NAB Re-Entry

Counting down to splash-down

Photo by Alberto Duo on Unsplash

On April 10th Artemis II successfully splashed down into the Indian Ocean after a successful trans-lunar orbit mimicking Apollo 8’s first journey beyond Earth’s gravity nearly 57 years later and 50 years since the last visit in and around the moon. On Saturday I will re-enter the gravity of a world (Media Technology) I’ve spent most of my adult life within.

As I watched re-entry and splashdown I appreciated the success of the mission, but also a bit of regret for the half-century lost. NASA seems to have forgotten itself that this has been done before with comments like that of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, "…pushed Orion, SLS, and human exploration farther than ever before.” Not quite. With this I wonder if the infatuation with technology for the sake of technology, media too has forgotten.

What do moon rockets, space capsules, astronauts, and the like have to do with NAB? Aside from the obvious parallel of a return to something which I’ve done now for many years? Me. Air & Space have always been my north star. In high school I created my own independent ‘space studies’ course as part of my curriculum and spent untold hours reviewing and studying video tapes ordered from NASA regarding space-stations, lunar bases, and the technologies of space travel. When I went to university, it was for aerospace engineering. Unfortunately, I hit that world right at the worst time. Aerospace was cratering. Lay-offs and shutdowns were rampant and highly experienced people were relegated to the proverbial scrap-heap. Much like the efforts of Apollo in the 1970s. Disillusioned, I put my skills and knowledge of systems to other use, in the burgeoning IT world which eventually led me into one of the truly revolutionary systems of modernity, mass-media production and distribution, and to NAB.

My first visit to NAB was at the behest of my boss. I was a younger me, but not young. He specifically instructed to me walk all the halls. To see everything that went into the production and distribution of audio and video. From the rows of F-connectors, to helicopters, satellite trucks, and the people. I talked with engineers at standards booths, looked at artistic sculptures that were actually specialized RF antennas. I talked with vendors, distribution people, and of the video processing and delivery contingent in the South Hall. That year (2012) there were 91,932 attendees including 1,600 exhibitors, 151 countries, spread over 815,000 sq ft (and several parking lots).

That first NAB was an unforgettable experience as a Principal Engineer and one which, when I started managing my own team, I encouraged my team members to experience. What I did not know, at that time, was that the very technologies I was crafting, the experiences I was delivering, were sewing the very seeds of its decline. I arrived at the apogee of NAB, right at the time when COTS HW and SW systems, those very systems which ‘experts’ like myself had developed.

Technology cycles. Looking at the infrastructure that monitors, communicates, and shares journeys such as these is still remarkably similar. Sure the miles of copper wire have been replaced with filaments of fiber-optics. The green-scan monitors and projectors of mission control are now OLED/LED panels. The infrastructure, the effort relying upon telemetry, audio, and video, deliver the story and more than the people - have become the story.

This year’s NAB marketing email says that the show has about 54,000 registered attendees. Like so many other human-human enterprises and events suffered terribly from Covid mandates and restrictions. The lock-downs and mandates weren’t the cause however, but they were the accelerant. Most of what we’re experiencing today was already well in the works. My “A History of Ai” outlines some of the key developments in technology which, over the last eighty years, conflated and emerged into todays Ai.

The IT development that really transformed media wasn’t COTS HW or even SW. Those all existed in workflows and production systems already. The missing ingredient was telemetry. A back-haul network that existed in digital cable, but not for broadcast radio and media. Streaming technologies, over bi-directional IP networks, was the real Cambrian change in media that lit the fire. Mass media and the systems that create, produce, and distribute the spoken, written, and motion word will still exist. The platform company shows now rival, and exceed, the industry shows. December’s AWS re:Invent (63,000+) and Google Next (30k+) join Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft, and the myriad of other smaller platform conferences vying for corporate marketing and expenses budgets.

Contraction is not always a bad thing. As I read “The Show Floor as a Lagging Indicator” by the venerable Mr. Beach I am of the mind to think of it as a distillation. That necessary process that concentrates flavors in spirits or a filter on an RF signal, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. No doubt technology, especially all things Ai - will be significantly amplified by the marketing efforts of technology companies and technologists who are working to understand shifts. But maybe, with 1/2 the people in attendance, there will be less background noise too.

The streaming world is condensing into forms which begin to look much like the ‘legacy’ media companies before them. Artemis II did not unite the world in a watching experience the way the Apollo missions did. I don’t ever expect to have another experience like my first NAB or AWS. That doesn’t mean these efforts aren’t still valuable. In the end what really comes through is that the technologies evolve and revolve - but the people are were the real value remains. Remember this when you valuable and important. NASA really forgot that without people, people loose interest. To those fellow attendees at NAB - remember if your differentiator is less humans. Ultimately the show will continue to shrink and you may very well sew the seeds of your own demise. NASA seems to have woken up to this having forgotten without people, people tend to loose interest.