NAB said WHAT?

[Rich Rubasch]

I missed the past few shows but still hope to get back to NAB sometime. I like the sense of scale that this industry boasts. Hard to get that online. I do think smaller regional shows might become a hit. But one reason I like NAB in Vegas is to rent a Harley and do some riding. And that works just as well in Spring or Fall in Vegas!

It still remains to be seen if we will even be back to whatever normal looks like by next Fall.

[Tim Wilson]

But one reason I like NAB in Vegas is to rent a Harley and do some riding.

I am by no means a Vegas hater. Quite the contrary. My wife used to come in on Wednesday and spend some time walking around the show, because it really is kind of cool. ESPECIALLY the hardcore broadcast stuff. (For my money, the South Hall stopped being all that compelling at exactly the moment it left The Sands.)

Then we’d stay through the weekend at someplace nice like Bellagio or The Venetian when they were new (which tells you how long ago this was) and see a bunch of Cirque de Soleil and comedy, and eat like crazy people. (Forget the buffets. Vegas has more proper world-class restaurants per square mile than all but a few places on earth.)

Heck, one year we flew in my parents and took them to O and the art museum at the Bellagio. Steve Wynn has one of the world’s elite private art collections and has done a fantastic job sharing it with the public. Every billionaire maniac should be so open minded.

I also like the idea of trade shows as providing a way for end users to meet each other, without respect to the vendors. I think we should be doing more of THAT regionally, too.

But I feel like people’s fondness for their own experiences adjacent to these events is preventing us from having the conversations we need to have, starting with, who is it benefitting that so many end users are so eager to line the pockets of lobbyists for oligarchs who are driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction? I’d say it’s benefitting the lobbyists driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction and their clients FAR more than its benefitting you, me, or our favorite companies, or the industry as a whole.

I’d rather see us come up with some ways to draw ourselves together that actually help people who need helping. Regional events are a great start.

[Ron Lindeboom]

Oliver Peters said: “Moving NAB to fall is just dumb. It’s shooting yourself in both feet. It sets up the choice between NAB and IBC, not only for attendees, but also vendors. This runs the risk of hurting both shows with no upside.”

An observation that I hear business owners, executives, and key marketing personnel echoing, Oliver. But to add an idea to your point, the audience itself would be hard-pressed to find any compelling reason to attend two major trade events back-to-back. This, as human beings can only process and digest just so much information before the eyes glaze over in information overload. Even insightful observant reporters like yourself can only process just so much information and it is why we see so many people trying to report about the shows from their unique perspective.

Two major trade shows back-to-back would be precisely the kind of information overload in which all but a handful of companies and products would get lost in. But the odds of being one of those companies or products would fall in the range of fractions of a single percentile. Not exactly a compelling reason to line up and mortgage the farm to do two major shows in a single quarter.

I think that by parking their tanks on IBC’s lawn, NAB is sending a message that they believe they can wrest final supremacy and ultimate trade show hegemony by their actions. But as Tim points out, who’s doing the pushing, for whom, and what is the destination?

Tim Wilson said: “But I feel like people’s fondness for their own experiences adjacent to these events is preventing us from having the conversations we need to have, starting with, who is it benefitting that so many end users are so eager to line the pockets of lobbyists for oligarchs who are driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction? I’d say it’s benefitting the lobbyists driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction and their clients FAR more than it’s benefitting you, me, or our favorite companies, or the industry as a whole.”

I think that NAB is seeing things incorrectly and while indeed NAB’s recent growth has come from EMEA, given a forced choice between the two majors, I believe that in a time of uncertainty and pandemic, people will choose local. Sports teams are analogous in that few people root for other than the home team in the end.

Lastly, as Tim points out, sending the press release public during IBC’s virtual tradeshow, really does taste like the actions of an organization that sees itself as coming to have IBC’s cake and to eat it, too. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I suspect that smacks of the kind of American imperialism that many Europeans and Asians, along with those in the Middle East, take personal umbrage at.

But I could be wrong on all points…

[Graham Quince]

I work for an education software company. Each year we exhibit at the UK’s education equivalent of NAB and it’s just not worth the money. Fewer and fewer people were attending before Covid. (I shudder to think of all the handshakes and close contact I had at the end of January). I’d be very surprised if we’ll attend again.

I think @timwilson is right with his Sony Tsunami analogy. 2020 has accelerated what was already declining.

Slightly different note, my company runs it’s own conference each year and we moved this one online and ran it as a live, 4-hour broadcast. We had guest speakers, comment areas, published the schedule etc… No one needed to travel, pay for hotel rooms or in some cases, miss work. And as a result we had much better attendance than recent years. I don’t think we’ll be moving back to physical conferences.

I can see the problem for hardware demos online – it’s not quite the same if you can’t pick up a camera/tripod/light, but for software? Not sure what a physical exhibition offers. It’s a shame in some ways, you miss out on all the hard-to-define experiences, but then you also miss out on catching a bug and being laid up for days when you get back too.

[Tim Wilson]

@grahamquince wrote:

Slightly different note, my company runs it’s own conference each year and we moved this one online and ran it as a live, 4-hour broadcast. We had guest speakers, comment areas, published the schedule etc… No one needed to travel, pay for hotel rooms or in some cases, miss work. And as a result we had much better attendance than recent years. I don’t think we’ll be moving back to physical conferences.

This is the Tsunami Moment in a nutshell. We could have gone fully virtual a little bit ago if we’d been motivated. Not that there aren’t kinks to work out — I’d hate to think that what we’ve seen so far from most people is the best we’ll be able to do — but now we have the motivation, and just as with the transition to tapeless, for every short term disadvantage, there are unique advantages galore, opportunities that we could never have other otherwise taken.

At the very least, I hope that people in the physical conferences keep getting much, much better at virtual events, and use this opportunity to build new audiences, new markets, and other things that are completely new.

That is, one reason why I think that virtual NAB and IBC have fallen flat is that they’re trying to recreate an experience spread across a million square feet (the former) or across the entirety of one of the world’s great cities (the latter). (And having mentioned how much I enjoyed going to Vegas, I LOVE LOVE LOVE Amsterdam. It really is a wall-to-wall miracle.) Instead of trying to cram all of that into a computer screen (if not a phone), do something NEW.

The folks who run those shows aren’t necessarily creatives themselves. No disrespect intended. Trade shows are a brutal business that I’m glad to be out of. But they KNOW creative people, by the boatload, so how about working to design something so compelling that nobody in their right mind would skip it? Rather than almost exactly the opposite.

it’s not quite the same if you can’t pick up a camera/tripod/light

I get why some people care about this kind of thing, especially if you’re a shooter who travels. You need to know if feels in your hand.

But to Mark’s point earlier, most moderately sized cities have dealers for this, if not rental houses where you can take it out. In the US, there are bunches of rental houses that will ship cameras and lights overnight via FedEx for a tenth the price of a plane ticked to Las Vegas. This stuff is imminently available.

And companies like Amazon, Broadfield, and B&H that will ship you the products you decide to buy will all take returns.

I’m speaking from experience here. I bought a Sony Beta SP camera for $10,000 and a Canon ENG lens for $12,000 back when that represented a good part of an annual salary. Not that I was making a salary. I took out a second mortgage to kit out my video production business (and yes, I know that having a mortgage in my early 30s dates me too, but it was a $50,000 house in Florida when you could live there cheap). I didn’t need to fly all the way across the country to wrestle my way through a scrum in the desert just to hold it. I was on a small island, but UPS got it to me from New York in a couple of days. I knew about what I was getting, and that’s what I got.

And if I didn’t like it, I’d have sent it back and been out maybe $100 for shipping.

I admit that most people will want to visit a dealer or rental house first, in which case, check into it. Don’t assume that there’s not one near you, because so many rental houses will ship to you. And honestly, there are better uses of your time. Read another review, talk to some people in the COW, and trust yourself.

I think that’s exactly what’s happening. Look at all the companies releasing new cameras this year!!! From the INSANE Blackmagic 12K to new mirrorless cameras from Sony that are blowing my mind, and a whole lot of other stuff. Developers aren’t waiting. Why would YOU? If you want it, you can get it.

I can’t say that I studied epidemiology, but I took some classes, mostly because my advisor was an epidemiologist, and I thought he was one of the coolest, smartest guys I’ve ever met. (Which I still think.) We spent a LOT of time looking at the “1918” flu, which actually went over two full years — from the spring of 1918 to the fall of 2020.

(Did you know that Babe Ruth got it twice, and nearly died the second time? A week with a fever of 104, went into a coma that doctors assume he’d never come out of. Both times he caught it: during an exhibition game “for the troops.”)

Which means that right now, we’re still kinda scratching our heads. We don’t know exactly how we’re going to do stuff. And yeah, at a certain point a lot of things WILL come back. But other things may not come back in the same way because the change had already been underway.

And I do get that people needed to SEE the RED camera in 2005, because the hype was unbelievable. Literally. But seeing is believing. Now, they don’t need to prove themselves. Who really does? If you’re a DP who needs to do a shootout for your project, you were never doing that at NAB anyway. You were doing that through your local rental house.

I also remember when this was true for hard drives. Manufacturers were lying through their teeth about arrays capable of playing multiple streams of this or that…although it turns out that many were lying in the booths too! They were playing video off tape decks in artfully composed demos, where the boxes on the desk were EMPTY except for the flashing lights giving the illusion that the drives were reading and writing! So in the case, yet another reminder that there’s point to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to be lied to, when you get lied to at home. Few people have anything left to learn from a drive demo anymore.

There’s been a transition for broadcast gear, too. You used to need to travel to a trade show to see what a digital, automated newsroom looks like…but who needs that now? I saw this changing even when I was still in the game back in 2006. People got the gist. Better to make the vendors fly to you, map out your workflow, and make a specific proposal. I saw pitches from Avid’s broadcast team that were pages and pages of full-size blueprints. Don’t tell me that you can make my workflow better. SHOW me, on paper, EXACTLY what you’re going to do, and how. THAT’s what they needed.

NEED is a funny word. There are things we want, things we enjoy because we enjoy them, but the one thing we’ve established is that nobody NEEDS things to “go back”. The only people benefitting from that are the ones with a financial stake in the old ways. We ALL benefit if we can get creative about going forward.

[Michael Phillips]

Sandwiched between IBC and Interbee, I see no real reason for many non-north American attendees to attend NAB resulting in a much smaller show than previous years. It will also be interesting to see how manufacturers choose to deal with this as well based on resources, budgets etc, and if they choose to not attend one of those three.

[Don Walker]

Of all the various virtual presentations done on the web, the presentations by Grant Petty from Blackmagic, are the ones that I look forward to most. I’ll watch them all the way through no matter how long they are. (Though I think BMD needs to embrace IP video, sometime REAL soon.)