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LAS VEGAS — With more than 50,000 registered attendees, the first in-person NAB Show in years was an unqualified success. And MESA members came well-prepared, with new and revamped solutions for every need of the industry.

Here’s a brief look at what some of the companies brought to the event:

BeBanjo

If his company learned anything during the pandemic, and since the last in-person NAB, Dan Meyer, sales manager, for BeBanjo, said it’s that there’s always been a need for Movida, the company’s core product for managing — and maximizing the value of — content.

“We’re proud of how we grew during the pandemic, with new customer relationships, and new partner integrations, five new total,” said Dan Meyer, sales manager for BeBanjo. “We’ve made more than 600 enhancements to Movida, and we’re looking for more, starting with new modules we can build.”

The current version of Movida represents a decade-plus of experience in the industry, and out of the box, it’s helping everyone from WarnerMedia to BBC transform how they manage their assets across multiple platforms, territories, and business models, alleviating the struggles associated with scheduling, planning, rights, and metadata.

“The demand for content is only going to grow, and we need to stay modern to keep pace,” Meyer added. “Every few years we do a market analysis to see what opportunities exist and what the gaps are. That helps us respond to growing market competition, and if we see a way to improve to help our customers, we adopt it.”

LucidLink

LucidLink’s first trip to the NAB Show was in 2017, where it was regulated to the start-up portion of the show. Five years later, you couldn’t have missed its booth, its executives on panels, or its name linked to the industry’s top content companies if you tried.

“It’s been lots of big names on stage, and lots of content owners dropping by,” said Peter Thompson, co-founder and CEO of a company that’s seen more growth than most in the last couple of years. When the pandemic forced productions and companies to work remotely and with a dispersed workforce, “overnight we were contacted by people who’d never heard of us but were in need of solutions to continue to work.”

“It was a testament to what we offer with how quickly the end-user creatives were able to adopt the service, and the key to that was they change their workflows,” Thompson said. “No new tools to learn, no change to their work habits. We enabled the level of production to continue, and even thrive.

“With LucidLink, it didn’t matter where the work needed to be done, and we’ve tripled in size, with 10 times the customer base [during the pandemic].”

Internally, LucidLink has addressed growing demand for its product by bringing in specialists from all corners of media and entertainment, including workflow heads, media asset management gurus, studio gurus, and even its first director of product management.

“The talk about the rocket-ship ride, and I knew that conceptually, but for us it’s been reality,” Thompson said. “We view ourselves as the connective tissue holding things together, unlocking capabilities and possibilities for workflows and innovation. It’s been amazing to have customers come into our booth and see their heads explode.”

At the show, LucidLink showcased the capabilities of Filespaces 2.0, the company’s newly updated, high-performance remote collaboration solution, and highlighted how key strategic partners, customers, and service providers (including CHESA, WebMD and IBM) have been taking advantage of remote media workflows with LucidLink. Filespaces 2.0 enables organizations of any size to quickly adopt cloud services, providing more flexible hybrid office strategies for employees no matter location.

“For large customers, they saw an overnight upgrade,” Thompson said. “As more people get into the office, they see there are bandwidth needs for getting into the cloud. We’re solving those challenges.”

EditShare

If you’re bringing home an Emmy from Vegas, it’s safe to say the NAB Show was a success. It doesn’t hurt with eyeballs at your booth either.

That’s what Tara Montford, co-founder and EVP of business development, and EditShare experienced in 2022, with the company taking home an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), thanks to its work in cloud-enabled remote editing and project management.

“It’s special when you show someone what our integrated, cost-effective solutions offer, and they realize how powerful it is,” Montford said. “We have thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of users seeing complexity in their remote workflows go away.”

Integrations with leading editorial tools (like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve), cloud-native storage management options (like AWS S3 and EBS), and EditShare’s robust open APIs were all on display during the show, with the company emphasizing its ongoing efforts to ease everyone’s postproduction processes.

EditShare’s FLOW workflow tools saw an upgrade just ahead of the event, with complex projects able to be moved between EditShare media management and the NLE environment. The updated FLOW also includes the ability to support the latest RAW format updates for RED and Blackmagic Design camera systems.

Dolby

Ryan Jespersen, director for Dolby.io, saw NAB as an opportunity to showcase what Dolby acquired in February: Millicast, a developer platform offering ultra-low-latency video streaming capabilities that scale.

The acquisition aims to be complementary to the Dolby.io platform, giving customers the ability to develop large-scale interactive online experiences, from conferences to music concerts, streaming from the presenter to audiences of upwards of 60,000 with delays of less than 500 milliseconds.

“Millicast enables the lowest latency possible over the public internet,” Jespersen said. “And with the move to remote production, we’re enabling an entire production suite inside the browser.” The latest update to Millicast 2 deployed more advanced features that enable customers to add multiple interactive real-time video tracks to applications, complementing existing interactive audio functionality. And a new projection feature allowed viewers to choose any audio or video sources available to receive dynamically within a stream.

“There’s a huge trend within productions on being both budget- and eco-friendly, and it’s about providing efficiency in the workflow, and meeting the demands of this absolute avalanche of content,” Jespersen said.

Dolby came into the show with news that South Korean online platform Naver would be launching the first-ever Dolby Vision-capable live commerce content, giving shoppers a more lifelike video experience with brighter, more accurate colors and richer details, offering a new virtual shopping experience.

“Dolby Vision takes our user experience to a new level as it can reproduce vivid colors and textures of products in various industries, like beauty and fashion, where delivering a product’s appearance accurately is critical. We remain committed to developing and advancing technologies to lead the live commerce ecosystem,” said Cho Seong-tak, e-labs lead for Naver, in a statement.

“With demand for live commerce increasing sharply, it is very significant for us to provide high-quality live streaming content never experienced before along with Naver Shopping Live, the nation’s largest live commerce platform, for the first time in the world. Dolby Vision, which provides a more realistic online shopping experience by showcasing real hues and textures of the products, will break new ground in the live commerce industry,” said Sang Ho Lee, country manager at Dolby Laboratories Korea.

BeBop Technology

How to you stand out from the crowd at NAB? Debut a new operating system for remote virtual post-production. And make a version of it available free.

That’s what the team at BeBop Technology with the soft launch of BeBop OS1 Free at the show, which is geared toward one-and-done projects and is a hint of what’s to come with bigger versions meant for bigger productions. BeBop OS1 Standard is expected this summer, with a fully loaded BeBop OS1 Complete expected by fall.

“Our traditional product was aimed at the enterprise market, and what we’ve learned and realized is that there’s a much larger part of the market that grew during the pandemic, ad agencies, YouTube creators, a documentary crew with just two editors, that didn’t need dedicated infrastructure,” said David Benson, president and chief product officer for
BeBop Technology. “We’ve dropped that dedicated infrastructure piece, and doing it in a much more frictionless way, creating an experience that allows smaller workgroups to come in an use these tools.”

The free tier limits file uploads to 1 GB and features a 48-hour window for feedback and comes with the ability to review and approve on demand (BeBop Notes) or in real-time (BeBop Sessions), and get annotated notes back, all without needing a cloud account.

Benson sees the package as the perfect fit for a small project, say, a wedding photographer who doesn’t need much time to complete the work, or revisit it later.

BeBop OS1 Standard, expected in early summer 2022, has the same features as the free version, but with no limits, and at an affordable price, Benson said. It’ll be valuable for those needing permanent, ongoing review and approve, both on demand or in real-time.

And by this fall, look for the debut of BeBop OS1 Complete, covering everything in the Standard version, plus virtual workstations, BeBop Flex storage, and file transfer services, invaluable for those who don’t have their own dedicated cloud infrastructure.

“Whether you’re an individual or a major studio, you can come through the same front door,” said John Conroy, SVP of marketing and communications for BeBop Technology. “And it’s designed to offer a clear and logical upgrade path, so if something changes in your workflow, you can easily upgrade to suit your needs.”

Benson added: “We’ve been in the market for six years, and the marketplace is radically different now. We’re responding to those clear needs.”

To access the new OS, visit osone.beboptechnology.com.