The NAB Post Plus conference in New York offers digital content creation tips for video artists and broadcasting professionals.Amid an avalanche of developments which could permanently change the landscape of television, NAB (The National Association of Broadcasters) kicks off its first New York conference this week.
Dubbed NAB Post Plus, the show focuses on the digital content creation techniques that will help broadcast professionals and video artists keep pace with a rapidly shifting environment.
Broadcasters are still trying to make sense of a flurry of recent announcements. Yahoo and TiVo partnered to offer combined services, while Microsoft and Associated Press joined forces to distribute news footage. At the same time NBC and CBS decided to start offering prime-time content on demand.
Top that off with iTunes' new video service, which sold over a million episodes of network programs in its first few weeks, and you find an industry struggling to keep up with its own innovations.
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Some traditional television stations fear that new media is about to wash away their most valuable real estate, but others see an unprecedented opportunity.
John Milner, media relations manager for NAB, points out that broadcasters are likely to be the prime beneficiaries of the surge in new media.
"They're producing the content that is being sold through these new deals," he said, emphasizing the fact that the people with the most advanced skills for creating new media content are the professionals in old media.
By the same token, he noted that the accessibility of new media tools will profoundly change how stories are told and who gets to tell them. "Take for example a series like Fox's 24," he said, "You've got a guy Chris Willingham creating entirely new forms of narrative."
The new tools will also help a new population of storytellers find an audience. One example is Ben Williams, a video blogger at the show who is developing a significant online following for his material after only a few weeks of posting to his blog at www.codedsignal.com..
"The numbers don't lie," he said, showing a total subscribership of over 18,000 viewers since the end of September, a number which is currently growing by as much as a thousand subscribers per day.
"This stuff is viral." he pointed out. "If you build yourself among the [blogging] community, that's how the word gets out."
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At the moment, Mr. Williams has no advertisers, but he's confident that his audience will continue to increase in the near future. "Everybody knows that this is going to be huge."
He only began videoblogging at the recent DigitalLife Expo in New York, and rapidly found an enthusiastic audience.
New products announced at the show include a new version of DVD SelectNet from PulseDigital, Inc, a product that combines Digital Asset Management with DVD authoring to streamline the creation of custom DVDs for archiving or distribution with no human intervention.
The product automatically manages the transcoding of media, menu creation and the preparation of disk labels. GlobalStor will also be showcasing its new ExtremeStor DI server, a high performance production system for dealing with Digital Intermediate files.
The system can manage from 6TB to 9.6TB of data at RAID levels 0,1,5,10 or 15 and at prices beginning at $16,000.
NAB Post Plus will also offer hands-on tutorials in many of the leading video applications, including Final Cut Pro, Avid and Adobe After Effects. The show runs through Thursday.
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