Another year ... another NAB ... It took me a while to write down my reflections; one of the reasons was the unexpected delay of eight days to return due to the volcanic ash in the air that disturbed the airline schedules.

This year the organizers changed the layout of the floor, resulting in the move of several companies to new places, including IBM. As usual, I used my time in between lectures and customer meetings to rush around and get updated on new stuff around. The conference lectures were a bit disappointing, to many US speakers, neither burning new topics, nor provoking point of views. All in all a bunch of smooth pitches about what will and might come, but very cautious in terms of timing. Most things ‘might’ start this and next year ….

Walking through the crowded south hall I felt lost. The hall was now dedicated completely to post-production, companies in other areas moved out of the south hall. Hundreds of booths are around with thousands of people watching demos of new post-production features. It is bizarre to see all these ego-centric professionals looking to the latest 3D animated banner, new mixing features, etc. where the consumer is less interesting in such stuff and seeks for easy consumable content. Looking from a higher level it is a kind of mismatch. It will probably take another year before we see a change in that hall.

In the centre hall I found two interesting things. First, the booth of Sony could not be overlooked. Interesting item at Sony was the use of service oriented architecture, finally we see the adoption in the media industry! This might become an accelerator in the use of service oriented architecture at application suppliers and in the broadcast environment. Second, one of my favorites was the booth of i-Movix. This is a rather small Belgian company. They were present at NAB for several years. This year their product reached an outstanding level of quality. I expect a major breakthrough of this technology the coming months. This is a nice example of Belgian creativity, congrats to Laurent and his team. Oh yes, also a large booth with the new HD outdoor sports camera from GoPro … I saw it already in Europe and at NAB they were for sale … could no resist and ordered one ;)

The north hall now houses several big companies that moved away from the south hall. An interesting mix of companies and I must admit that the atmosphere in this hall is less hectic then in the south hall. Visitors spent their time to get the information they were seeking for. The IBM booth itself got a serious update, in terms of layout, graphics and more important the demos itself. New demos such as newsroom, mobile TV, WebTV, LTO5 … were present, couldn’t be done better!