On March 11, NAB president/chief executive Gordon Smith announced that the NAB Show 2020 would be canceled. The NAB Show, which would have taken place April 18-22 in Las Vegas, gathers over 100,000 media, entertainment and technology professionals from all over the world. In a letter to the community, Smith wrote that the organization has been “carefully monitoring coronavirus developments both domestically and globally over the past few weeks.” Additionally, the NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards dinner was been moved to October. Continue reading Coronavirus: NAB 2020, Tech & Engineering Emmys Canceled

In a keynote address at NAB in Las Vegas, ETC data & analytics project director Yves Bergquist described how the changing economics of media audiences require new measurement methods and metrics. For the first time, he said, the media and entertainment industry can leverage behavioral psychology, computational neuroscience and machine learning to understand the deep cognitive relationship between audiences and content. He pointed to director Alfred Hitchcock’s prescient statement that, “Creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.” Continue reading NAB 2018: ETC Keynote on the Audience Genomics Revolution

During a Destination NXT presentation at NAB Show, Media Sherpa managing director John Canning moderated a panel on “redesigning the consumer experience” with “AR Adventures, Gamified Gatherings and VR Vacations.” Canning asked the panelists what drew them to creating immersive media. Fulldome.pro chief operating officer Stephen Powers sees this “new media as having the unique power” to “lift the human spirit.” For Vari Parks chief executive Louisa Spring, it’s her love of VR and desire to bring the experience to more people. Continue reading NAB 2018: Immersive Leisure With AR, Gamification, and VR

Fabric Media chief executive/founder Jason Damata led a discussion at NAB with two experts in the field of social media intelligence. Dr. Indraneel Mukherjee founded LiftIgniter, which is “a machine learning personalization, recommendation and discovery engine” for websites and apps to have one-on-one conversations with users. Dr. John Kelly is chief executive at Graphika, which turns “network relationships into dynamic maps of social influence, enabling precision targeting and action to drive business results.” Continue reading NAB 2018: Analytics Scientists Look at Social Media and Bots

Closed captioning isn’t just for the hard-of-hearing anymore. According to Digiday, 85 percent of Facebook video is viewed without sound. That signals a trend of viewers who prefer to watch closed captioning, putting the heat on solutions providers to come up with compliant systems that are also accurate and speedy. With artificial intelligence, says IBM Watson Media senior offering manager David Kulczar, closed captioning can be enhanced to go beyond transcription, and automatically identify background audio descriptions. Continue reading NAB 2018: IBM Watson on Refining AI for Closed Captioning

A panel discussion co-produced by ETC@USC and Google and moderated by ETC director of adaptive production Seth Levenson examined the latest innovations and solutions in the cloud for M&E companies. Google Cloud technical director Jeff Kember opened the discussion by stressing the importance of collaborating with content creation and audiences. “We have products and services to connect the two,” he said. “We run Tier 1 content on our cloud from the studios. Think of Google as a partner in the ecosystem.” Continue reading NAB 2018: ETC, Google Examine Cloud Innovation, Solutions

Although using AI and machine learning tools in production may remain a lofty goal for some, such tools are already in use in some video workflows, from dailies through mastering. Moderated by Netflix coordinator, production technologies Kylee Peña, a panel discussion described the tools available and how they’re being used in real world applications. Google senior cloud solutions architect Adrian Graham described his company’s now-open sourced TensorFlow technology, and how it’s being used by the M&E industry. Continue reading NAB 2018: Machine Intelligence Toolsets in Video Workflows

Tools powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning can also be used in animation and visual effects. Nvidia senior solutions architect Rick Grandy noted that the benefit of such tools is that artists don’t have to replicate their own work. That includes deep learning used for realistic character motion created in real-time via game engines and AI, as well as a phase-functioned neural network for character control, whereby the network can be trained by motion capture or animation. Continue reading NAB 2018: Artificial Intelligence Tools for Animation and VFX

Do Androids dream of making movies? That was the provocative question posed in a conversation at the Future of Cinema conference track at NAB. Universal Pictures head of creative technologies Annie Chang led a discussion with ETC@USC data scientist Yves Bergquist, who is also chief executive of the AI firm Novamente, and IBM Watson Media senior product manager David Kulczar. Bergquist began with the definition of AI: “the design of optimal behavior of agents in known or unknown computable environments.” Continue reading NAB 2018: Potential Impact of AI on Storytelling, Moviemaking

At a conference track on machine learning during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services M&E worldwide technical leader Usman Shakeel described his company’s toolsets. Shakeel addressed up front the question of whether machine learning can replace human creativity. “Can content ever create itself?” he asked. He emphasized that, in today’s world, machine-learning (ML) tools are being used to create efficient workflows, and curate and extract massive amounts of metadata. Continue reading NAB 2018: AWS Machine-Learning Tools for Content Creation

USC School of Cinematic Arts professor and editor Norman Hollyn spoke at a conference on machine learning about ML tools available today and those that are imminent for editing film/TV content. Underlying the growing importance of ML-powered tools for editors, Hollyn pointed out that editors who resisted the advent of digital nonlinear editing in the 1990s exited the industry. “AI is bringing things into the post production world and if we don’t start to look at and embrace them, we’ll be ex-editors,” he said. Continue reading NAB 2018: Machine-Learning Tools to Become Vital for Editing

Google News Lab works with journalists and entrepreneurs around the world to drive innovation in the news industry, explained training/development manager Nicholas Whitaker. Established three years ago, the worldwide team focuses on trust and misinformation, local news, inclusive journalism, and emerging technologies. “Building a more informed world will require news organizations and technology companies to work together,” said Whitaker, in an NAB session that revealed some of the work being done. Continue reading NAB 2018: Google News, Journalism 360 on Immersive Media

Location-based entertainment (LBE) is at the forefront of virtual reality and mixed reality content, and an NAB panel took a look at the role that LBE plays in distributing and popularizing this form of entertainment. Phil Lelyveld, ETC@USC’s lead of the Immersive Media Initiative program, noted that LBE represents the high-end of VR/MR storytelling, in contrast to home-based solutions. Technicolor Experience Center lead VR/AR experience producer Brian Frager said the industry adoption of standards will change that. Continue reading NAB 2018: Immersive Media & Location-Based Entertainment

If you want to know what’s on the mind of a post-millennial, the best person to ask is a member of that demographic. At NAB 2018, a 15-year-old high school sophomore did even better than that, presenting the results of her own survey of over 200 members of her age group. Based on a family conversation (that included her father, industry consultant Pete Ludé), Helen Ludé, a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco, decided to poll her friends on cinema attendance, home consumption habits and virtual reality.  Continue reading NAB 2018: Post-Millennial/Gen Z Survey on Cinema, TV, VR

Call them Gen Z, or Plurals or Centennials. But whatever you do, don’t call these 14- to 19-year-olds millennials. During one of NAB’s Future of Cinema sessions, ETC Immersive Media Initiative lead Phil Lelyveld described Gen Z and what makes them distinct from the much more familiar millennials. For starters, he said, they spend only 13.2 hours a week watching TV, the lowest number of any preceding generation. Lelyveld also noted that the exact definition, by age, of Gen Z is undetermined, but behaviors are clear. Continue reading NAB 2018: Distinct Traits of Gen Z, The YouTube Generation