NAB Show, the biggest event and meeting point for the global Broadcast industry, has already finished another edition and now lots of companies and professionals evaluate the results and latest innovations that have been presented during this four-day trade show. Cloud, IP, drones, 4K, HDR, VR The technology's evolution, more and more focused on serve consumers, has been without a doubt the main protagonist of all conferences and seminars that took place at this event. What main challenges does this technological evolution pose? Among others, the traditional storytelling adaptation to nowadays content consumption and the search of new ways for monetizing content. Opening of NAB Show 2016The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) ends its 2016 edition with amazing results: more than 103.000 attendees and nearly 1.900 companies have visited Las Vegas during the four days that the trade show has been going on, looking not only for business, but also for getting to know the latest trends that soon will take over audio visual production and postproduction, as well as for discovering the most relevant companies' synergies to promote innovation together and build a better future for the industry.
At VSN we always make sure to launch our new features at NAB, and this year has not been an exception. Many years of attendance has given us the insight to know where the industry is going. With this article, we highlight now three of the most important trends about Broadcast industry's future in the short and medium term that have been pointed out during several conferences and seminars at NAB Show.
1. Complementing traditional storytelling with new technologies
Drones, 4K, HDR, Light Field technology, Lytro cameras, VR or the live streaming and spatial audio launched by Youtube at NAB Show. All these new technologies have suddenly bursted into the Broadcast industry, in order to offer an experience more real than never to spectators. What main challenges will these new technological advances present to broadcasters? Experts stress out some key points for properly using these technological developments and align them with audio visual companies' goals and audience. First, we have to keep discovering all the technical possibilities that these new media offer. Second, we must adapt and complement traditional storytelling with these ones and not just completely changing it. And lastly, we have sometimes to understand that these are a whole new media themselves, for which sometimes specific content should be created.
Therefore, their inclusion in the industry looks neither for abusing their technical features nor for completely adapting these technologies and their use to traditional way of creating TV content. Nowadays we are going through a new discovery stage of this new technological medium and of a new storytelling that it is being built right before our eyes. Rob Legato, Visual Effects Supervisor at The Jungle Book highlighted: We wanted the film to look like a regular film, not like a computer generated film. [ ] Even if with computer you can do anything, you just don t want to do everything. You want it to be limited to things that the audience can recognize as real'. Thus, on their equilibrium relies success.
Drones have been one of the main attractions of NAB Show 2016.
2. Second screens and new OTT and VoD platforms are already a new medium
Everybody knows that audiovisual content consumption has increased and been revolutionized in the past few years. Reality now puts viewers in a multiscreen environment where customized consumption of programmes and events (where, when and how viewers want) is influencing the daily work of the industry and in how it creates content (some of which is already being created for some devices only).
Michael Paull, Amazon's Digital Video Vice President, declares in reference to the potential that the new platforms hold that currently there are around 20 million homes that don t have access to TV paid channels, from which 50-60% have bandwith, so we are talking about a great deal of audience that is simply not being served. And this data is going to rise around a 40% until 2019 .
What technologies can play a key part in this environment? No doubt, Cloud is one of the star solutions for these platforms, both for the ubiquity that allows in content publication and for its adaptation to bandwidth requests for content transmission and for the costs reduction that brings together.
3. The new content consumption starts to change the business model.
This new multi-screen ecosystem that we are talking about has turned to be one of the big challenges of the Broadcast traditional business model. TV advertising is not as efficient as it used to be, since it is incapable of locating its target audience in a single location at the same time. Is it possible to put limits to this ubiquity of content and audience? Some try, but that limitation carries a great costs within. This is the case, for example, with sports content providers: TV channels that openly compete with hundreds of millions in play to broadcast a concrete event.
With these background, the search for new content monetization methods is more necessary than ever and for that, one of the proposals launched during NAB 2016 has been data analysis.
Digital platform users are more and more used to giving personal data in exchange for content, and this personal data must be treated not only to extract consumer trends, but also to gain new monetization techniques for each channel. This is, it would be possible to empower the conversion of Broadcast companies to data-based and data-driven businesses. Ben Silverman, Executive Producer that has won an Emmy and Golden Globe and Propagate Content's CEO, declares that Second Screens should be better integrated with television so
