LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)

Christy King, consultant:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
C.K. About 10. I took a few years off in the early 2000s when NAB went through the phase where everyone pretended the Internet didn’t exist. Once everyone got over their fear of the series of tubes, NAB content became relevant to me again. 

Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
C.K. VR and drones, though I was more struck by the lack of themes this year. Last year, everybody was marketing “cloud everything.” The year before, everyone in South Hall was a MAM. This year, everyone seemed unintentionally focused on anti-vaporware: Promoting functionality that actually worked and existed today, rather than promising things that were “coming soon.” 

Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
C.K. Every demo I saw specifically mentioned that their products/features were not “vaporware” and showed actual execution instead of “slides” from a Power Point. 

Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
C.K. I think people who got burned by the 3D fantasy are struggling mightily to jump on the VR bandwagon. VR makes a ton of sense for specific applications: Training, gaming, tourism, real estate, but may not be so quick to invade theaters or our living rooms. 

Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
C.K. Surprised that there is still so much resistance to public cloud applications. Especially the security arguments strike me as odd, but maybe that’s because I don’t send embarrassing emails to my clients or co-workers?

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—It’s all right there in the numbers. From the key to interactive advertising to creating responsive content. It’s in the data, Steve Wong of Siemens and media technology consultant, Christy King, said Wednesday at the HPA Technology Retreat.

Wong talked about the necessity of having the proper metadata for interactive advertising. He said there is now “an opportunity then to license metadata rights. Think of the opportunity to negotiate now with another revenue stream.”

King, who collected and interpreted data for the UFC, spoke to specific applications. She said she is working with companies introducing new content for over-the-top Internet delivery.

“We’re starting to see people looking at data around titles that already exist, and what opportunities they present,” she said.

When King says “data,” she means everything, not just the shoot date and the technology used, but information about the content within the content. E.g., the city in which action is taking place, an actor’s nationality, their brand of clothing, the time of day in a scene, the items in the scene, the age of the characters and their emotions.

On the audience side of the screen, a company by the name of “Canvs” gleaned social media and identified 4 million terms that define emotions, King said. They narrowed it down to a lexicon and created a timeline bar chart of “reactions” so clients could determine how people are responding emotionally to content based on their social media posts.

King also pointed out that genres aren’t simple anymore. She said Netflix recognizes a multitude of “discrete” genres.

“Horror with 14 knives only shot at night is a genre,” she said.

There are 597 genres that include the term, “about marriage.”

One issue here is “scope creep,” where you’re just collecting and looking at too much stuff, King said. There need to be best practices and possible a data chief to mine data and deliver the results to creative so they can, in turn, respond to audience appeal.