Setting individual products aside, Simon Hawkings, director of sales strategy at Ross Video, said the cloud, artificial intelligence and viewer engagement are the three biggest trends to emerge from the 2025 NAB Show.
Speaking during an Executive Q&A with TVTech contributing editor Phil Kurz, Hawkings pointed out that the M&E Industry is in a transitional phase that will see technology vendors moving away from “selling metal to selling minutes” in the cloud and users embracing the cloud and cloud-based software to run production instances and enable other media workflows.
Contrasting the move to the cloud with previous technology transitions in the industry, Hawkings noted this one “is really different.”
“This is a more fundamental change in how we're going to do business as well as how the technology works,” he said, “and especially where Ross is coming from in the live production world.”
AI has witnessed rapid transformation in the media industry in the nine months since IBC2024, he noted.
The hype around AI has given way to real applications that improve media workflows. “People are using [AI] stuff in a practical way every day,” said Hawkings. Those include graphics, automation, transcription, auto tagging of metadata, fully assisted productions to make completed shows without an operator, facial and body tracking in cameras, highlight reel creation and clip generation, he said.
When it comes to viewer engagement, Hawkings noted the internet back channel from Smart TVs will give traditional broadcasters deploying ATSC 3.0 an effective way to identify users and serve ads and content better suited to their individual interests.
“All of a sudden now I [broadcasters] know who’s watching, and I know what they’re watching and when. [T]his is driving up ad revenue for some of these more traditional media companies, which is great,” he said.
The transitions evident at the NAB Show this year weren’t strictly limited to these technologies, however. Show organizers made a concerted effort to advance the effort they launched at last year’s show to appeal to the creator community.
“[NAB] created a forecast that said this [creator] market would be worth $500 billion… by 2030. [T]hat would be made up of 50 million professional creators. So, I think there’s a great level of interest in how the industry is going to shift and how we can take advantage of that growing market,” said Hawkings.
Click here to watch the full Executive Q&A.
