NAB 2024: Top New Tech for a Disruption-Ready Streaming Industry

I had an interesting conversation the last day at NAB 2024 which really resonated as to the problems the media industry is experiencing. Our industry is largely divided into tech companies and media companies. The tech companies try things and then they fail, try other things and fail, and then they try things and they succeed. Media companies are a bit more risk averse. They need to find a way to experiment, test, and fail if they are going to compete. 

In this article I’ll spotlight a number of new products I saw in the exhibit halls which are going to be great for starting that test-and-learn cycle going in a low-investment, high-benefit type of approach. Many of these products are using Gen AI, but even if they are not, these are each looking at a part of the industry which is ready for disruption.

CuttingRoom

I’ve looked at this company a few times since they spun off from Vimond. CuttingRoom Reporter is an Apple App that allows phone-based UHD and HD video recording. Reporters need to be able to shoot good-quality content from their iPhones and this app has several features that enable them to do that without the headaches that come from other apps.

CuttingRoom Reporter

First off there is image stabilization, so your shot won’t look like you need a lesson in how a tripod works (especially if you don’t happen to have one with you). Magic Zoom provides an automated transition which gives a bit more depth to your footage and enables closeups without the jerky zoom you might do manually. Best off is the auto upload function, where when you’re done shooting something, the content automatically is uploaded to whatever storage product you are using. There’s also an internal teleprompter which overlays the video to make interview sessions less error prone.

Frammer AI

Frammer AI is a Gen AI-automated video editing tool for transforming long clips into shorter pieces. The preview feature allows for human visual approval, as well as full text editing. Don’t like one piece of narration? You can cut and paste from the full text editor to revise the content. The application will reframe to the unique specs for owned-and-operated environments and each social platform.

Frammer AI 

Prime Focus Technologies

The ability to talk to your software has gotten one step closer to being standard operating procedure. Prime Focus Technologies has a whole suite of Gen AI-powered content creation, management, and distribution tools being used by some very big name media companies including Disney Hotstar, Hearst, Amazon MGM Studios, ITV, Crunchyroll, and A+E.

Boss: I need this by tomorrow.

Me: Chat to search content, chat with the content library to dedupe and archive, chat to build highlights, chat to run social media and finally, chat to localize.

If only this platform could make me coffee.

Prime Focus Technologies De-dup analyzer

Carrick-Skills

Carrick-Skills’ Carrick Flow is a management tool to execute your workflows between your on-prem and cloud services, based on schedule and available capacity. Users can manage work between multiple products and vendors within the browser-based tool. Their priority engine makes sure workflows are load balanced and can run in order of priority. Flexible pricing plans are available.

Perfect Memory

Perfect Memory calls their service a knowledge operating system, which works on top of a customer’s asset management system. Users are able to use a natural-language search to identify video (and other content) by description similar to a ChatGPT or Bard interaction. The system works on facial or object recognition, business rules (staff access levels and editorial rights) and emotional understanding.

Chord Communities

Chord Communities provides a platform for news organizations to build up their own community groups for either websites or apps. The use case the company had in mind is for a news organization to have a place where an external community or special interest groups can gather, mingle, and interact. In addition to being able to post images and text, there is the ability to have calls powered by a WebRTC low-latency connection.

Chord Communities 

Super Hi-Fi

At one of the West Hall’s stages, Super Hi-Fi’s Brendon Cassidy presented their cloud-to-transmitter workflow for broadcast, online, or in-car programming. They had a full audience to hear about their tech for building automated, personalized radio programming, complete with a redundancy stream using HLS+ streams with an AI engine to program unique content and ad breaks.

During NAB, they set up a temporary studio broadcasting to KMXB-94.1’s HD2 signal in Vegas from their hotel using their Program Director Radio Operating System running the Orban OPTIMOD 5950 transmitter playout appliance and their own StreamPlayer 1 playout device.

Super Hi-Fi Stream Player 1

AWS

NAB is a show which often showcases alliances, partners, and workflows. There are specific company pavilions (UK, France, etc.) and company groups. AWS had a very professionally put together booth showing off the many workflows which can run on AWS, including broadcast and live production, content production, data science and analytics, DTC and streaming, media supply chain and archives, and—last but not least—monetization.

AWS monetization solution at NAB 2024

While many of the companies in these demos had their own booths elsewhere, this was a great chance to get an understanding of how different vendors work together. Each participating vendor had to train an AWS employee to do their pitch, and all of the ones I heard were very good. See this link for a quick look at AWS’ featured demos from NAB 2024.

Amira Labs

Amira Labs is pitching live captions and translation for live broadcasts. Their software solution does multilingual AI processing for live streams, TV, and podcasts. They promise sub 1-second latency, with on-prem and cloud deployments. They run on all the major cloud providers.

AmiraLabs’ cloud-based live captioning and translation

AI-Generated Problem-Solving

These products all solve very specific problems, whether it’s how to shoot great iPhone footage, how to automatically create short clips, provide live translation and captioning, create customized radio programming, or build social communities.

Gen AI sounds like a lot of hype when it comes to an overarching idea, but having vendors who have figured out how to use it solve challenging problems and offer this as a SaaS tool that you can test out is very useful. It’s going to be key to helping media companies can act more like tech companies to keep iterating until they find a winning formula. However, use cases may have to fail a few times before it finally works. The key takeaway is not to be afraid to try.