Time for NAB Reality Check

Content Insider – What’s Real

By Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com

“Great leaders don’t seek power. They’re called by necessity.” Johanna, “Allegiant,” Summit Entertainment, 2016
The great thing about the NAB show (heck, any trade show) is that there’s a solid mix of real stuff, sorta’ good ideas and downright whimsical wishes.

Don’t believe us?

Years ago, we came away from CES swearing to gawd 3D and 4K was going to be things … now!

3D was a wish and caused us to endure a bunch of really awful 3D films.

4K was beautifully fantastic but the infrastructure was still heavily invested in HD and the distribution infrastructure was barely beyond dial up.

But consumer goods folks are always focused on telling you how great things are going to be when the infrastructure is there to support it.

It has taken years of technological improvement, price reductions and investment to make it real.  

In fact today, most projects are shot in 8K and 12K even though the pipes don’t have the bandwidth to deliver flawlessly.

Producers and studios just want to futureproof projects for … tomorrow.

And yes, downscaling a project from 8K/12K to 4K does make for a better show/film to watch, enjoy.

It’s hard to determine what is real and what is wishful thinking when you’re caught up in the excitement, wishful thinking of the show.

At NAB or IBC, it’s pretty easy to slip into the rabbit hole and just “know” that what you saw on the show floor or heard in one of the sessions is going to be available for you to use and enjoy soon.

We covered a lot of the highlights last week but have one that straddles the boundaries of reality and – in our opinion – fantasy … virtual. 

Virtual production is real with many benefits and capabilities. No wonder Sony devoted a big chunk of its floor space to highlighting its end-to-end solution.

Virtual Production – Sony highlighted its large and small video wall products at the show which gives a project a choice rather than go big or go home.  

Sony’s latest virtual video walls showed how massive video walls are cool; but not every production needs a 100-plus-foot virtual production facility and in many instances smaller, more easily reconfigured sets are more than equal to the task and can reduce a film’s production cost, including remote shoots which reduces the carbon footprint making it a win-win for everyone.  

Okay, virtual production isn’t the ‘knock your socks off’ stuff you come to see at NAB.

It’s just the new normal and it’s setting the stage for some spectacular work.

Of course, if you’re ready to get in on the ground floor of the virtual world, nothing beats a 3D VR camera set-up.

All In – Folks have been discussing and displaying VR creation/production tools for years, even demonstrating solutions with an iPhone, Vision Pro; but let’s just say it’s still a work in progress.  

And to see what the camera sees, you obviously need a VR headset and it’s okay for a few minutes and sometimes even a half-hour.

After that, you’re cut off from the real world.

VR Isolation – VR content enjoyment has been projected to sweep the market for years and there are a lot of very good applications but a headset in every home is still years away … if at all.  

Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s clunky Quest 3 will both be in firm display and usage at this year’s Paris Olympics by digital natives to highlight “next-generation engagement.”   

But that doesn’t mean it’s ready for primetime or that the world will rush to get (and use) their headsets for everything.

Reality – Every year, a number of market analysts project that VR headset sales will be growing rapidly in the next few years, and where there are solid applications for the devices. Sitting at home or walking around “in” your entertainment probably isn’t one of them.  

VR headset/sales reached their pinnacle back in 2021when Meta’s Zuck pronounced the world would soon be working, living the Metaverse.

Needless to say, people just haven’t been “hungry for a mind-blowing experience.”

But there are some excellent VR games.

We have friends who think nothing of strapping on a headset for a couple of hours to pit their talents against the worst the universe has to throw at them.

Yeah, they’re awesome. Emerge with their headset imprint and you know they were victorious.

There are also some outstanding VR applications in education, training (engineering, healthcare training/treatments, immersive/realistic job training, and more).

If you’re not put off by living in isolation with folks in your household or people giggling when they see your VR headset imprint; that’s fine, but you won’t be in the majority no matter how many great films you create/talk about.

It’s neat, but we’re years plus away from volume profits.

There’s also the hard fact that the build-out of 5G population coverage is presently about 45 percent and will be around 85 percent by 2029.

7G Coming – The Wi-Fi Alliance announced that all of the specifications for 7G standards and a few analysts have already projected fantastic sales in the next few years.  However, the 5G infrastructure hasn’t been completed in many countries around the globe and wireless service providers are just beginning to monetize earlier investments before they make the next leap.  Actually, 5G delivers great performance for most day-to-day applications.  

Now we appreciate that the Wi-Fi Alliance – and several analysts – announced that Wi-Fi 7 had already hit $1B even before it’s official launch and will hit $24+B by 2030 but forgive us if are a little skeptical that the transformation to tomorrow’s transformation will happen … soon.

According to Parks Associates, you already have an average of 17 connected devices in your home and you rely on/expect to use them quickly and flawlessly all the time.  

That speed, performance, reliability is even more important in the office.

World Online – In a number of countries, internet access is essential for business and individual communications that require a smooth blending of wired and wireless connectivity.

And Wi-Fi is just a part of the whole internet we rely on for business and personal communications around the world.

If you want to get a good perspective of the fragility of our internet-connected world, check out The Verge’s excellent piece, The Cloud Under the Sea – https://tinyurl.com/mu2enk3j.

Yep, all of that communication anywhere, anytime, anyplace relies on hundreds of thousands of miles of cable lying at the bottom of the ocean.

Fortunately, when cable(s) are cut by nature, accident or maliciously, you probably don’t even realize it because there are backups for the backups for the backups …

You get the picture.

Fast, Reliable – With projects increasingly being created/produced/posted around the world, high-speed internet is mandatory to quickly and effectively finalize a project. But speed and reliability are still something you can’t count on in certain areas.  

Now we realize you could give a rats behind on the bandwidth and fast, reliable service around the world but in today’s global content creation environment, we all have a stake in the game–especially if you’re a producer in Hollywood, a production team in England, a video editor in Toronto, a VFX team in New Zealand or an audio team in Singapore.

Suddenly, speed and reliability become vital.

Viewer Options – The streaming industry is still in its early stages with most of the folks enthralled with new subscribers even as folks cut their service and move somewhere else.  Until consumers have a service solution tailored to their wants/needs, churn will continue but not the real profitability measurement factor.  

It’s especially vital if you’re one of the production teams responsible for feeding the hungry – and picky – streaming video consumer.

Or, if you’re on streamers’ delivery, the team responsible for hiccup free content delivery to subscribers’ homes or devices, you know what happens when the film/show constantly buffers.

Just ask the folks at Akamai, AWS and the other folks who are responsible for keeping video content flowing smoothly.

There are a lot of reasons Netflix is the leading streaming service but one of the key reasons is that they are the only one that invested in their own Open Connect CDN (Content Delivery Network) – 17,000 content servers spread across 158 countries.

Add that with the development work they, SMPTE (Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers) and IEEE did on advanced codecs (data stream encoder, decoder) and they’re able to manage the video streams, so they have plenty of downstream headroom for hiccup-free entertainment delivery.

Maybe – just maybe – that industry-wide cooperation will come about when everyone gets tired of fiddling around with – and bragging about – their fantastic content selection/recommendation tool.

Netflix has an excellent recommendation engine that has accumulated a ton of our personal data so it can instantly check what we watched, compare it with the films/shows in the library and give us some project ideas that are really worth watching (in our opinion).

So does Prime … so does Disney+… so does Apple TV.

Pluto is pretty good … so is Tubi.

But we don’t want to jump from one service to another to another to decide which movie/show we want to watch right now.

Half the time, when you’re through with that little exercise admit it … you forgot where that “great” piece was hiding so you settle.

We know the services don’t want us to jump on their service, leave and maybe/probably jump back at a later date.

But the ad-supported versions aren’t really that expensive considering just a few years ago we were dropping $100 a month for home entertainment.

So, dropping $25-$30 a month is almost cheap.

One search/recommendation engine that could survey the entire field is a helluva’ an idea.

Unfortunately, that’s probably too far down the rabbit hole.

As David explained that idea in Allegiant, “You want change with no sacrifice. You want peace with no struggle. The world doesn’t work like that.”

Maybe at next year’s NAB.

Speaking of next year, if you really want to see the immersive beauty/reality of VR, skip an evening at the casino tables and enjoy an evening in the Sphere.

It’s the kind of experience everyone in the content community wants to create/produce/deliver.

Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com – is an author of more than 800 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software and applications. An internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields. Extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media and industry analysts/consultants.