NAB 2023

NAB 2023 Takeaways and Trends

NAB celebrated 100 years of bringing the media and entertainment community together. This year, the space was divided into content pillars: Create, Connect and Capitalize, and Intelligent Content, with a strong emphasis on Artificial Intelligence.

Red Bee Discover sales director Joanne Ciurzynski provides expert insight into featured trends at NAB and talks about the conversations she had with customers while in Las Vegas.

Shift to Streaming

One of the most prominent trends discussed at NAB was the shift towards streaming, which requires new strategies and systems. For example, the FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television) channel is rapidly growing, with better content than ever before.

In 2022, revenues for the US streaming market were approximately $4 billion and are projected to triple over the next five years. With 377 Over-The-Top (OTT) providers in the US, and 88% of US internet homes having at least one OTT subscription service, traditional Pay TV is ‘still alive’, mainly due to live sports content.

According to Parks Associates, sports will eventually move online, with live sports already available on platforms such as Apple TV, Hulu, HBO Max, and Amazon.

Automotive

Another trend discussed at NAB was the connected car in-dash experience. Xperi presented that 26% of Americans now have in-dash entertainment, up from 22% in 2022, led by Apple CarPlay.

Artificial Intelligence

AI was also a significant focus at NAB. It is now having a tremendous impact on workflow automation, personalization, monetization, live IP delivery, and new remote production tools.

However, rich metadata is essential for AI to be useful. Radio ChatGPT created the first 100% AI-driven radio hosts by scanning social media and other sources for trending topics, then using AI to create a script for on-air use and recording using AI voices. Two media companies are testing and considering various concepts and use cases but have not used the technology live.

AI-powered data-driven personalization is another application, which enables recommendation engines to serve content based on individual user preferences and targeted advertising. Real-time dynamic metadata is used, with AI natural language engines extracting relevant metadata from each frame of video from speech, subtitles or captions, and AI tools enabling facial and object recognition used to create metadata for each frame. Standardizing descriptors is still something that needs to be worked out.

Monetization

Finally, monetization is a crucial topic at NAB. NextGen TV (ATSC3.0) enables two-way connectivity with viewers, bringing personalization, engagement, and new revenue to broadcasters.

A provider of cloud-based personalized content discovery believes there is interest in a personalized EPG (Electronic Program Guide) experience, whereby a viewer would have their favorite channels prioritized.

Generative AI provides enterprise users with a transformative experience by utilizing a natural language interface to rapidly locate, retrieve, and present relevant data. AI tools can also be used to easily extract content from large content libraries based on many factors.