After a 6 year NAB hiatus for me, there were some interesting changes. The new Las Vegas Convention Centre West Hall is a bit of a hike from the other halls. Now in any other country and any other exhibition centre, the attendees would just have to accept that it helps to get your step count up. As you can see it worked for me!
But not in Las Vegas. In a town where nothing gets boring, it turns out that Elon Musk has done exactly that; he’s been busy boring tunnels and provided 100+ Teslas to chauffeur delegates between the halls, for free, in his Loop! It’s a mad Tron-esque vanity project as it currently exists, but the plan is to have a complete network of sub-terranean roads across the city, which should relieve the awful traffic on the Strip. Fortunately for me my Tesla didn’t suffer a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Thanks Elon.
The West Hall itself even has a food hall, which is a novelty for the LVCC, but it still can’t cope with the lunch time rush, and it’s amusing to see senior business leaders more used to swanky, expensed, corporate dinners trying to discuss million pound opportunities sat on a corridor floor eating a 2 day old pizza slice. It’s quite a leveller!
Something that has changed in recent years, and certainly post Covid is the cadence of product launches. Remember the good old days when major product launches happened at Trade Shows? I think that Covid and the ongoing supply chain issues have thrown product launch scheduling out of the window, and product is now launched when it’s ready, regardless if there’s a show at the time. I didn’t see a single major product launch this year. Did I miss something?
Arri continue to be a victim of their own success, with back-orders of over a year on their hugely popular (and expensive) Alexa35 camcorder. I understand that customers who placed large orders are seeing them drip through, but these are still being supplied at the original order price which could be a year ago, and Arri has had a 20% price hike since then. This is not great for the single camera purchasers who, if they’re lucky enough to jump the queue and get a camera early, are paying perhaps 20% more than the big boys. It encourages the smarter larger companies to place an order for 100’s of units, knowing that Arri won’t be able to deliver them all for years. Perhaps a better bet for Arri would be to base their sale price on when they can deliver, rather than on a year old price. It’s a seller’s market right now so I doubt they’d lose many sales.
Sony’s Venice was proving very popular on the show floor. I understand that 3 were stolen from various stands in central hall on the night before the show opened, along with the lenses that were mounted on them.
“NAB has demonstrated a strong commitment to environmental sustainability. The event organizers implemented several initiatives to reduce its environmental impact, such as using LED lighting throughout the exhibition hall to reduce energy consumption, recycling and composting waste, and encouraging attendees to use public transportation to reduce carbon emissions. NAB’s efforts to promote environmental awareness and sustainability set a positive example for other events and organizations to follow, demonstrating that it is possible to achieve success while minimizing our impact on the planet.”
The AI learning tool ChatGPT came up in many conversations, and it’s a powerful writing tool, if sometimes a bit generic. Hopefully you noticed this, the paragraph above was written by it, not me. Copywriting and A level essay writing will never be the same again. Did you notice?
Back to me writing this now…speaking to US-based friends, the impending writer’s strike is already an issue for kit hire companies as scripted shows are being delayed. Writers used to get an initial payment when they wrote a script, and further payments for repeats and DVD launches etc. Now that the streamers are bypassing many of these steps, and are not publishing viewing figures, the writers have no idea how popular their content is, and therefore what their value is. They’re reporting a significant reduction in their income, as well as a loss of power and influence, so are striking for more transparency and ultimately a better return for their work. If it continues, expect more unscripted delights in the Love Island format that requires minimal writing expertise and even less expertise of any description from the “talent”. Let’s hope they resolve it before it impacts the UK.
I have some sympathy for the writers as clearly they play a fundamental role in the process, but there really is some rubbish content on the streaming platforms, and it feels like the streamers are going for quantity over quality. Have you seen 6 Underground? I did, so you don’t have to.
There’s more info on the strike here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/us/hollywood-writers-strike.html
A few kit highlights, just to prove that I did go around the show…I do like the Motion Impossible Agito, which is a versatile and robust piece of kit, and the Magtrax feature means that it can follow a strip of magnetic tape that can be put under carpet, so it looks like it’s steering itself, with no track to trip over or be in shot. That’s clever.
And the Sec Swiss eagleEye is technically advanced, and now seems to be the go-to flying camera rig, often used in conjunction with the Shotover G1 gimbal.
Newsbridge is another clever business. Their MXT-1 platform is an AI-driven metadata indexing technology which recognises content in audio visual footage such as faces, text, logos and speech, and generates human-like descriptions of the content, making it much easier to find the content you’re searching for in large archives. And it can index 500 hours of video content per minute which just seems extraordinary! But it wasn’t just that it was really clever ; it was that the business had clearly worked on its elevator pitch, so even a not-especially-techy, ex-kit-sales-guy “got it”. In a room full of really clever technology, for me it was the most concise explanation of what it did, and how it might help a customer. It’s a licensed product, so it’s unlikely that I’d benefit from its success, but the way in which it was presented really stuck with me. Nice work.
One thing that NAB did very well was the app. Does anyone else use these for the big shows? I nearly didn’t bother as the IBC and ISE versions were truly awful. The NAB app was clear, helpful, intuitive and made planning my stand visits much more efficient. Thank you.
Another NAB plus point is the badge collection booths at many of the hotels, which makes initial entry to the Show so much easier. It seems so simple! Take note ISE and IBC, your first morning entry systems are both truly shambolic.
My visit was a last minute decision as we really weren’t sure how many Brits would make the trip. It seems that a lot of other people made a different decision to mine and didn’t bother. Total attendance was just over 65,000, 30% down on NAB 2019, and only 13,000 up on last year which was the first post-pandemic NAB. Maybe the days of the mega-shows are numbered? They may have been losing their way even before the pandemic, but the great re-set has focussed attention on what’s the best return for the exhibitor’s marketing spend. One mid-size exhibitor in Central Hall told me that the 4 day real estate cost was $400,000, not including staff hotel rooms or super-expensive dinners. On that basis the large stands must have been getting towards $1M? There’s a lot of incremental business that needs to be done before NAB2024 to justify that investment. The FOMO factor lives on for many.
As a visitor, I feel like I made the most of the networking opportunities, which is now the main reason for attending these shows. It probably always was. Do you agree? I’ve worked a few different roles in my 23 years in “media”, so my network crosses over into multiple areas, and yet I met people on this trip that a) I’d never heard of, and b) were in my sweet spot for people I should have known.
I think of networks like Venn diagrams. I know a couple of people in my Venn diagram who I think of as knowing “everyone”. I’m sure you know someone that just seems to know everyone, almost like there’s 3 of that person such is their networking prowess. These omnipresent people are the Kevin Bacon’s of networking. Who’s your Kevin? Is it actually a Kevin? If you’re in accounts, HR, sales, marketing, law or engineering, you need to click here to understand your network better. Are you all of them?
It reminded me of a time about 18 years ago at IBC when 2 “Kevin Bacon’s” in my network who I thought knew everyone actually met for the first time. They’re still married, and I bet everyone in my network knows at least one of them. I can’t promise the same result every time I introduce 2 friends to each other, but you never know.
I’m looking forward to expanding my network in a few weeks at the MPTS event in London. See you there?
All thoughts / guesses welcome.