Helping to Drive New Thinking at NAB

Written by Susan Crouse, Director of Product Management for Alticast US

When change comes to the television industry, one of the best places to spot it is at the annual NAB Show.  Driven in part by the growth of High Dynamic Range for 4K and 8K, this year’s event in Las Vegas was long on attendees (more than 103,000) and new products – including devices and software that enable content creation, editing and distribution for the higher-resolution video that is fast becoming the de facto standard. The most buzzed about demos were VR and drone displays that continue to take more floor space and draw the crowds with their great demos, and while drones are having commercial success, VR still has a long indefinite road ahead for broad commercial adoption.

In the Connected Media area, Alticast was among the innovative companies spotlighting innovative software solutions for addressing the burgeoning market for IPTV content delivery. There was no shortage of companies, new and old, providing OTT workflow services for the growing market of small and large content creators delivering video. In addition to workflow tools, there was a plethora of cloud-based streaming technology (often with encoding), CDNs specialized for media delivery, and search, discovery and recommendation solutions starting to leverage social media behaviors to develop more personalized results.

Interestingly, entrenched software products that provide services for cable are finding competition from start-ups providing similar functionality for IPTV/OTT operators. Their different video delivery perspective has led to a variety of fresh ideas: Business software is taking advantage of simpler models that integrate common Internet transaction companies like PayPal, and a number of companies are using Internet-based advertising models to hone targeted ad delivery.

The varying sources of new high-quality content are transforming the roadmap for content delivery and NAB is the place to see how tools are converging for both traditional pay-TV with OTT providers. Alticast’s proven ability to meet the needs of all constituencies opens the door to innovation and implementation around new technologies that are driving the industry forward.