NAB Show to address dramatic economic, technology transformations

The NAB Show in Las Vegas opens this year amid dramatic changes in the economics and technologies underpinning the media industry.

When it comes to technology, the first mobile DTV deployments and announcements of 3-D TV networks at home are two of the more obvious transformations, but others, including the continued growing reliance on IT technology, greater deployment of automation, new file-based workflows and broadband Internet content distribution, are making their presence felt from acquisition to editing and distribution. On the economic front, broadcasters have faced a strong headwind brought on by last year’s recession and continued fragmentation of audiences.

The 2010 NAB Show will offer a rich resource of conferences, training and certification opportunities addressing many of these issues. The convention’s conference program, April 10-15, offers themes targeting broadcast engineering, broadcast management, “broader-casting,” digital cinema and military and government-related topics. Training and certification will be available in the form of Post|Production World courses.

Major conference topics include:
• Mobile television; DTV transmission and reception issues; TV test and measurement; and green technologies for broadcasters during the Broadcast Engineering Conference.
• Broadcast spectrum — use it or lose it; how to use Twitter to increase your station’s ratings and revenue; TV advertising — creative differences and perspectives; and big doings in the midyear election cycle during the Broadcast Management Conference.
• Power to the people — harnessing social media; is linear video the next AOL?; online video innovations; taming the wild, wild west of digital filmmaking, alpha to omega; and the 21st century camera crew and how it works during the Broader-casting Conference.
• Understanding stereopsis and 3-D image capture; digital cinema rollout — a status report; can there ever be a common worldwide 3-D TV broadcast standard?; and 3-D consumer experience in the home — the interoperability challenges during the Digital Cinema Summit.
• Optimizing server and storage architectures through virtualization; architecture trends in DoD; test and measurement of video compliance standards; and geospatial intelligence content to the edge — the need for NGA and commercial broadcast partnership during the Military and Government Summit.

The NAB Show this year also will feature an extensive technology exposition April 12-15 with more than 1500 companies spread out across more than 800,000sq ft of space in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Special features include the Post Pit, hosted in partnership with the Final Cut Pro User Group Network; Technologies for Worship Pavilion; and International Pavilions, including pavilions from Bavaria, Belgium, France, Italy and the UK.