I’m most excited about the market's transition towards IP production. To be able to build an end-to-end live production system using COTS equipment like network switches while still maintaining the performance and operational practices of today's SDI environments represents a revolutionary shift for the broadcast and production community. IP-based production systems are now a practical, flexible and cost-effective solution and so much progress has been made in this area over the last few years. At the Sony booth, we will have an IP Pavilion showing all of our offerings integrated with solutions built by our 3rd party partners. This will highlight practical implementations for an IP Live Production System using products that are available for purchase today.

NAB is always the show that predicts the future of the industry. I’m really looking forward to seeing not only Canon technology but also what’s being introduced all over the show floor.

As a leader in mobile power solutions, we always look forward to seeing the latest cameras. Every year the cameras get better, and our batteries have to meet the needs of the technology. We have a new product making its debut at NAB, which was specially designed to meet the needs of high power draw, digital cinema cameras like the new RED Weapon 8K camera, so it’ll be exciting to see what the camera manufacturers unveil. Also, as a product manager, I always look forward to meeting our customers, hearing the innovative ways they use our products and most importantly, hearing their feedback.

We are definitely most excited to see our customers – to have the opportunity to meet with them face-to-face, hear their stories, learn about their workflows and better understand their needs and how those needs are evolving, is really invaluable.

The ubiquitous access to fast broadband has provided the unintended consequence of enabling content piracy through illegal re-streaming. At this year’s NAB Show, I’m looking forward to seeing increased interest in protecting content, particularly for the latest industry standards such as 4K and High Dynamic Range (HDR). It will be particularly interesting to see how this has an effect with multiscreen content consumption being as commonplace as it is with the help of increasing digitization – from eScreeners through to premium content such as internationally acclaimed productions and sports up to 4K.

Anything related to video delivery and playback of Virtual Reality and HDR will be hot and certainly worth seeing.

The next generation of LTO-7 drives and libraries are now shipping. LTO-7 brings a massive increase in capacity per cartridge, which in turn delivers much improved storage capacity per dollar. We are excited to see the new products based on LTO-7.

ILM, Coffee and TV, Mainframe, CounterPunch Studios and Pixomondo Toronto, to name a few, are part of our great line up of customer presentations this year. Attendees will receive a behind-the-scenes look at some of the latest groundbreaking creative in films, TV series and commercials from studios around the world. We are also looking forward to showing off the latest and greatest versions of our software as some of our recent releases have been our best ever.

I’m always excited to see the latest camera gear — I'm the typical gear-head filmmaker who spends my earnings on the latest and greatest equipment. Having said that, I am also very excited to see where VR goes this year, from the latest VR headsets to VR experiences, which are surely going to be mind-blowing.

In recent years, IP-based content delivery has opened the floodgates for a wide variety of new players to enter the TV space. As such, operators are under huge pressure to keep their customers happy, and are increasingly looking to international markets to grow their subscriber base. Various Pay-OTT operators are making strong inroads into these markets, but these businesses are not yet completely monopolising consumer wallets. In reality, consumers are viewing content from various sources, with VOD/OTT usage often supplementing traditional viewing habits. Consumers are still very partial to the services that traditional operators can provide, such as FTA channels, live events and sports coverage and catch up services. At NAB, I’m looking forward to seeing the ways in which operators are building more engaging services, in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace.