Impressions from NAB’s Centennial Show 

For me, the excitement of the NAB Show is all about experiencing the energy of this industry, discovering new ideas and technology, exploring emerging trends and reconnecting with customers, industry colleagues and friends. At this year’s show, I had the chance to share more about what Dalet has been up to and how we have shifted our product strategy to fully embrace cloud-native technologies and deliver what our customers will need to compete in the fast-changing media industry.

An Industry in Constant Evolution

As ever, walking the enormous halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center gives you plenty of food for thought. Just by looking around, observing exhibitor’s booths and demos, and attending conferences, you soak in the state of our very lively industry – one that has a true passion for change.

The trends that stood out for me, both from dozens of conversations and listening to conference speakers, were:

• Technical and business transformation is a continuum: unlike the past, where internal changes were typically from point a to b (e.g. from analog to digital, from tape to server…), today content owners & distributors need the ability to constantly adapt, rather than going for a “big bang” approach. To respond, suppliers must build solutions that enable such continued evolution.
• The consumer is in the driver’s seat: no matter how innovative your technology implementation might be, it needs to deliver to the needs of your audience. Plus you need to have a good solution to track and understand your consumers’ preferences if you want to remain competitive.
• Similarly, any technology solution needs to be easy-to-use. With today’s digital-native workforce, if the tools are not intuitive, they simply won’t use them.
• As a major global broadcaster stated, reducing time-to-market is the quickest and easiest path to cost savings, and technology should help by providing the backbone to streamline workflows, reduce manual work and human error.
• And finally, as we’ve been predicting for several years, every media company is gradually moving their workflows to the cloud, initially through hybrid implementations. This also brings opportunities for AI-powered workflows that signal the beginning of a new era. According to the latest research by the IABM more than 30% of media businesses have started to adopt AI in their day-to-day operations.

I feel privileged to work in such a forward-thinking, innovative industry and look forward to seeing its continuous transformation.

My Takeaways from the Dalet Executive Breakfast

One of the highlights in our calendar is the Dalet Executive Breakfast at the NAB Show and this year’s edition marked the return of the event after a 3-year hiatus due to the Pandemic. In a large Vegas ballroom packed with industry leaders, top media executives and innovators, the Dalet team, together with speakers from Bloomberg Media and Fox Sports Australia, had the opportunity to exchange ideas on emerging trends and future challenges for industry.

These are the key thoughts I took away from the session:

Cloud Everywhere

• In today’s media business landscape, content is consumed from the cloud, which makes it available everywhere. 
• There’s no question that embracing the cloud paradigm is essential to benefit from its operational efficiencies and cost benefits.
• This demands a platform with a cloud-native architecture with modular services that can be scaled up and down as your business requires.
• As the media industry adopts cloud-native solutions, how content is produced and managed needs to evolve too.

Get the Right Solution for Your Business

• It’s important to take a gradual approach to cloud migration – a “big bang” approach can be too disruptive and detrimental to your operations.
• Look for a single platform that can centralize your media workflows in the cloud leveraging scalable services and applications.
• Choose the right technology partner to help your organization transform the way it works.
• Choose a media management solution that will support your company’s evolution with a cloud-native architecture, integrated tools, AI and data-driven automation for increased efficiency.

Eliminate News Production Chaos

• News production and distribution has become chaotic with hundreds of content sources and consumer destinations.
• News storytellers need to produce the story wherever they are – time and versatility are of the essence.
• Implementing a story-centric workflow based on centralized planning will enable news organizations to bring order to this chaos through orchestration, visibility, remote production and rich data models across the full story lifecycle.

You can watch here the Dalet keynote that I presented at the Executive Breakfast, together with COO Stephane Schlayen.

Dalet – Your trusted Partner

After more than 30 years of innovation, Dalet continues to lead the way in delivering solutions that respond to the needs of media-rich organizations. Ahead of 2023’s momentous NAB Show, we unveiled our latest product strategy shift, which is based on our deep-seated industry knowledge and leverages the latest available technologies.

You can count on Dalet as your trusted partner to enable your business transformation today… and tomorrow. We have the know-how and 33 years of experience to bring you to the next chapter

Keep an eye out for our next NAB-themed blog post, where we will discuss the four new Dalet solutions that will transform the way you manage and share assets across key workflows: News Production & Delivery, Production Asset Management, Media Supply Chain & Distribution, and Archives & Monetization.

Missed NAB? Would you like to review key trends and innovations from the show?

Join us on a virtual post-NAB event to hear more about how your business can thrive in today’s competitive M&E landscape.