Las Vegas: For most of the 80-plus years that the National Association of Broadcasters has held a convention, the event has been a get-together for primarily one group – television and radio broadcasters. But new technologies have irrevocably changed the face of both broadcasting and NAB and, at NAB2005, computer manufacturers and service providers were equally prominent, leading sessions and telling traditional broadcasters what their future will be.

‘This is not your father’s NAB,’ said HP exec Shane Robison at a packed session about convergence and content.

Robison’s point was that media and entertainment companies and service providers all belong to one industry bridged by IT. Tech giant HP has partnered with media players such as Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures Entertainment as these studios look for an end-to-end digital pipeline. Warner, working with HP, is looking to be the first studio that stays in a digital file-based environment from production through post to distribution.

In the opening days of the six-day huddle, a recurring topic was adapting digital broadcast content for distribution on cell phones and home computers, and continuing to expand the interactive features of these devices into traditional television.

‘Consumers expect to get what they want wherever they are on whatever device they have in hand, and they want it [instantaneously],’ said Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of telecom giant Verizon.

The choice of Seidenberg to address international broadcasters at NAB2005’s all-industry keynote may have initially seemed strange until one considers the $73-billion capital investment Verizon has made in recent years in innovations including fiber-optics and wireless broadband.

Verizon Wireless’ V Cast streaming video technology allows the delivery of games, TV shows, movie previews and programming guides to subscribers on their handsets. These types of initiatives have recently launched in Canada as well, notably with the MuchMusic phone from Rogers Wireless.

If all this sounds like a potential boon to producers and broadcasters, perhaps it is, yet, as both Robison and Seidenberg agree, there remains one setback – rights protection. The matter of piracy just won’t go away, such as recently, when someone leaked a copy of an unaired Doctor Who episode to the Internet.

‘If we don’t adequately protect the content on our networks, we will have no value on our networks,’ said Seidenberg.

For his part, Robison called for open industry standards for digital rights management, to allow companies such as HP to build their own solutions to protect clients’ digital products from piracy.

Another mixed blessing of digital technology comes from PVRs – the greater control they allow the viewer also enables ad-skipping and threatens conventional TV’s traditional revenue model. It is a crisis far from finding a definitive solution.

‘It’s causing a gap that needs bridging from other sources,’ said Dave Brown of the consulting firm Accenture, at the all-industry opening. ‘What the new models will be is not yet clear, and we may not have bridged this gap by 2009, when it might be a wide chasm.’

Digital innovations are clearly uppermost in the minds of the media industry worldwide, as NAB reports its registered attendance for the 2005 show at more than 104,000, 23,000 of which were from outside the U.S. Overall attendance is up about 6,000 over last year.

-www.nabshow.com