Me, I’m wondering if NAB has experienced their “Sony tsunami” moment, and just not realized it yet.
I think there are a lot of things that are experiencing a Sony Tsunami moment.
The rush to digital remote has been accelerated. Literally, today, I just got Gigabit fibre installed in my home for cheaper than the 120Mb down 12Mb up that was nearly twice as expensive as this Gig fibre. With remote learning with our son, lots of transferring big files by me, and nearly constant Zoom and Teams meetings with all of us, our internet was crippled. It would literally kick all of us off four times daily in the middle of the work/school day. It’s a bunch of hot garbage.
That’s not the story, the story is that the technician, who was very good an knowledgeable, and helped to clear what I would imagine is about 40 years worth of of coax out of the way to make room for the tiny fibre, was having trouble getting the modem to light up. Signals were good, everything was good all the way in, but the modem wouldn’t respond. He then tried another modem with the same results, he then went down the street to make sure that the junction was hooked up correctly and it was, so then he called the home office. What wasn’t on the install ticket was some sort of fibre termination box. Turns out the fibre termination box is 10Gb hardware. So fibre comes in to the house, goes to this 10Gb terminator, then ethernet out to the modem via 10Gb. Right now, it’s a 1Gb connection, but there’s 10Gb supposedly coming. WTF? That means I’d have 10Gb to home from the office 10Gb. That means (in theory) I could VPN in to the office and edit with the files in the office, from home.
I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it seems like it would change a few things.
We are speccing shoots are there will be zero client and agent on set, but rather they will be in video village at their respective homes while we stream the set back to them. We are speccing out shoots where none of us will be there, and all of us will be viewing remote while we direct talent who is also setting up the lights, camera, and audio that we have shipped them.
Will these types of scenarios last forever? I don’t think so, but what will happen as a result of this rush to remote? What will stick? What will our clients have learned? Certainly, some forms of production will change forever.
This is a long way of saying, that I can’t imagine that NAB would remain the same as it ever was, because nothing will be the same as it ever was. I don’t see how things get better in time for 2021, even later in 2021 (~a year from now). There have been lots of things that companies have been forced to adopt and overcome and I imagine having two trade shows near each other in time, and far form each other in space will be another year of doing things differently than have been done before out of pure necessity. It’ll be great, it’ll be terrible.