I’ve been to NAB thirty-something times (the count being blurred by Covid). This year seemed the quietest ever from a crowd standpoint. I come from the past where attendance was in the six figures, the days when it was hard to get a room, difficult to eat unless you planned your reservations months in advance, and taxi lines were long. Coffee was usually a queue too far. Protein bars were your lifeline. Cell coverage and internet were spotty with competition.
Indeed attendance this year was reported at 55,000, which AI quantifies as a “slight” drop from last year’s 65,000. That’s getting onto a 20% drop. I don’t think any of us could sell that to our corporate leadership as “slight”. (AI is experimental).
So it was not my imagination that it felt like almost half as many people as I remembered in my bones. The crowds still converged in time-honored ways around Sony, Blackmagic, Adobe, AVID, and the other marquee booths.
As someone who has long gone to both the Pro AV shows and the broadcast shows, I’m feeling a shift of excitement in Pro AV. The energy of our shows feels like it’s building, while NAB feels more convergent than ever. Some of the highlights were AV-driven—big displays, powerful streaming ecosystems, and cameras that can play in both worlds, in all worlds. Software continues to supplant hardware wherever possible which brings powerful features to us.
But there was no escaping a sense of uncertainty, and now tariffs, whatever that will end up meaning. It’s hard to track the mainstream media on these things, and even harder to know what about tariffs is real, permanent, performative, or punitive.
AVIXA has amplified a story from Avendor that quantifies potential tariff relief for Pro AV. The story (on Avendor’s blog) seems well-researched citing specific schedule codes that seemingly protect a lot of professional components and products from tariffs. It cautions that a secondary code is required, suggesting that if you get the bureaucracy right, you may get relief. How accurate this is and how long it may hold is debatable. But it makes the overall point that community matters, sticking together, and sharing well-sourced practical information is a much better tactic than whatever the mainstream media will do with these times. I hope I can help a bit. We can help each other. And we should value our personal networks and use them. Tradeshows may have a new reason to be important, providing something that the internet cannot.
So where will things stand when we next see each other at Infocomm? Who knows? We should plan to go and find out.
