I Told You So…
by Paul McGoldrick
Don't you just hate people who say that?
I have been saying for at least ten years that the dedicated boxes being manufactured for the broadcast industry would be the cement blocks that drown some vendors in the future. And although the changes are inevitable -- from my viewpoint at least -- it is almost impossible for a manufacturer to reinvent itself.
Let's say, for example, that your company name begins with Q and you are making boxes that sell for $40,000 -- and up -- that create multi-channel special effects of video images. As the years go on, software seems to be catching up with your boxes, but you grimly go on making improvements and versions for different video standards as we morph from composite to Y/C to GBR and YPbPr and into the digital formats up to HD. You cannot afford to get off the box habit; that's who you are, that's where your margins come from. Admitting anything else is corporate lunacy.
But just as we went through the revolution of everybody believing that they could match the professionals with desktop publishing, and then that anybody could produce videos, we have the situation where the content producing pros start to become almost irrelevant. That happened with the Q company this year, the NAB year when the people didn't come any more. Others are already out of business because of the blinkered nature of the executives in these companies. You only have to look at the scattered corporate ashes of a company like Ampex to remember that you cannot keep ahead just because your patent portfolio is larger than anybody else -- it's all about keeping up with technologies as they evolve.
So, this year Q's demonstration areas were mostly empty; only a few people sitting in each of the chaired sections of their booth, and some were obviously just there to get off their feet.
Not so, closer to the main entrance to the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The first time I passed by the Apple booth (passed by is not the right description, I had to inch my way past) there must have been 5000 people in the booth, in the aisle, and in adjacent booths watching and listening to a demonstration of Apple's Final Cut Pro 5 content creation system. The pendulum has finally swung full arc.
It was not therefore at all surprising that the NAB Awards for Innovation in Media (AIMs) included Apple. The 104,000 attendees (including 23,000 from outside North America) had the opportunity to vote during the first two days of the show and the awards were announced, and presented, at a luncheon on Wednesday, the third day. This is the third year that the NAB has made such awards and they are really popular with the attendees, pre-empting the results of the print journals in their best-of-show award issues.
In the Content Creation category Apple shared awards with Avid (for the latest version of Media Composer and for Symphony Nitris) and with JVC and Sony for HD camera/recorders. I have always had little sympathy for Avid for its rather arrogant corporate attitude, and its years of financial losses have been a result of being in the software content creation market too early -- but it has led the way for Apple to reach in and pluck the rewards.
In the Content Management category Apple won another award for QuickTime Broadcaster and also recognized were Global Microwave Systems' HD Message Transmitter, NewTek's TriCaster (yes, Kiki Stockhammer is still demonstrating with a lot of leg involved), Omneon's Spectrum Media Server, and the Smart AV Smart Console.
In the Content Delivery category Apple doesn't yet have a contender -- although I have been told privately that they will -- and the AIMs went to Avid's DNxchange, Sony's Anycast Live Content Producer, Sundance Digital's NewsLink and, staggeringly, Leitch's X75 Up/Down/Crossconverter for HD and its NEXIO HD. The latter is another of those being in the right place at the right time scenarios; the hard work in format conversion was done by the BBC Research Department and Snell & Wilcox, but Leitch is likely to win the rewards.
In imagination terms it seemed that at last year's NAB a lot of vendors thought they knew how to build a newsroom system; that field of contenders has, naturally enough, been weeded quite a bit and this year it seemed that an awfully large number of vendors knew how to test MPEG. In my next prediction I'll tell you that such testers will never blossom as standalone products -- they will end up as built-in test routines at virtually every major stepping stone of MPEG signals.
Told you so, again.