NABster Pt. 2

Day one of my trip to NAB is in the bag. Those of you that follow my Twitter stream saw the highlights. Pretty much the same shit as last year, for the most part, and the show is somewhat smaller, as well.

Last year, the catch-phrase was “streamlining your digital workflow.” I could’t walk 10 feet without hearing some permutation of that phrase. This year, the word is “cloud.” Everybody and their second cousin’s babysitter has some sort of “cloud” solution. Even companies that were already fairly cloudy to begin with (e.g. AT&T) had all kinds of cloud motifs around their booths. I got a demo of AT&T’s media caching/clouding/whatever service, and actually left the booth with less understanding of the service they offer than when I went in to it, taking in to account that I’d never heard of it when I went in to it, so my understanding baseline of their “cloud” media service was zero.

The Microsoft Cloud stuff felt kind of pained. That sort of shit just isn’t their style, and there was mute embarrassment all around. I’d like to get all the guys from the New Cloudy Companies together and give them a crib sheet. They could say “it’s like Amazon S3 only we charge more,” or they could say “it’s like Amazon S3 only we charge less.” It would really save everyone a lot of time and energy all around. YOUR SHIT, OUR SERVER FARM. LET’S GET IT DONE!

It’s really surprising that I’m not a professional pitchman.

I was going to put a little thing up on that Edirol video sampler (the which is sort of like an SP-202, but for video instead of audio.) Except that after I played it, I decided it was basically tragically unplayable, and is a rare miss for their Edirol division. There’s like a 1 second pause when the clips start. Maybe it’s a software bug and will get fix. I tried to ask one of their booth Bettys, but he was too busy trying to give some lard ass a demo. So I guess we’ll never know.

I didn’t really see anything else that would be of general interest here that we don’t all already know about, I’m sorry to say. The audio side of things was the usual suspects; nothing new. This is the show where the broadcast divisions of all the names you know come out, so you see a slightly different side of Yamaha, SSL, whatever. Kind of fun, but ultimately, it’s rather tedious talking to those guys, because you have to put a translation layer over all their terminology.

Anyhow, back at it tomorrow, then back to Tempe in the afternoon to rest my tired feet.