NAB 2022 Perspectives: Blackmagic Design U.S. President Dan May on the Content-Creation Explosion By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Wednesday, May 25, 2022 - 8:00 am
Print This Story
In recent years, the Blackmagic Design booth at the NAB Show has been a cornerstone of the South Hall. The large, open space welcomed attendees from across the spectrum of industry professionals. This year, Blackmagic Design called the North Hall home and displayed a wide range of products and services, many born out of the pandemic. One of the key things that we saw immediately with the pandemic was that people were looking to create video, says Dan May, president, Blackmagic Design. There wasn't a lessening of video-content creation; it was an increase of video-content creation.
May says Blackmagic Design quickly saw the birth of a new kind of customer: those who were set to rely on video not only to enhance their business but to stay in business. And the Blackmagic Design products, from the ATEM live production switchers to the 4K cameras, storage, and monitors all found a place in a new eco system.
Blackmagic Cloud comprises the DaVinci Resolve 18 software package offering editing, color correction, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio postproduction.
If you were a karate instructor that no longer had kids coming into your dojo, he says, the question was, how do you get a multi-camera shoot into the dojo. Even normal corporate-video-based things needed to have video in the workplace to connect people together. And then there was media and entertainment.
With that explosion of video-content creation, products like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera lineup (starting at $1,295 for a 4K camera) and the ATEM Mini (priced at $295) or Mini Pro found a marketplace hungry for their capabilities and price point.
You're not going to sell a lot of those users $10,000 cameras and $5,000 switchers, May explains. The increase in demand was so much that we chanced some of our product launches to broaden our offerings with things like the URSA Mini Pro or ATEM Mini Extreme.
The ripple effect of an expanding customer base over the past three years is also opening up opportunities for higher-level Blackmagic Design products, such as the ATEM Constellation 8K UHD live-production switcher.
We're at a point where people are looking to expand, May notes, and now we can help them with new products that enable them to do more and to move upstream with some of their functionality. We were very fortunate to have products and a supply chain to manage all of that fairly well.
One of Blackmagic's big stories at NAB 2022 was the Blackmagic Cloud, in particular DaVinci Resolve 18, the free software package that provides editing, color correction, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio postproduction.
We want to have people working on the same project timeline within Resolve at the same time, explains May. Someone can be creating a project in California and invite in a colorist in Florida or an editor in Vietnam. The need was driven by the pandemic, but now it's about empowerment and connecting creatives wherever they are. And, with Blackmagic Cloud, you can share a project timeline with them via cloud and then have storage solutions update media across these different projects.
A key message at NAB 2022 involved the pricing of hosting a project as well as accessing it. It's only $5 to host the project library, says May. The editor or VFX person does not have to pay $5 to log in on top of that. We're trying to steer away from everyone having to have a subscription. We're also trying to steer away from the model where you pay for a subscription whether you use it or not. If you have 20 project libraries one month and 10 the next, you pay only for those 10.
It's all part of a process that truly is focused on democratizing video.
How do I bring more people to the table? says May. It's not about taking business away from the post house. It's about getting more people trained and educated on how to use these tools. Maybe some of them will be working at that post house in 10 years, but some of them will just be able to do their own cool things using Blackmagic products. And that has always been what Blackmagic has been about.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
NAB 2022 Perspectives: Blackmagic Design U.S. President Dan May on the Content-Creation Explosion By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
