The 2024 NAB Show is coming up quickly, and we wanted to hear from SDVI sales leadership on their expectations for the show! Simon Adler, senior vice president for North America and Alex Emmermann, vice president of business development offer a look ahead at what attendees will see on the SDVI booth (W2313), as well as the trends and technologies likely to be big this year.
Q. Alex, you’ll be a new face on the SDVI booth at NAB. What’s exciting about joining the company right now?
Alex: I’ve been in the industry for quite a while now, always working with customers like those who work with SDVI. Over the years, those customers always offered very positive comments about SDVI. So, I’m excited to be on the SDVI team now because, in addition to being a well-run company with great people and a great platform, SDVI is exceptionally customer focused. And I like the opportunity the company has right now. As media companies begin moving to the cloud, it’s interesting to see how cloud-enabled media supply chains can reduce a lot of friction in their media operations, particularly when those
companies are using SDVI’s Rally platform. I’ve been telling the cloud story for years, and with SDVI I get to continue telling it — and I have a platform that backs it up, as well as a team laser-focused on supporting media supply chains in the cloud.
Q. What trends do you expect to see at the 2024 NAB Show?
Simon: We’re hearing questions from media organizations about how to leverage machine learning, or ML, solutions as they explore what they can do with AI. They know they need to become more efficient, and they’re trying to work out where to leverage ML to save time and become more operationally efficient. I expect we’ll see more companies come to NAB this year with a real set of problem statements they want to solve using ML, as well as questions about how to integrate it into their supply chains.
Just the other day, actually, we got a question about content moderation from a customer. Because ML solutions introduced several years ago have matured and now provide very good results, content moderation is a pretty well-established use case for ML. But we have yet to see many ML-driven content moderation solutions integrated into media supply chains. Why? Is it because businesses have been focused on transitioning to the cloud and just weren’t ready to take on this application of the tech? Or is it that they tackled other problems first – getting content into the cloud and automating basic content preparation processes – and now they’re looking at ML as their “phase two” project? There is a lot we’re hoping to learn from our customers this NAB.
Alex: I’m expecting to see more AI solutions from other vendors, though I don’t know how real they’re going to be. There are a few narrow areas where AI has impact right now. People will start to exploit those and, if they’re successful, start to find additional uses for it. At SDVI, one of the most powerful benefits for our customers is that, regardless of who the vendor is, we can integrate specific ML- or AI-driven solutions into the Rally platform if there is demand for them. SDVI is in a position to drive practical adoption of AI that helps organizations process and prepare more content for ever-wider audiences.
Q. What will SDVI highlight at the show?
Alex: First and foremost, we will be showcasing our Rally platform for managing and optimizing media supply chains for media companies of all types and sizes. We are continuously innovating the platform, with almost 150 new features since last NAB. So, I’m excited to show visitors to our booth what’s new. In addition, we’ll be demonstrating our Rally Insight data analytics service, with new features around custom metadata and reporting, plus powerful filtering that helps users collect, analyze, and visualize metrics across all their jobs, assets, and metadata according to their use case requirements. We’ll also be showing Rally Access Workstation, our new, fully-managed solution for editing in the cloud with Adobe Premiere Pro, and how it brings another key element of supply chain activity into the cloud. Finally, we’ll also show new multiregion support, with two Rally environments in two different AWS regions synchronized to ensure uptime in the event of an outage. This is proving valuable for customers with tight time-to-air schedules, where timely processing is essential.
Q. Will sustainability be a focus of this year’s show?
Simon: Sustainability continues to be important for a lot of SDVI customers. We are proud not just to run completely net-zero media supply chains, but also to provide extensive reporting that helps our customers take real steps in creating a sustainable future for their businesses. It has been more than two years since we launched our Net-Zero Supply Chains initiative, which makes usage of the Rally media supply chain platform since the beginning of 2021 completely carbon-neutral. Our experience measuring, collecting, and reporting detailed operational data is unique in the industry and key to implementing this sustainability initiative. SDVI is in a strong position to help customers leverage cloud efficiency to move toward their sustainability goals.
Q. What kinds of companies do you expect to see visiting the SDVI booth?
Alex: While larger media enterprises have been the first to take on the cloud journey, we’re now seeing smaller and mid-sized companies making the transition as well. As our CMO, Geoff Stedman, noted in a recent blog post, it’s not a question of if, but rather a question of when. It’s not a question of why, but how. We’ve been seeing interest from companies of all sizes — it’s one reason the SDVI sales team is growing — and I think the NAB Show offers a great opportunity for them to get a firsthand look at a platform that can help them get to the cloud. We’ve proven ourselves and the Rally platform with the largest players in the industry, and we certainly can handle the content preparation and delivery workflows of smaller organizations.
Q. What will make this year’s NAB Show unique?
Simon: I think this will be the first NAB Show that gets full participation of companies following the pandemic. While we saw a bump last year, many companies sent smaller teams, or no one. We see it increasing significantly this year based on the number of booth meetings already scheduled. I’m looking forward to it!
Alex: I agree. Obviously, we are excited to see people come by our booth and see everything we’re showing. But we really look forward to hearing from the industry about what problems they’re looking to solve, where they need to go next – and helping them get there.
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