 Aloha. This is a special edition of Think Tech Tech Talks, and I'm your host, Kariman Lee, today, who just came back from the 2017 NAB show with our special guest, Jay Fidel. Hi, Carol. I'm so glad we're doing this. We have to get it, you know, out there. We have to report on what happened at the NAB show. Exactly. And we were there all weekend. We just got back yesterday. So tell us a little bit about the 2017 NAB show. What does the NAB stand for? The National Association of Broadcasters, which is a huge organization of thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of members. It's not cheap to belong, by the way. And we don't belong yet, but we will one day. And it involved people from all over the world, all languages. It was like the United Nations. It was amazing. People came from everywhere. And you and I, we'd always strike up a conversation with somebody you hardly knew where he was going to be from. How about Uruguay? How about that? So this was in Las Vegas. And where in Las Vegas was this? At the Convention Center, which is a huge facility, and it really makes you feel that we here in Hawaii need a facility more like that one than the one we have right now. Well, okay. How big is the Las Vegas Convention Center? Well, I think the Total Convention Center was dedicated to this show because this is one of the biggest they have. This is a huge amount of people come and a huge amount of money is involved. So a million square feet and more went into this conference. A million square feet. A million square feet. And the number of people who came was something about 103,434. Give or take a few. I remember things like that. Right. And last year it was 104,000, so maybe they're slipping already. Oh, and we were there last year. We were there last year, same time in station. And let's see, 161 countries were represented. There were 1,800 exhibitors, and they were really important. And we probably saw maybe 18 of them. We walked by hundreds of them. We walked by hundreds, thousands of them. Exactly. It's the kind of place where you need a compass. Actually, yes. You lose direction. You could use a scooter too, just to get around. And it's in three huge halls. South Hall, Central Hall, and the North Hall. Yeah. And they seem to be divided up, right? The locations of the different exhibits. Yeah. They didn't say that it was divided up. But you get the impression that the South Hall, which is like, I think the biggest one of all of them, was where the big capital was. The big, big companies, you know, the networks, the name brands you've heard of before. The Central Hall was maybe not that big. And then the North Hall, that was for the smaller companies, the startups. Anyway, there are a lot of Chinese companies there. There are a lot of companies from everywhere. You know, like France had a whole section. Germany had a whole section. Some of the South American countries had whole sections. Asia was very highly represented. Korea, Japan, of course, China. Yeah. And how did you like it? We didn't see this last year, but this year it was noticeable. You know how the Japanese, when they travel, they go in groups? Well, they were going in groups this time too. And a little flag. And everybody follows the guy. Everybody is translating for them. And they're not necessarily speaking English, but they're learning everything on the floor. Actually, most of those groups were Chinese, actually. Chinese, yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the big vendors. And one of them, who actually was in the Central Hall, was actually the biggest exhibitor there, was the Sony. Yeah, it's 20,000 square feet of space. 20,000 square feet of space. Imagine how much space that is. That's like the footprint of this whole building, just for one exhibitor. You can imagine how much money they spend. And by the way, decorating these exhibits is very expensive business. We know that from what happens here at the Convention Center in Hawaii. So to make 20,000 feet of exhibition space is a real project. And it was beautiful. Sony was beautifully walking there. And we were shown around by Tofer Shlund, whose office is right across the street in what we call it, Merchant Harbor Court, right across the street. And he shows us every year. He shows us around. He shows us what's Sony, which is one of the biggest names in the show, really. So where were some of the new pieces of equipment that you were so impressed with? Well, you walk in and there's this big screen, you know, the LED screen. It's probably, I don't know, 50, 75 feet wide, huge. And so, you know, and all these people were standing around just looking at the screen. That was the phenomenal thing about the Sony exhibit. So I said to him, you know, Tofer, how much one of those things cost? Maybe put it here in ThinkTech, right behind us. What do you say? He said, well, that's not big enough. Well, it cost you, you know, a million dollars, a million dollars for a television. Now, if you had, you know, no limits on your spending, that's probably what you would do. But there were others. They weren't the only one. So, you know, what you see is you see technology that is, you know, on the leadership edge by companies like Sony. And then you see companies all over the world trying to emulate that technology. So we found another screen by a company called Ledman, L-E-D-M-A-N. That's out of LED, right? And that was half a million dollars. But that was from which country? From China. Yeah. Doesn't take them long. We'll figure it out, yeah. So what other products did Sony have that you were impressed by? Oh, they had a switcher, such as we have TriCaster. About that big, what am I saying? About a foot wide with a four-camera switcher that was really just came out. I got them credit for that. They got all kinds of new wireless mics and sound equipment that will test your sound real-time. A lot of new cameras. A lot of new ideas. One of them was their cloud service, right? Yeah. And we're interested in that. You know, we archive on AWS, that's Amazon services, wireless, I guess, services. And they have a front-end for wireless services. It makes it a lot easier than Amazon does. And it's not expensive, at least what we would consider. So, you know, you can not only archive there, but you can use it as a temporary storage facility and bring down stuff you want to broadcast. This means this puts you in with the big boys to be able to do that. And so they're offering a product, I think, that's very useful for anybody in the broadcast community and for us included. And that's a new idea that just rolled out. And so that would be competitive with Amazon, and you think in the future we would consider? Well, it'll use this Amazon. It wraps around Amazon. But, you know, part of those 1800s exhibitors, and we saw some of these last year, are software companies. And the software companies are broadcast software. On the other hand, when you listen to a radio show, the radio host has got all these things lined up, from ads to new spots to music. It's all on the screen in front of him, and he can jump around. The same thing with video. And there's a lot of software vendors that do that and create software to allow you to broadcast effortlessly. I mean, the thing is there's so much innovation going on about this, that it's mind-boggling. Everybody's in on the act. They come from all sides. So it's not just the cameras and the, you know, drones, a lot of drones, really fancy camera drones. And all these cameras and booms and microphone electronic equipment, things I didn't understand at all. So what about Adobe? What did Adobe show you then? Adobe has its software, and it's, you know, it's competitive in the video space with Final Cut Pro. But Adobe is different in a sense that, you know, you have to subscribe. You have to pay every month. Adobe, rather, Final Cut, you just buy it. That's it. And what's interesting about the subscription is you keep on updating it. So every time you look, there's another, like, behind-the-scenes update of, say, Adobe Premiere, which seemed to me the more popular of the two products. And when they updated, they put in new stuff. So it's always getting better. And I had the joy of talking with not an engineer, not a salesman, but a programmer who programs on Adobe, on Adobe Audition. And he was telling me some of the new fantastic things. For example, one of the real problems in broadcasting is the clipping. When you've taken the sound too high to clips, you know, the waveform is sort of squashed up against the top, and it distorts the sound. Okay? Nobody, everybody knows. I mean, I remember reading something as a sound man does that. He's fired. That's the end of it. It's so bad to have clipping. Well, Adobe Audition now has software that will fix the clipping. How do you like that? Identify it. Save your job, yeah. Wow. Okay. So let's talk about Newtick. And Newtick is the distributor of our very important Tricaster. Yes. We have not one, but two Tricasters, a main and a backup. And it's very interesting to see how popular Tricaster is. You know, it was one of those choices we made a couple of years ago about we'd go this way, go that way, what brand you like. And we chose Tricaster, and I'm so happy we did that because, you know, if you look last year at the 2016 NAB show and 2017 NAB show, you see that Newtick is going great guns. They're all over the place, not only at their own exhibit space, but all over the, everybody's using Tricaster. They're becoming coin of the realm. They're becoming the standard. So we made the right choice on that. I'm so happy about it. We also had the opportunity to meet with Lisa and Kurt Wood, who are our resellers. And they come out here all the time. He's spent a lot of time in Hawaii. And they help us. They help us on operating the system. They help us on learning. And in fact, I'm out of certifying our people to do it best. And they're very friendly and helpful. And they introduced us to other experts, you know, in the Newtick family there who were answering our questions. The thing is, you know, you try to get somebody on technical support and maybe it's in writing. It doesn't happen so fast or it doesn't happen at all. But you're there at the NAB show. You got them. You grab them. You don't let go of them. And you make them answer all your questions. So that's worth the price of eggs right there. So did you have any new product? Did they have any new products that you liked? Well, they had a product they were trying to push to us, which is a product that goes on your cell phone. It's an app. And this app follows the live view kind of format so that you can go out with your cell phone and you can send video and audio back to a server and then you can use that as a shot on your tri-caster. Now this is live view though, not Newtick. Oh. Wait. Sorry. I'm talking about live view. Right. Live view has this product. Right. But it integrates with the tri-caster. So you use them together and you send the product back and it's an app that sends it back to a server and the server sends to your tri-caster. The result is you can have what, remember three or four people. Three or four cell phones attached to the one live view piece of equipment and that becomes then four different cameras on one piece of equipment and allowing the B-roll and interviewing the one person. Right. So for example, there's a march tomorrow, a march for peace. Okay. Big march. I think it's in Waikiki. And you know, if we wanted to cover it with this kind of technology, we'd send out three guys, unassuming, and the girls, unassuming people, covering it, one from this side of the parade, one from that side, one from this side and that side, and they'd all have their cell phones there. Everybody said, oh, they're just taking pictures. They must be a bunch of tourists. Not true. They are actual videographers and they're taking pictures that are being combined and coordinated for broadcast somewhere else. And if you remember, there were like half a dozen that we touched. There were dozens, actually, of shows all about how to do video, how to do movies on your iPhone. And there are movies that are coming out now. They're high-ranking movies. Exactly. Produced entirely on the iPhone. Broadcasting is going in the same direction. So if you ask me, and I hope you do ask me, what's one of the big trends happening that we noticed at the App Store? What are some of the big trends that we noticed at the App Store? It's the iPhone. The iPhone is a broadcast tool. The iPhone is a movie-making tool. Now, do you have an iPhone? No, I have a Samsung. I have an Android. But it's the same thing. I mean, it's the functionality. So you need a smartphone. A smartphone. Okay. And you can do amazing things. And now you can broadcast. And people are making books and lectures, and they're trying to spread the good word about exactly how you do that, what kind of accessories you need. It's all happening right now. And you go to the NAB show, Carol. That's what you find out. What's happening right now, where the industry is going. So actually, as a result of last year's visit to the NAB show, that we actually acquired our live-view piece of equipment. That's right. That's right. We went to the live-view, which is an Israeli company. It always displays in central. We care about that. And they showed it to us. And we came back. And ultimately, we got a grant from the Cook Foundation in order to actually get one. And we have one now. We use it at least twice a week for our Think Tech on the Street program. And it works well. And we told them that a couple of days ago, and they were just delighted to hear it. Great. And let's see. One last, Blackmagic. How about that? Well, Blackmagic, that's in South Hall. And it's just splendid. Huge exhibit. Huge exhibit. You walk in and it's like blows you away. It must be 20,000 feet also. They're like a football field of stuff. And we're talking about cameras. They make cameras, all kinds of cameras. They make switching equipment. They have software. They have little widget things that connect everything. I mean, it's like, it's the toy store from one end to the other. And the display as last year was just phenomenal. They're really a going somewhere company. Okay. And so before we go for a break, how about live-stream? I know we did stop at the live-stream. Yeah, live-stream is our subscription streaming service. So it's actually a proper name, live-stream, in addition to the... Yeah, one of the vendors said, why do they use that name? It's confusing because live-stream is like a verb or a noun. But it's also a company name and it's our company. And they help us stream. So right now, this program is going through our tricaster made by New Tech, right? And it's being broadcast through live-stream, which is serving it out to the world. What's interesting is you can catch it on thinktecawaii.com where it's broadcasting right now. But you can also catch it live on live-stream.com. Go eat the place. You can have a good time. Just go to the Think Tech channel on live-stream.com. Okay. So before we go to break, I want to say that we will be showing some slides from the NAB show in Las Vegas. And this is my guest, Jay Fidel, a media tech traveler. And I'm Caroline Lee. We'll be right back. Aloha. My name is John Wahee. And I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you. So I want to invite you in. I want to invite you in to talk story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Wahee. Come on in, join us, express your opinion, learn more about your state, and then do something about it. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Caroline Lee in our special show, Think Tech Talks. And we're talking about just being back from the 2017 NAB show. My guest is Jay Fidel. It's great fun, Carol. Yes. And we're going to show some great slides of what we saw in Las Vegas over three, four days. Okay, so Jay is with three gentlemen here. These are the live view guys. The guy in the middle is George Clappell. He's our representative there at Live View. There's two guys on the right. The third fellow is the guy that originally sold us on the idea of getting a live view, L-U-500. And the fellow to his right is another representative of the company. Both of those guys are Israeli. Guess why? Because it's an Israeli company. Right. Okay. And the next photo. Oh, you can always see her far away in the NAB show. That's Lisa Wood with the red hair. There was also another woman with red hair. And that's her husband, Kurt Wood. And the two of them are our, their company is called ComputerWise. They sold us the TriCaster and they stay in touch with us and they come to Hawaii regularly and we expect to see them this May and hopefully in October. Oh, we have a caller. Let's hear what our caller has to say. Hi, I have to have a question. With all of this new technology coming our way, how do you keep impacting Hawaii news and Hawaii programs? What do you think it will benefit? How will it benefit Hawaii residents? Okay, so thank you very much for that call. Did you hear the call, Jay? I did, but you'll have to interpret it for me. Yeah, I think the call just basically asked how can we benefit in Hawaii from all that you saw at the NAB show. And thank you, that's a good question. That's a really, it's a provocative question in the sense that we went there and we saw some panel discussions and the like of these young people who were trying to make a living in video, in editing video and in, you know, doing engineering on video all around the country and the world. And the one thing that struck me, well, two things. One is, you know, Hawaii could do this because now with broadband, you know, you can, you can emanate content anywhere and companies and all these professionals are emanating content from everywhere. We're not, we're not, except ThinkTech, as far as I know. Two is, you know, you can get a job and you can do editing and you can be part of the industry from anywhere in the world. And I'm sorry, we're not. So it's, and these are good jobs. They're high paying jobs on the mainland for the, you know, the big companies for the capital concentrations. Hawaii should become a center and we'll be happy to help anybody who wants to get into it. Should become a center of developing content on the web because it's the future very clear from NAB show. It's not only the NBC and the ABC and the CBS. It's people who are broadcasting on the internet just like us. And there's an industry emerging now and Hawaii should have a part of that. So this is a really good place to learn how it works. And if you're interested in learning how it works, you should go to the NAB show next year and it'll be in April, next year, again, in Las Vegas. In the meantime, you can go in June, you can go to Shanghai. Right. And in September, you can go to the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan at the southwest corner of Central Park. You can go to that NAB show there. So they have at least three shows a year all around the world. Yeah. So anyway, I hope that answers the question, but I feel that Hawaii should be more interested in this than it is. But I'll tell you one thing, we're interested. Right. So you're distinguishing between the content which we think that Hawaii produces a lot of and see the future here in Hawaii because we have so much, whether it's our location, our interests, our just natural curiosity about the world that we could develop content versus... We can stream it, too. We can stream it. We could have an engineering structure here. We may need better broadband, but Hawaiian telecom is supposed to be working on that. Faster broadband is a stream to the world. We could be a center of streaming high-quality content, Asia-Pacific content to the world here in Hawaii. But what part of that is going to have to be by acquiring more expensive equipment and technology, which right now is limitation in Hawaii. Yeah. Well, some capital-rich company, investors can set things up like that and they can buy the equipment. I'll be happy to show them what to buy. And they can make Hawaii into a broadcast center. Have you ever heard the book called Pacific by Simon Winchester out of the east-west center? And he talks about iconic things that have happened in the Pacific area that make it what it is today, in all areas. I mean, go all the way from climate change to nuclear bombs in the Bikini at all. And what's interesting is that Hawaii and the Pacific in general have so many different strains of history and politics and, I mean, of social change. It's all here. We could be the center. We could be the intellectual center of the Pacific Rim and also the world. We can generate content that would be interesting everywhere. You know that's true. I know you know. How long do you think that's going to take? Okay. Let's take another call. All right. All right. Well, tell us a little. Let's see. Do we have a few more slides, Ian? Okay. This is a picture of the tricaster TCI. Oh, that's their new machine. The TCI one, rather, just came out a month or two ago. It's the one that's better than anything they've put out before. It's their latest statement of the technology. What does 4K mean? Say it again. You see the 4K. Oh, 4K. Well, that's the 4K is the size of the number of pixels on the new protocols for the new video. We don't have 4K, but 4K is becoming popular on the mainland for television and for internet broadcast. 4K is the best that people can offer right now. Okay. And this is a slide of one of the sessions I attended on podcasts. Very, very interesting. And as our viewers know, we have a podcast station, I guess that's the right word. And I've been listening to it. We have a podcast account on iTunes and all our stuff, including this show, is going to be on iTunes. And that's definitely the wave of the future, too, if we're not using it. So let's talk about some of the sessions that we attended. Oh, yeah. Well, you went to the podcast one and I went to some comparable one and we were trying to get as much as we could. I went to a number of sessions about Adobe products and programming and editing video in various capacities, not only video but sound. And there were a lot of sessions on exactly how you structure the content, how you tell the story, how you put it all together. The last one we went to, which I really liked was the one on light. You know, we talk about sound, we talk about pictures, visuals, but the lighting is so critical. Eduardo Angel. He's so prolific, so smart. Somewhere from South America, I think. And shows you, the experts are from everywhere. They're not just from the U.S. He has written, he's on lynda.com. He's got his own page on B&A photo, B&H photo. Remarkable how much he knows. And what an open teacher is, you know, a natural teacher telling us about how you find innovation, how you find total creativity in using light. And the takeaway from that talk, which I remember today is don't worry about the equipment. And be innovative, be creative. There's nothing, there's no wrong here. There's no right. It's just what works in a circumstance. And that's the story of light. Exactly, so that an expensive piece of equipment may not be any better than an old light bulb with a screen, you know, a filter, a rag in front of it to diffuse the light, right? Yeah, and he does that. And he achieves amazing results. And not only that, but he's telling us about historically some of the great film producers of the page. Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane, what a... Oh, that was amazing, that discussion. It was. So if any of our viewers are curious about light, check out an old copy of the movie, Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, right? And the use of light and how he uses it to create incredible drama. You know, it's hard to explain without seeing it, but it's visually so impactful. And check out Eduardo Angel, Google him and you'll get a whole page of hits. He's really a very good guy and he's writing and thinking and sharing all about light and light is important. We could use some of his advice right here. Right. What about Skype? We have a short little... Can you say anything about Skype? Oh, yeah. Well, we learned a lot about Skype on this trip. We had multiple efforts to do Skype shows, not so easy, but we learned how to do it. We have a template now and our plan is to use Skype shows with the phone because there were many, many breakout sessions on using iPhones and androids in order to produce Skype shows. Right. So I think we learned a lot, we learned enough to do this on the fly. You could carry all you needed in one pocket a little that much. And you could create a show with quality, good video, good sound using this little pocket full of gear. And they were talking about what you needed in a little pocket, but we know now how to do that. We're going to do that. You'll see. Okay. And I'm going to give you a minute and a half to do your commentary that you wanted to do. I talked to my brother this morning. He told me he doesn't watch television anymore. I said, why? Why? You know, well, you know, it was the election and they lost confidence in the news media that gave Trump too much space because people were interested in Trump and they were pandering to that interest. And then they miscalled the election too. So the whole thing was really not the best moment to press and especially television has ever had. And a lot of people are really turned off on television. They're turned off on the quality of the news content that comes over. The New York Times is so much better if you care to read and turned off on the commercials, which seem to be growing because there's no regulation that says that you have to hold down the number of minutes that you are broadcasting these commercials about various drugs that you don't know anything about with all the warnings, you know. All the drugs ads come on and then the lawyer comes on and says, if you've been taking that drug, call me. It's really weird. The point is that television is turning into questionable news, okay, and then drug ads. And it's really impossible to watch. I mean, I have trouble watching this stuff too. And you say, well, we got great technology. We got great capital concentrations who do affect public opinion, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, all over the world, and then entertain people and engage them all over the world. There's televisions and your remote phone and they're everywhere. And people are, you know, like connected that way. Before you even get to social media, it's just television broadcasting at you. So my rant is that, you know, it's big money. All this is big money. You can see that at the NAB show. It's huge big money. These companies are making money hand over fist. And these careers are really doing great guns for the people who try to aspire to be executives and producers and engineers and editors and whatnot. But the reality is that the content needs work. There should be better content serving the American people, serving people everywhere. And my problem is I think that it's all in the technology. It's all in the production skills. It's all in the money and making a return on investment. But it's not in the content. And we ought to pay more attention to that. Are they listening? The guys who control the content, they're not belling up to what the people really need for a better life and a better world and a better country and a better democracy. It's not just an NAB show. It's the guys who do the content. It's the guys who do what I'm saying. So is that your take away then for the NAB? That's my rant and my take away. And it's a little more advanced than it was last year. Okay, right. So you want to help me say goodbye to our audience and wrap this up? Yeah. You know, Carol and I go to this show and it's magnetic. And we find there's a lot of white people there. We met several white people. We'd like to see more white people there. We think that Hawaii should be connected to what I suggested in that question. And that we should learn about this and do this and have our own broadcast system emanating from the state of Hawaii. We ought to look for the kind of content that I was talking about. And I think we can and should do that. We have the culture. We have the knowledge. We have the diversity. Let's give ourselves and elsewhere good content from Hawaii. All right. And on that note, we'll say aloha on behalf of Jay and Carol from the 2017 NAB show visit and we'll see you next time. Aloha.