Making Waves - Commentary
Reviewing the NAB Convention
By Gary Stigall
For me, the best part of the NAB Convention is social--catching up on the lives of industry friends, meeting vendors face-to-face after they've helped me over the phone solve some problem, and discussing the future with industry luminaries. At the hospitality suite of one San Diego supplier, I met a team of engineers and marketing people we had been in discussions with regarding some issue with their demo product. After a nice chat, I turned around to face my network affiliate technical contact. Couldn't have planned it better.
As always, there are a few product or service demos that leave us saying, "Wow." Did you see the Jadoo Power Systems fuel cell replacement for ENG batteries? Even though it's very expensive at $4,000 per camera minimum, you know the technology is coming down the pike, and here we got to see it firsthand.
ENCO showed a speaker-independent speech recognition system to generate closed captioning. This is a huge deal for TV stations spending $100 or more per hour to have their news captioned by a court reporter. I watched in amazement as the system transcribed an assortment of voices in accuracy that rivaled a live operator. The catches: a bit more delay than we'd like to see, and an hourly use charge designed to offset the enormous development costs associated with the licensed technology. They seemed open to reworking the finance details to create a customer base, something elusive at the show. The company demonstrated system using similar technology for radio stations that deletes naughty words recognized in real time.
Add to your list of buzz terms: "store and forward." That's the TiVo-inspired technology that allows a piece of hardware, say, a satellite receiver with hard drive and embedded processor, to store downloaded data, then release it in an intelligent manner. PBS network stations with no local content, for example, could supposedly run virtually vacant of operating personnel. Bitcentral of Irvine demonstrated to me store and forward software meant to manage news stories received via satellite from a large network.
Of course, the ultimate store and forward system would deliver a package of desired programs and targeted commercials (assuming the viewer hadn't upgraded to the noncommercial version) via cable or satellite directly to a box in the viewers home. Motorola in San Diego demonstrated the concept on a storyboard many years ago. Why bother using local affiliates and all our expensive broadcast equipment and personnel?
Emmis broadcast CEO Jeff Smulyan announced at the convention a plan to battle the decreasing relevance of local over-the-air broadcasting. What he called for is a bold move to build cooperatively a multicasting community of stations within a market to compete in capacity to basic cable or DBS systems. With each digital channel currently able to multicast up to six streams, a set of 12 stations could carry 72 channels. The proposal includes a plan to charge a subscription fee to handle programming costs. Too early to tell if the plan would work. For one thing, will the media conglomerates go for it? But the job this could save may be your own.