NAB: Avid and Microsoft TV
For me, the show opened up on Sunday at the Apple press event where I met up with DMN contributor and indie filmmaker Heath McKnight. Apple always has a standing room only crowd, and I was there, standing in the far corner, with my luggage, fresh from a straight shot from McCarren. So what was new? Final Cut Studio 2 for all the Mac editors. In addition to the upgrades to the apps in the suite sans DVD Studio, the company also introduced Color, which will add even more value to the heap. Those events are always loaded with Apple folks, in black shirts, and I always tend to wonder if they are planted to just get the crowd riled up, as there was some applause that was laughable at the least.
Following Apple, and after getting lost on the Blvd looking for Panasonic, with my luggage in tow, I finally gave it up and headed over to the Convention Center, after of course dropping the anchor off at the hotel for the Avid shindig. CEO David Krall made it a serious point in his opening remarks that no one company can provide all the tools in this industry, and coming from a company that had been a pretty closed ecosystem in its early days, was a breath of fresh air, especially since that other A company continues to try and close the loop. After an explanation as to why the event was held at the booth and not at the Hard Rock, we got sherherded into two groups to hear the Avid talking heads extolling the virtues of collaboration and audio. Avid's audio offerings were pushed hard in both the post production and the broadcast groups (First we were invited to sit in to hear about postproduction, and then we switched and heard about broadcast), with talk about Icon and M-Audio's new speaker systems, but it seemed to fade away as the audio talk that was supposed to be different turned out to be eerily the same as the first 20 minutes that we already heard, as if they both prepped from the same talking points. But anyway, there was still a lot of information at the booth that Sunday night. Avid is still alive and kicking despite the attacks from all over the place.
The first meeting of NAB, with Microsoft TV was probably the most interesting. Held at the Renaissance Hotel at the company suite, I got a glimpse of what the company is doing with its seemingly newly monikered (at least to me) Microsoft TV. Not Internet TV, but IPTV. Microsoft is providing essentially the front end and backend to service providers all over the world for a relatively new TV distribution medium. Company execs Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for Microsoft TV, and Jim Brady, communications manager for Microsoft TV gave me the update to what Microsoft is doing. And I will tell you I am impressed. The company essentially remains a silent partner to those it does deals with, and its technology is currently in 16 markets throughout the world, including eight markets in the United States, serving customers in the six figures in the U.S. alone. While still seemingly small in terms of subscribers, those subscribers are getting some excellent TV technology, just not from a cable company. It isn't a model where you download video and then view, ala Apple's approach, but rather, it is a model just like that of TV. You turn it on and watch it live, or you record shows for viewing later, or you watch VOD. It really is fairly impressive what the Redmond company has quietly been working on the last several years. Does it scare the cable companies? Absolutely. Will it offer up the proverbial 500 channels of entertainment? Sure. Is it affordable and is it coming to your street? That is the question.
Posted at 01:43PM Apr 18, 2007 by John Virata in General | Comments[0]
