by James Wyngaard, Director, Rice Lake Community Media
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is a phrase you probably have heard time and again when a friend or relative goes to Sin City for a weekend away. In this case, what happened in Vegas is coming back home to be shared with you.
For the first time in three years, the National Association of Broadcasters held an in-person convention and trade show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Covid canceled the 2020 event and the 2021 event was originally scheduled for October, but that ended up being canceled as well. The show went on as normal in its regular time slot this year from Sunday, April 23 through Wednesday, April 27. This is an event drawing companies and attendees from all over the world. The recently announced final numbers were: 52,468 attendees from 155 countries. This is down by more than 40 percent from the last in-person event in 2019, where more than 90,000 people attended from 160 countries.
My personal experience at NAB2022 started on Saturday, April 22 with a pre-show. Exertis Broadcast hosted a two-day experience prior to the official opening of the main event. More than 20 exhibitors showcased their offerings. I saw Newtek with their Tricaster models, Lumens demonstrating their PTZ cameras and new AVOIP options, and Netgear talking about their business-level network switches for local companies like Squigl (based in Madison and Minneapolis) that make whiteboard videos. Attendees to this pre-show were able to meet with companies and engineers in a more intimate setting than the normal hustle and bustle of the main NAB show.
Sunday and Monday saw your intrepid reporter walking the halls and exhibition floor of the main NAB show. It was (hopefully) understandably overwhelming to see all of the exhibitors (900+ according to the final numbers released by NAB) under one roof. This year’s show saw a few changes. The show was divided into four distinct sections…Create, Connect, Capitalize, and Intelligent Content. Attendees were able to go to a specific section of the exhibition hall and find countless companies and exhibitors for what they were searching. Many exhibitors also offered pre-arranged meeting times for those looking to finalize a purchase of goods or services or discuss new ideas or procedures and how to incorporate them into a current workflow.
Some might argue or wonder why the director of a community media center in a city of 9,000 in northwest Wisconsin would bother going halfway across the country to a trade show of this magnitude and attempt to be on the same playing field as broadcast networks from around the globe. Frankly, I thought the same thing a few times when one of the first things I saw was a display in the main hall. It was an XR (extended reality) show with a motorcycle set against an LED wall background with a motion picture camera attached to a swooping and swinging crane system that created this incredible visual effect that one would likely see in a Marvel movie. In my humble opinion, the answer to the “Why Go?” is this: if you scale down some of these big theatrical or television productions by a factor of about 10 or 1,000 in some cases, it’s really not that much different than what we do on a daily basis. We create content for an audience using cameras, lights, tripods, and sound equipment. We need storage for the assets with which we make the content. We need ways to distribute the content to our audience. Most importantly, we in community media have just as much right to the knowledge and insight on display at NAB as an engineer that works for HBO or a network in Germany or a radio station in Australia.
The experience of making connections both new and old with the dozens of vendors that I spoke with -- some of which I currently use at my radio and television station on a practically daily basis -- made the trip well worth it. It was also great to see the exhibitors and sponsors of our WCM - ACM Midwest Spring Conference in a whole new venue and situation. I can’t wait to go again!
