2024 NAB Show Shines Spotlight on Broadcasters’ Road to the Future
By Sadaf Sundas Riaz
Year one of the NAB Show’s second century is shaping up to be a window on a future that broadcasters will be able to imagine a little more confidently than in recent years.
.png)
“As an industry, we have the opportunity to set the tone for the next 100 years,” says Chris Brown, executive vice president and managing director of NAB Global Connections and Events. “It’s an exciting time to see technology reach a point where truly extraordinary advances are possible—in how content is produced, distributed and consumed.”
‘Foundation of Optimism’
For TV stations and their network affiliates, putting these technologies to work across OTA, MVPD, CTV, and streaming outlets to keep audiences engaged while preserving the primacy of broadcast’s role in serving the public is the priority, abetted by new avenues to lowering costs across legacy as well as next-generation operations. While broadcasters—like other segments of the M&E industry—are dealing with serious “headwinds,” as Brown puts it, unlike recent events in the Covid and post-pandemic era, this year’s show is built on a “foundation of optimism with improving macroeconomic conditions.”
Along with highlighting an unprecedented confluence of advanced technologies that have simultaneously reached commercial viability for the entire M&E industry, the 2024 show—April 14-17 in Las Vegas—will feature an expanded agenda specifically tuned to broadcasters’ interests.
For example, there will be “roughly double” the number of sessions in the annual Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) conference NAB jointly sponsors with the Society of Broadcast Engineers and a return to providing the off-floor “Broadcast District,” in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center which was introduced last year as a focal point for networking and learning that Brown says worked “spectacularly well.”
Standing Out from the Crowd
The upheaval in the streaming market, driven by consolidation and the popularity of ad-supported and FAST services, is forcing companies to distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded market.
