This week, AIB is making its first visit to ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) in Amsterdam, a trade show not always at the top of the list for broadcasters. So why are we here? And what is ISE anyway?
ISE is one of the world’s biggest tradeshows serving the installation and AV market. The gear on the tradeshow floor and the seminars held are wide-ranging. Tech companies present everything from touch-screen kiosks and weatherproof 4K monitors to smart home devices and elaborate comms systems. The ISE seminars and conference topics include the smart building tech, immersive audio, home theatre design and, of course, the potential of The Internet of Things.
So what does ISE have to do with broadcast? And why is ISE worth AIB’s notice?
For one, more and more of our broadcast partners are showing at ISE. Avid, Dolby, DPA Microphones, and Sennheiser are all here – as well as the big media tech players like Panasonic.
More importantly, we realise media is no longer bound by conventional distribution channels, a theme that ISE returns to again and again.
In the past couple years, we’ve kept hearing about “The Internet Of Things” and that we have passed a tipping point in its development. Exactly what the Internet Of Things is meant to be is still vague, even to some experts, but at its core is the notion that the devices all around us in our daily lives will be able to communicate with each other and with us.
The ISE keynote address on Monday evening was given by futurist Lars Thomsen of Future Matters, who was a technical adviser on the movie Minority Report. That dystopian sci-fi film famously showed a vision of the future in which media was omnipresent, and highly personalised. As characters walked down the street, advertisements on flat-panel screens would personalise their content as they passed, and the mass manipulation of data was a matter of everyday occurrence.
In his keynote address, Thomsen painted a picture of a future world – one he thought was not too many years away – saturated in the connectivity of IP, one in which virtually everything we own has its own IP address, everything we own is a part of the internet.
We know that the bulk of web traffic in the world is dominated by video – and that percentage is only going to grow. As IP connectivity between everyday objects – phones, fridges, bathtubs, TV’s, cars, air conditioners, roofs, sidewalks – becomes more ubiquitious, the opportunity for delivering content to consumers – for broadcasting – extends beyond the “internet” to potentially every device we own. The potential reach of a piece of content in that scenario in which everything is a receiver of informations is nearly infinite. Imagine being able to transmit your content to a display (and one not necessarily confined in size and shape) that is part of your audience’s fridge, or bed, or bathroom, or car, or workplace wall, or…you name it. The Minority Report vision of hyper-hyper-targeted content seemed like a sci-fi dream when the movie was released in 2002. Looking at this year’s ISE, it’s apparent we’re not too far away from it.
Broadcasters – those who want to survive into the next century – are leaving behind the definition of broadcast as a linear one-to-many proposition. The new generation of broadcasters understands that broadcasting is no more or less than the delivery of relevant timely content – through whatever means is best suited to its audience. From the discussion at ISE, we can see that the future holds an endless variety of ways in which a broadcaster can contact its audience, where reaching the audience no longer even depends on a consumer’s access to a screen. In the ultimate vision of The Internet Of Things, every thing that a consumer owns is a connected opportunity for messaging and for communication, and a chance for the consumer to participate in a truly universal conversation that will makes today’s communications web look like 1930’s radio.
Understanding and awareness of the possibilities of this new world of hyper-broadcast is essential for both media companies and consumers alike. The latest scare that Samsung TV’s may be registering and relaying living room conversations without viewers’ consent is one issue that will have to be resolved to consumers’ satisfaction, along the way. If you thought issues of privacy, content ownership, and the borderlines between public and private life were complicated now…
Some say we still have a way to go before the full implications of an IP addressed life becomes accepted. Even many of the vendors at ISE think we’re going to be stuck with hardware and cables for a while. But the connected future will be a present reality soon, and AIB is preparing broadcasters to be a leading part of it.
-Neal Romanek