. I’d also have a rule that I reject demos made with just a shotgun mic on the camera or phone. This is NAB and you have to have SOME standards. It amazes me how many demos I find on Youtube where an engineer who should know better is demoing with hollow, echoey, off-mic audio.
But I digress..
So, standardized format, short short run time with links to expanded versions. Keyword-searchable, by maker/brand as well as type and function. So If I’m shopping for a switcher I can see all the switcher-related clips in one bunch. Links to a discussion thread for Q&A and detail if you want it.
And I want all the panels open to view, all the keynotes, white paper presentations, round table discussions, no paywalls. NAB is not just the hardware show floor but also the experts talking about the industry and where it is going. That’s the simplest part to share online.
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[Mark Suszko] “I love the TED talk format for making presentations. I am also a huge fan of Pecha_Kucha Night presentations, which are timed talks linked to 20 powerpoint slides.”
I think we can definitely agree as a nation and a world that TED has really helped its speakers hone the art of a 15-minute talk. None of it is accidental. They DRILL people on it, and in fact have some fantastic resources on their channel, YouTube and elsewhere to teach you how to do a presentation exactly like this. Here’s one from TED Official, but there are a bunch of others that honestly every speaker should take to heart.
[Mark Suszko] “And I want all the panels open to view, all the keynotes, white paper presentations, round table discussions, no paywalls. NAB is not just the hardware show floor but also the experts talking about the industry and where it is going. That’s the simplest part to share online.”
I don’t think they could do it for free free with their major source for funding educational effort no longer in play, but they could definitely get corporate sponsorship out the wazoo, and should — and then, yeah, make the content free. It’s a model whose ongoing viability we can testify to ☺ (with thanks again to the many of you who turn your ad blockers off in the COW).
But Mark, I love these ideas! And maybe it really does take this kind of thinking — NOT assuming that you’ll be so sad sad sad if you can’t have beers with your buddies from far away and have engineers from your favorite companies treat you like you’re important to your face, and that the only problem to solve is to figure out how to be that hung over and have people still suck up to you rather than treat you like a hobo. LOL
It’s ultimately as simple as you’re making it, I think. There’s lots of people ready to share lots of information, and we have lots of ways to accomplish that while we’re in a set of conditions that might be around for another 12-18 months in some part of the world
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It’s a bit shocking that video industry stage presentations haven’t adopted the TED talks model long ago. The biggest thing that video teaches is focusing a message and making it as brief as possible.
As a long-time corporate video editor I’ve suffered through innumerable live event key note addresses and they are always way too long. Keeping a live audience engaged for more than 20 mins is no small task and for the most part there are very few instances where it’s warranted.
The TED talk approach should be mandated for virtually all live presentations and especially for us folks in the business of video.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
So WWDC is going to be online only now, will be very interesting to see how Apple make it work
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