i "Nothing is finer than the pictures on that monitor", said my colleague as we stood in front of the enormous Sony LED screen showing super bright, super wide HDR pictures that were beautifully shot and carefully presented. The English language, however, can be confusing because when I returned from NAB and showed my wife the photos that I took, she said "Nothing is finer than a group of middle aged men in lycra". I smiled confidently as she regarded our NAB cycling group posing at the top of red rock. "No, I\'m serious, I would rather look at nothing\" she added for clarity. I wilted, but she is right. There are some images that look great on a 6m screen and there are some that are better left on a phone or tablet or printed in a magazine.
In a way, she has identified one of the things that was bugging me about NAB this year. There were lots of big shiny displays and there were lots of great images. There were many system diagrams on walls and some slick user interfaces, but in the end the large majority of the stands that I visited were showing a computer monitor above akeyboard and a graphic entitled "Solution\" or "Production\" or "Playout\" or similar. I didn\'t know whether I should be impressed or if it was the same demo as on the neighbouring stand. It was really quite difficult to figure out why one demo was different to another.
I tried asking the demonstrators "What am I looking at?\"
Wise demonstrators would respond with a few questions about my background to figure out where to pitch the demo. Less wise demonstrators would launch into a pre-canned speech that was often laden with buzz words about how their software was the best in the industry. Asking technical people business questions and asking the business people technical questions would quickly reveal the companies that had their own technologies as opposed to those that were rebadging someone else\'s work.
Ultimately, it seemed that there is a lot of convergence in product functionality taking place. Transcoders have grown workflow controllers. Data transfer engines have grown workflow controllers. MAMs have grown workflow controllers. Most bits of software now have APIs and many run natively in the cloud. This is a good thing because we are finally able to link professional media software applications together without having to write a lot of bespoke code. This linking of sophisticated process is often called Orchestration. It usually involves defining a trigger and an process and works well, when the process is self-contained and generates downstream triggers on completion. Orchestration yourself
If you have not played with the world of Orchestration, then you can start to understand the principles quite easily. Sign up for an IFTTT (IF This The That) or a Zapier account and look at the consumer things you can link together.
You can get your smart weight scales to tweet "I am finally below 74kg\" so that the world knows that you deserve Ice Cream. But why stop there? Use IFTTT to detect that tweet and get it to tell your Muzaic smart wifi to shout into your house "Hey Alexa, Buy Tanzanian Chocolate and Blood Orange Ice Cream". Alexa will then spend your money for you and Ice Cream will appear. You can even get your smart fridge to tweet "Bruce has left the fridge door open because Alexa ordered Tanzanian Ice Cream again.\"
The key thing about orchestration is that you have a number of loosely coupled processes that trigger each other. Keeping the dependencies between triggers loose & lightweight means that changes are easy. It means you can control the system without having to understand the low-level details of every process.
I saw two or three companies at NAB 2017 that have IFTTT / Zapier like products for our industry and those companies were very busy and growing. So, whilst last month\'s predictions about the hot topics at NAB 2017 were OK, I completely missed the fact that great orchestration engines are appearing which bodes well for the ability of professional media companies to respond quickly to opportunities.
Until next month - Enjoy!
