put me back on my bike: NAB 2006 Post-Game Spectacular

Well, it's over. time for a Best of Show… well, for me it’s always a toss up between Caesar’s Palace and the Venetian. But if I had to vote for one it’d be the vene… oh, not the casinos… the actual stuff at the trade show… oh, ummm… yeah.

Most stylish client entertainment area: quantel. Theirs was not the biggest of the high-end enormous manufacturers; that was reserved for sony, apple & avid. But the design was so cool.

Thing WE must have for just $7000: chyron lyric pro. This upgrade allows for super-kool seamless transitions between messages. The duet falls just sort of the lyric pro’s eye-candy animation skills. the kids at chyron assured me that no hardware upgrades to our current duet are needed, just software.

Everything old is new again award: newtek tricaster. Those of you who have been around for a while, might have run into the videoToster in the past. It was an all-in-one switcher, 3d animation system (lightwave 3d was the animation software that came with the box, and aparently kept the company afloat) it all ran on an amiga desk top computer. WELL, this redesigned all in one guerilla field production unit has its own proprietary box (about the size of a regular toaster, actually), a little switcher with a t-bar & all the software runs on windows now. The software also includes a 4 channel audio mixer. The cool thing is that it can stream the audio & video out the back of the machine. Perfect for on location internet broadcasts, or streaming an on-location back to the station via the ‘net so we could air it. I’m not sure all of the infrastructure is quite there yet for streaming NTSC quality video from just anywhere but, intriguing none the less.

Best quote from my seminar notebook:

Thing that became apparent: how “out there” in terms of innovation we really are. Here’s what I mean… one whole day seminar I went to was on MoTV (mobile tv… pod-casting, vod & live tv to cell phones etc.) most of the stuff they were talking about stuff we already do, with our c3ktogo.com news, weather and the other digestible programming that gets put on the site. A lot of the other people there were just trying to get into it. In another seminar about the upn/wb/cw/myNetwork thing, a guy described how their second channel was running Oprah in prime time, after the main channel runs it in the afternoon (sound familiar?). a bunch of people were like “oh, that’s a good idea…” I know I’m kissin’ up a little when I say this, but it’s true.

Shiny Object award: why do i need a pen with a green light by the clip?

Holiday snaps (aka: cleaning off the camera's memory card):

just a fraction of the sea of shipping crates that brought all of this cool stuff to the show...

compared to the huge booths of the big manufacturers, the small ones off to the side are where the real "inventors" are. these are the guys who build very specific black boxes in their garage, in the hopes that everyone will need one someday...

How deals get done: that's Tim Saunders the set designer from BDI that we work with, in a very high level pitch meeting, in a rather relaxing setting.