Lessons from the 2024 NAB Show

Each year, the NAB Show serves as a helpful measuring stick for progress. Press, analysts, and industry competitors can quickly see and experience the degree of change…including the annual construction obstacles. In 2023, construction was all about preparing Vegas streets for Formula 1. This year, it was construction on the North Hall of the LVCC. For those of you who stuck to the Wynn Tower Suites and never saw the show floor, the rest of us hit the tunnels to get back and forth to the West Hall – either boosting our step count via a long LVCC plywood tunnel or riding a Tesla through the Vegas Loop. That electric car ride may be the only thing in Vegas that hasn’t had a price increase…yet.

 More importantly, the sessions and show floor at the 2024 NAB Show did reveal changes in innovation and across the industry at large. Here are a few items that stood out:

 Growing up FAST

FAST continues to be a hot topic, much as was at the 2023 NAB Show. However, while the story of 2023 was about adoption and growth, 2024 was more about the ongoing maturation of FAST channels, monetization, and distribution. The days of content producers stringing together library content and hoping for a distribution partner seem to be long gone. Streaming services with FAST are being more selective in the channels they choose to carry, kicking out those that underperform. Instead, content rights holders are applying more strategic thinking in content selection and targeting of audiences for FAST. Advertising and delivery tech for FAST continues to evolve while still coping with some of the same challenges. Solutions are more efficient in driving revenue as well as producing and distributing channels. However, inefficiencies in data/currency continue to linger, and content discovery is still a challenge for FAST viewers. No one offered quick solutions for either (unless they were pointing to their own booth).

 Strapping on AI

Yes, AI was the event buzzword. No visit to an NAB booth or suite was truly complete until someone mentioned their AI story, and whole tracks of sessions were dedicated to AI. It was fun to see the NAB Welcome Session as well as the follow-up press session with Ameca and Futuri Media, giving us the sassy robotic face that launched a thousand smartphone camera videos. While there were some new AI-focused startups at the event this year, most vendors surfaced the AI or ML capabilities that were already part of their offering, with many pointing out that they were in AI all along, well before the hype. The new AI demo sizzle for the 2024 NAB Show involved generative AI. For products related to moving, managing, protecting, playing, or monetizing video, generative AI’s focus was on enhancing analytics or the viewer’s UX. On the creative side, implementations were often built on early generative AI offerings and prototypes from the 2023 show. Many were either to help conceptualize ideas for quick iteration or to assist in the design of videos, images, or other visual elements. In many cases, these AI enhancements felt like early bolt-on additions rather than deeper integrations of generative AI into the core functionality of the offering – perhaps because many are implemented as a clearly marked red (or other distinctly colored) button with a lightning bolt rather than a background engine driving new capabilities across the product. I suspect that the generative AI hype will grow throughout 2025, but the resultant product features will be more robust and useful over the next year.

 Show Me the Money (Please!!!)

The event showed that economic challenges continue to be deeply felt across the video ecosystem. The implications of mergers, financial losses, and layoffs among content producers and B2C distributors are cascading throughout the industry. In-house innovation is even more a competitor for tech vendors than ever before. Potential tech clients with in-house engineering teams must justify their budgets with tangible tech results or have their teams downsized (or eliminated). As a result, longer term innovation and vanity projects are being driven out of all but the largest players. Creators and distributors are desperate to minimize cost, which is resulting in smaller, less frequent purchases from vendors, and client decisions are driven by necessity rather than opportunity. As a result, a leading theme in value propositions and messaging across the floor is cost reduction in all of its bottom-line glory. Minimizing cost (or lost revenue opportunities among advertising vendors) has been an important decision factor for many years. However, this year more than ever, costs felt like the front-page lead for vendor discussions. This trend is also contributing to a heightened level of business card churn across the vendor community, particularly within leadership. Some players are turning over their leadership in hopes of spurring success while others are seeing their top people leave as the flood waters rise.

So What

For those in the FAST lane, you will need to continue to up your game in building an audience and community around your FAST channel. Engagement and marketing will need to extend beyond the content stream to reinforce your value to viewers and to streaming service distribution partners.

 In the AI world, understand how (or if) generative AI can enhance your core value proposition and focus your innovation accordingly. There’s nothing wrong with eye-candy, but be sure not to confuse nice-to-have AI features with core value and differentiators in your product strategy. Many vendors are increasingly struggling to clearly define their product strategy as they chase competitors (on multiple fronts, not just in AI), making it more difficult for customers to see differentiation and identify value.

 The economic challenge is real and will continue to be painful as the whole value chain wrestles with revenues. As cost increasingly drives the train, new differentiators will likely emerge in the vendor space, including longevity, reputation, communication, and quality of support (a different type of QoS).

 So, buckle into your Tesla seats and hold onto your AI-generated hats. It’s going to be a wild ride going into 2025. And who knows? Maybe North Hall will be finished by next year’s show!

© 2024 Sappington Media | Images Courtesy: NAB Show