By far my favorite session of the day was “Grow Your Online Audience With Hyper Local Content,” part of the NABEF Career Development Program. The presenter was Rob Curley, vice president of product development for the Washington Post Newsweek Interactive. Some of the work he and his team are doing is inspiring and helped open my eyes to what could possibly be great options for stations online. more

Saturday 12, the round of press conferences kicked off. The first sessions made many mentions of file-based workflows. Nothing new here, but what the IT infrastructure does enable is outsourcing of “broadcast” functions like asset management, content distribution and multi-format delivery to enterprise service providers.

This got me to thinking, what is a broadcaster, and what do they do? If they do outsource many of their traditional operations from newsgathering to playout, then what is left? In playout, the word is branding, specifically channel branding. But following this through, the television network now becomes a brand, not a broadcaster, with the in-house functions left as program commissioning and scheduling, plus the revenue provider, the sales arm. more

I just got back from attending Avid’s customer event at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. The company’s executive vice president and general manager Kirk Arnold has only been with the company for a short while, but her speech was focused on the future.

Avid’s customers have told her they want more customer support, and in providing that support, Avid has focused on several things, including simplifying its product line, making Media Composer more accessible and creating an online support community.

Toward the end of the presentation, Avid employees “unveiled” the company’s new products, which were draped under black sheets up to that point. The presentation ended with three words: quality, performance and value.

Omneon introduced ProCast CDN, a high-performance content distribution platform. It’s kind of hard to describe, but basically it optimizes file transfers over any IP network providing dramatically increased efficiency over great distances.

Incorporating advanced WAN acceleration technology, network management, and bandwidth prioritization, ProCast CDN enables broadcasters and content distributors to easily initiate, monitor, and manage transfers of large files between multiple geographic locations. more

Today at NAB I attended a session called “Directing video podcasts” presented by Richard Harrington, president and founder of RHED Pixel.

The session was of particular interest to me because this year I’ve been tasked with orchestrating Broadcast Engineering’s video coverage from NAB. more

The Thomson press conference is usually one of the more polished PCs of the show. This year was a huge exception, but only for technical glitches.

The teleprompter (no hints at who’s it was) failed several times during the presentations. Unfortunately, the presenters didn’t seem able to carry forth without the prompter. One would think these pros could wing such things, but not so this time. more

Watch the action from the 2008 NAB Show on Broadcast Engineering TV. Tune in to see the latest new technology, keynote presenters, person-on-the-street interviews and demonstrations of the hottest new products.

Broadcast Engineering‘s editors report daily live from the show floor providing you with the up-to-the-minute and all the behind-the-scenes news from the television industry‘s biggest annual tradeshow. Plus, you‘ll get an inside look at the hot, new products with live product demos from top company executives.

Want a first-person viewpoint? Broadcast Engineering will be asking engineers and broadcast executives just like you about the solutions they‘ve found.

Coverage begins at noon, Monday, April 14th.