The National Association of Broadcasters is the world’s largest convention, hosted in Las Vegas, Nevada. It features what is supposed to be the latest and greatest of the big-bad tech firms, as well as the same exact thing from upstarting under-dog-type companies. And quite frankly, it’s a bit of a jumbled mess. Let me expand on that.
For full disclosure: I interviewed for a tech company that is on the front lines of NDI technology. What that is can be covered another day. I was asked if I would be at the show, and scrambled to be able to show up. Since I am a writer and podcaster, I figured I would go for those purposes as well. It felt like a win-win; to meet perspective employers in person as well as find future production help.
The first day was pretty great! Everything felt so random and in-your-face and novel. I even found my perspective employers. Great, one thing already checked off the list. I figured I shouldn’t plan anything the first day and just roll with it. That turned out to be a good idea, because the next day I was constantly looking at the map, trying to figure out what anything meant.
There are designated spots for seminars, presentations, and sudo-TED talks. These are Zones with buzzwords as titles, such as “Intelligent Content Experiential Zone,” or “Capitalize Experiential Zone.” The words Create and Experiential are in half, and are often confused for each other. I sat through twenty minutes of a speech meant for “the future of platform experiences.” It was the most vague vocal self-congratulatory masturbation I’ve ever sat through. This isn’t to say any one person isn’t intelligent or isn’t developing anything new or inspiring; but to say we know where the future of platforms is going just feels asinine.
Let’s move on to another issue I found: the Map. There was an app this year, which cut down on paper usage. But unless you had good cell phone coverage, you couldn’t see where you were clearly enough. And because the Zones were nothing but buzz words, I could never tell if I was in the right place. I nearly missed one event hosted by a YouTuber, who recommended beginner gear for live-streaming a podcast.
The map doesn’t add much to the experience. It only shows how confusing and terribly-laid out the booths are. Much like Who’s Line is it Anyway?, the numbers and letters don’t matter and everything is made up. One booth could be A-223 and be lined up next to A-530. I’m convinced the folks in charge of NAB wrote numbers and letters on strips of paper and through it up in the air like confetti. Where they fell, that’s where a company would go.
Before NAB is completely written off, there were some definite positives here. I met some amazing people from big and small businesses. One or two from Adobe, while also meeting people from BirdDog and ATOMOS. But the most interesting for me personally was a company that started up in 2019.
Showrunner Industries Inc takes the storyboarding idea and makes it digital. Depending on what’s needed, multiple people can throw out ideas. Television shows are the heaviest inspirations, though they claim novelists and other formats are being used with this software. More information on Writers Room Pro. As a Scrivener user who writes novels and the occasional screenplay, this is very intriguing.
To wrap things up: NAB has come back strong from the pandemic, though with some definite disorganization. Networking at a convention like this is anxiety-inducing and random. Not great for someone who is neuro-divergent. But I accomplished what I needed to get done. Still, I give NAB two and a half stars.