Trends at NAB for Video Geeks – 4K, HEVC, and More

Each year, NAB presents an opportunity for video geeks everywhere to absorb streams of tech announcements, product demonstrations, and engineering presentations. Although titularly focused on broadcasters, in reality attendees cover the gamut of professionals across the video landscape. Creative filmmakers, software engineers, industry executives, and armies of video experts trawl two million square feet of exhibit space for any information that keeps them current on the trends that shape our industry.

So what’s trending this year? It is impossible to mention NAB without discussing 4K (or UltraHD). Almost every booth had something to offer content creators adopting this higher quality format. Whether it was Blackmagic Design or AJA introducing surprise cameras (a sleek and inexpensive studio camera and a suede-padded shoulder shooter, respectively), industry stalwarts like Sony, Canon, and Panasonic expanding product portfolios, or software vendors like Adobe, Avid, and Autodesk demonstrating editing tools, color correction capabilities, and broader format support, each vendor proudly displayed the UltraHD logo.

HEVC (also known as H.265) made quite a splash as well. Since its ratification as an MPEG standard last January, a number of companies have begun incorporating the new compression format into products. Due to its efficiency over existing H.264 solutions, it makes a compelling solution for the substantially increased bandwidth required for 4K. Cisco and Sony collaborated to show off a complete HEVC workflow. Similarly, MPEG DASH (an HTTP-based delivery standard that is gaining steam) made a bigger appearance this year, with Elemental and Level3 showing off a “triple-play” streaming solution with 4K content compressed with HEVC and delivered via MPEG DASH.

While the broadcasting world embraces HEVC, the lack of VP9 presence at the conference was telling. (VP9 is an alternate, open-source compression format, claiming similar benefits as HEVC.) VP9 is being pushed heavily by Google, and is already available as an option for modern versions of Firefox and Chrome. YouTube currently streams 4K content in VP9, while Netflix began streaming 4K content to HEVC-enabled televisions very recently, so the battle is already being waged (unwittingly) by consumers.

Of course, this is just a tiny sampling across areas that matter for our platform: the formats in which people are shooting (and the associated equipment), the quality at which the industry is mastering and archiving, and the delivery mechanisms for the future of video distribution. NAB encompasses everything from digital signage to mobile production trucks to radio equipment, so whatever your particular niche in media, there is almost certainly an announcement for you if you go Googling.

As a final note, this year was special for me personally. I had the privilege of representing uStudio by giving a talk on video workflows in the cloud. Ten years ago, I attended my first NAB as a lucky participant in Sony’s NAB internship program with Baylor University, my alma mater. The Sony theme that year was “Ride the HD Wave”, a symbol of the increasing adoption of high definition. 1080P acquisition was becoming more mainstream, and the new compression format H.264 / AVC was beginning to displace existing MPEG-2 based systems. The parallels from a decade ago underscore one of my favorite parts of this industry: in the pursuit to improve communication technology, the only constant is change.