Trade Show Diaries: Part 2 – Embracing Innovation at NAB 2024
This blog post was written by Matt Le Masurier, VP of Product, M2A VOD
Despite a cancelled flight, enduring jet lag, and last-minute preparations for my talk at the AWS Learning Lounge, my experience at NAB this year was overwhelmingly positive. The show was vibrant; M2A had exciting new features to share, and Las Vegas was filled with colleagues, customers, peers, and mentors.
Las Vegas itself transforms during NAB. You’re never far from a towering 50ft digital billboard, reminiscent of those in Times Square. This week, however, the usual faces of celebrities and ads for extravagant pool parties were replaced by broadcast tech advertisements. It was unmistakably clear: NAB attendees had taken over the city.
A hot topic at the convention was Gen AI. AI is making its mark and we’re here for the ride. The applications are vast and fascinating, though the execution sometimes leaves room for improvement. Nonetheless, it’s a significant shift that we all must embrace. Other key topics included broadcasting sustainability and bespoke, personalised content—truly exciting times for our industry.
Speaking of exciting, M2A showcased our new features at the show. This includes our Workflow Orchestration engine and a sleek UI implementation that provides operators with a clear view of resource states during live events. We also introduced a new event multiviewer that automatically populates with your events, displaying sources, encoders, and endpoints as tiles—allowing you to visualise the entire video pipeline in one glance. As the lead of our Capture products, I was thrilled to see the various ways our customers are utilising these services. Particularly, our Capture Editor tool has been a game changer, giving operators the ability to clip up their live events and create compilations for re-monetisation.
At the AWS Learning Lounge, I had the opportunity to present on how M2A leverages AWS, particularly AWS Media Services, to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy live video infrastructure. My talk, titled ‘Making FAST Channels Faster’, delved into our methods for enabling customers to swiftly launch FAST channels. We explored the technical nuances and benefits of our approach, which not only reduces setup time but also optimises operational costs. This discussion was not only a highlight of my personal NAB experience but also underscored M2A’s commitment to pioneering efficient, scalable broadcasting solutions.
As we navigate these exciting technological advances, the potential for transforming live event broadcasting is enormous.
I left Las Vegas inspired by the innovative spirit of NAB attendees and eagerly anticipate what the future holds for our industry.
