Elemental Perspective: NAB a Success for All

Submitted by Whitney on April 23, 2010 - 09:56

This year’s highly anticipated NAB show started strong with a state of the industry address from Gordon Smith, the newly appointed president and CEO of NAB (and one of our own as former Oregon state Senator).  From what we heard and experienced on the show floor, the event was a huge success, showcasing innovative technologies from industry leaders and illuminating the bright future of broadcasting in new media. 

According to NAB, more than 85,000 audio, video and film content professionals attended the show. Consistent with last year, the show attracted an exceptional crowd of influential decision makers from top corporations representing 157 countries.

3D was the main buzz throughout the huge convention center, with Dolby, Panasonic, NVIDIA and many others demonstrating the latest in cutting-edge 3D technologies for video editing, display and production. The big question still remains: How quickly will mainstream consumers adopt and thus demand the 3D experience? While demonstrationg in the editing pavilion at the Panasonic booth, we overheard a lot of talk about 3D camera capture and displays. Panasonic is confident that 3D stands for "dollars, dollars, dollars" in the very near term.

In total, there were five technology demonstrations of Elemental products in three locations on the show floor, including with Hewlett-Packard, where Elemental Server was spotlighted in the “New Media” section of HP’s booth.

Crowds at NAB

Heavy foot traffic in the Elemental booth at NAB 2010

Our booth drew a considerable crowd of interested parties, ranging from traditional broadcasters and cable companies to new media ventures. We demonstrated several products, including the recently launched Elemental Live, which is a GPU-accelerated enterprise-class video processing system that provides content distributors with video and audio encoding for live streaming to new media platforms. 

Of more than 1,500 exhibitors, Elemental was one of only ten presented a Mario Award recognizing the forward thinking and technical excellence of Elemental Live. It's an honor to be in the company of the other winners including Sony, Dolby and Panasonic. Many awarded products from prior years have gone on to significantly impact the future of video technology and we believe Elemental Live is on a similar trajectory to change the game when it comes to video encoding for live events.

Overall, we believe the show was a great success. While there are other shows right around the corner, including Streaming Media East in NYC May 11-12 (Elemental will be in booth 319), we are enthusiastically looking forward to NAB 2011 and the new products and technologies we'll see in a year's time!