It’s that time of year when you lift the phone and long for it to be someone telling you that they have been appointed by a spurious government department to offer loft installation at discounted rates. Or that one when you are informed that your Windows computer has been infected by a mysterious virus, which only your credit card details can fix.
Instead it is a collection of calls asking if I am going to IBC. For entertainment value I’ve taken to responding ‘No’, which while mildly entertaining, for me anyway, has done little to stem the flow.
This time next week we’ll be well into Day Two – yes, contrary to popular belief the premier broadcast event actually begins on a Thursday – for many there is a feeling it started in March.
To be honest the timing could be better, while I’m in Amsterdam one of IBC’s ‘partners’, the Royal Television Society, is running its bi-annual RTS Cambridge event, making me miss the opportunity to show Liberty Global’s Mike Fries the pub where they invented DNA.
As always the majority of my time will be spent moving between Hall 1 and the conference. In between there will be occasional visits to the Connected World – an area of the Amsterdam RAI that looks a little bit like the set for the Great British Bake-off, just without the windows.
The key phrases this year will be 4K or Ultra HD, HEVC and multiscreen. The trick will be to see who has thrown them into the company statements as opposed to having something genuinely innovative.
The other trick will be spotting what isn’t there; last year for example all of the demos that suggested putting Facebook onto the family screen had vanished – presumably on the discovery that executives’ teenage children weren’t so keen on the idea – to be replaced by the use of Facebook data to link everybody together.
3D discussions will I suspect be at the back of everybody’s minds.
But what are the products that will be the next 3D, the star to rise in the East, before setting faster than you can say Nicam Digital Stereo?
We find out 12 months from now.
