NAB
Yesterday, the annual National Association of Broadcasters show began in Las Vegas and this is the first year in more than ten that I haven’t spoken, shown or attended in some capacity. I also didn’t attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show in January this year, because my professional focus has been off IP media management and delivery and on Yallery.
I’m probably different than 99% of the participants with ten years of NAB attendance because I’ve never experienced the NAB show in a capacity that, in some way, didn’t involve IP-based media management or distribution. In the mid-to-late 90s, it was difficult to raise even an eyebrow on the show floor or in the sessions about IP — Internet Protocol.
In 1999, this changed a little. I was leading a technical consulting team at INTERVU in San Diego to help design and build-out their network. And, as a little extra for their marketing folks (to bring some thunder to NAB), I introduced them to IP Multicast and architected a video service delivery demonstration that featured the distribution of a live CNN feed to both NAB show floors (LVCC and Sands).
The CNN feed was encoded in San Diego from satellite and sent through an INTERVU MDC, in multicast tunnels to the convention halls where it was shown on television sets within the booths of INTERVU, Microsoft and AT&T. I felt it was important to place the full screen steaming video on actual TVs because they were the native video frame of the typical NAB attendee. In addition to our TVs, anyone with a Windows PC and Microsoft’s media player connected to the show networks could tap into the Multicast feed.
We had some issues with the show networks getting saturated with random traffic from other exhibitors, but after contacting the venue network engineers about our needs and goals, we were able to negotiate a good chunk of their network to ensure the quality of our IP Multicast tunnels for the duration of the conference. The show floor opened to the public on Monday and the IPTV demo worked as expected (not especially crisp, but “good enough for tv”).
The next day, April 20 1999, I flew to Chicago at 6am because I was chairing a panel discussion on “Integrating Voice, Video and Data on IP Networks” at COMDEX Spring. We had a wonderful session and within 15 minutes of the end, I was back in a cab to the airport for the return to Vegas.
I had my phone turned off because of my session and turned it on to get messages during the ride and I had 20 messages — I don’t normally have 20 messages in a day, and this was only three hours. What had happened, was the nation’s worst nightmare and our demo’s best case scenario. An event so newsworthy had occured to place CNN into live coverage mode. Columbine High School was all over the Airport CNN television sets and at the NAB show, where the broadcast television universe had converged, it was on our three TVs. According to my team and the executives at INTERVU, there were crowds formed around our humble IP streams, watching television as events unfolded.
Our demonstration received a tiny amount of coverage from the TV technology and business press, taking a few pages away from “The year of HD”. The pieces compared the value of our Internet video content over the possibilities of crisp HD nirvana. And, maybe we helped a few RF/broadcast people reconsider the power of Internet-delivered video that year.
Over the last few years, the NAB show has witnessed an explosive growth of IP-based video management and delivery solutions for broadcast, cable and IPTV. There are even pseudo-official delineations of IP-based video markets identified by the NAPTE ranks, amongst other broadcast, content and cable groups. The accepted vertical markets are “Broadband Video” directed to computers (aka Internet streaming video), “Mobile Video” directed to portable devices such as PDAs and Cellphones (aka wireless streaming video) and “IPTV”, which is directed to set-top boxes (aka real TV).
I don’t agree with these definitions, because as we showed in Vegas during the 1999 NAB show, any computing device with a NTSC scan converter could be a STB. With WiFi, Wimax, DVB-H, MediaFLO or DMB/DAB-IP (amongst other infrastructure technologies) nearly any wireless device released in the next two years may receive real-time video from IP networks.
Content should be valued and monetized within the context of a consumer’s entire media device+network ecosystem.
Anyway, it will be interesting to learn where the buzz lies this year.