Steve Ahern walks through the 2025 #NABShow to discover some of the equipment and programming trends at this year’s exhibition in Las Vegas.
Some of the trends I’ve found here while walking around NAB 2025 are:
- Cloud storage and cloud workflows are coming of age, there are more reliable high level services being offered from cloud providers and they are more secure. AI suppliers are paying attention to security and are building AI inside their tools and locking it to the client on-prem or in secure cloud services.
- Equipment is moving more off-premises into the cloud, supported by cloud SaaS.
- RCS has revealed a better ZETTA. They’ve had cloud services for a while with the Zetta Cloud and Selector Cloud products, but these were initially developed as emergency backups. Now RCS has perfected them to the point where, now they’ve expanded all your playout and integrated functions to a browser based product in the cloud. It even works in unstable internet connectivity environments.
- Prominence in cars is just as important an issue here in America as it is in Australia and Europe.
- Audience measurement – a very interesting trend. Radio ratings are shifting from 5 minute measurement chunks to shorter measurement – 3 minutes. This is in recognition that advertisers believe that online social and search services are more up to date because they can see minute by minute data. Never mind that this so called minute by minute data may create a false impression, it is still a negative perception for radio, so the industry is moving to fix that perception.
- Voice cloning is coming of age and also, particularly in this market, people are thinking about the ownership of your voice and your image. Rights management for music in film has been a thing for a long time, but now it’s coming to radio and podcasting and the AI tools in some of the recording equipment are being set up to help us automate rights management via AI recognition of who was speaking and whose image is in the shot on air and in social media.
- The cost of imported transmission and studio equipment imported to America may rise, but locally manufactured equipment will stray stable, resulting in the benefits that President Trump is promising… more purchasing of American made equipment.
- Apple has got ahead of the tariff war by moving some of its iPhone manufacturing from China to India to avoid the huge tariffs that have been imposed as part of the tariff war between the two countries.
- Transmission companies are offering maintenance and monitoring contracts when you buy the equipment as a direct response to having less broadcast technicians available with broadcasting expertise because a lot of people in the technical area of radio stations now come from the IT side. It is a very interesting solution to the problem of less trained broadcast technicians and a new service support product for transmitter manufacturers.
- Also in transmitter developments is the idea of plug-and-play transmitters where everything is in the transmitter housing, including the exciters, encoders, compressors. This is now possible when the transmission process is all IP based so can all be integrated into one computer and control centre. Content comes via internet not STLs (backups still needed) and once it arrives at the TX site clients just plug in the blue cable and turn on the transmitter.
The media industry expects that President Trump’s tariffs are going to affect sales in areas like cars and retail, because prices may go up and cheaper products may not come into the country because they’ll have to pay higher tariffs. The businesses that sell those products may not have as much money to spend on advertising. Fears of a recession are also increasing in America at the moment, which some analysts have predicted will mean consumers may cut back on subscription services such as music streaming and video services as they tighten their belts. This may lead them back to ad-supported entertainment media such as free to air radio and television.
Something I’ve been raving on about for years is the inconsistency of levels and monitoring over streaming. All outputs should be the same level and have similar processing. AM broadcast, DAB broadcast, the stream to your app, the stream to your website should sound the same, especially when cars and phones can dynamically switch between sources… and yet they’re often not. Companies are now introducing monitoring across all their streams and that allows broadcast Ops Centres to integrate program fail alarms and more active stream monitoring with their broadcast monitoring system.
Another trend talked about here is that radio people are under-selling themselves. In radio we know digital, we’re dealing in digital on the digital platforms and yet advertisers, agencies and people who talk about radio forget that we’re digital. Radio people themselves don’t champion that point enough either.
AI now will allow online advertisers to make multiple versions of ads tailored to very specific audiences. Radio creatives should be making more versions of radio ads. It’s something radio used to do and we’ve forgotten it, but AI is bring it back in focus. It’s one of the strengths of radio that can help radio take on this social media advertising trend.
In a divided world, local radio is very strong here in America. Local stations are retaining their audiences and advertisers. Local radio owners have told me that is because they’re very anchored in the community. There’s political division in this country and in the world at the moment, but when people are sick of listening to the big competitive aggressive networks taking one side or the other, they return to their local radio stations to ground them in their local communities or to music stations to bring them entertainment and help them escape from the polarisation.