A disruption in the desert: The Tagboard takeover at NAB

As you can see in the sizzle video off the top, we placed some aggressive bets at NAB 2023. With attendance back in the six figures, there were so many industry friends to see, and new friends to make as we headed to Vegas with six newly released products to showcase to the world.

*Record scratch and rewind*: If your crazy content demands kept you out of the loop, we dropped a series of new products earlier this month, including a first-of-its kind integration with Adobe Photoshop, data-driven graphics, and real-time production analytics powered by AWS. A total of six new products were released to remove inefficiencies from your workflows and overtake outdated processes.

With our new features in tow we embarked on a multi-day adventure at NAB Show 2023 to introduce the broadcast industry to the most efficient production workflow they’ve ever seen. We had so many activations scheduled around the clock, you could call us the Roy Kent of NAB – we’re here, we’re there, we were every-f***ing-where.

AWS Free Kick Challenge

Brett Goldstein (better known as Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) kicked off NAB 2023 with a keynote session, but the biggest soccer star in town was the “AWS Free Kick Challenge” happening everyday just inside the doors of the West Hall Lobby. Thousands of attendees stepped up and took 3 shots at goal, while cameras recorded and tracked data points for each kick. That data was then fed to Tagboard and added to a highlight clip where the player data was displayed on a graphic overlay.

When we talk about cloud production building efficiency for production teams, this is a great example. Within a matter of seconds someone could kick a soccer ball, and then walk away with a personal highlight overlaid with real-time graphics – all brought to you by cloud production. Another benefit? The producer running the Tagboard graphics? They weren’t even on-premise. They were posted up in an entirely different location, producing remotely. It’s impressive to watch once, but to see it done thousands of times over the course of NAB showed what’s possible when great partners with a shared vision lean on the power of cloud solutions backed by AWS.

Storyteller at Blue Wire Studios

With the AWS Free Kick Challenge in full swing, we activated in another location to bring to life an immersive experience you don’t find on the NAB show floor; it was a full #Storyteller takeover at Blue Wire Studios. The hall echoed with brilliant insights from top industry voices piping through the halls of The Wynn, and hotel guests stopped in their tracks in awe of the 20 foot long LED screen being fully powered by Tagboard Producer.

But this event wasn’t for hotel guests, it was a private event to celebrate our Tagboard partners and introduce them to our new product releases – in full Tagboard style. Not only were guests greeted with live demonstrations and provided the opportunity to test drive the most efficient new workflow in the industry, we also had our video podcast running all the new products in a live format. A single producer operating on a single laptop was running every screen at our event – every on-screen graphic, all the video playback in the 20-foot LED wall, for 6 live episodes.

Each episode was chock full of examples of our newest product features from uploading fully-layered graphics into Tagboard using Adobe Import, powering b-roll moments and show opens with our Video Overlay functionality, peppering in QR codes backed by production analytics, and then ending each show with a data-driven graphic to highlight various betting odds, NFL mock drafts, and player cards for the USWNT roster.

Our Storyteller guest list featured broadcast and Emmy-nominated leaders like Riot Games, FanDuel TV, NFL Media, FOX Sports/FOX Deportes, and a team getting ready to put on the biggest U.S. sporting event of 2024, the Super Bowl 58 Host Committee. We have a quick tease for you, but stay tuned for those episodes coming soon!

Tagboard tees it up at Topgolf

From there we headed to TopGolf Las Vegas to tee it up with more than 70 of our friends from the sports and media industry. With drivers in hand and buckets of cold beverages on deck we launched golf balls towards the strip and did our best to give everyone an opportunity to forget about the 24/7 content grind for a few seconds.

Create and innovate speaker sessions

This year marked the centennial of the NAB conference, and to celebrate they hosted several speaker sessions focused on industry innovation. Tagboard hosted two of those sessions – one with our partners at AWS describing the revenue-generating power of alt-streams, and the other with our partners at FOX Sports who showcased cloud production workflows on the global stage.

For all things alt-streams, Christine Chalk hosted a discussion with myself and Gregoire Rouyer, Broadcast Global Partner Lead at Amazon AWS. We dove into the next big thing in broadcast media, alternative livestreams, and discussed why more broadcasters need to be leaning into the alt-stream strategy. Catch the entire session here, and a quick clip below of why more broadcasts aren’t doing it, the benefits of why they should be, and how Tagboard can help them open the door to new revenue opportunities.

In the other session, Sky Muller was joined by John Marcus, Senior Manager of Technical Operations at FOX Sports, to share how FOX Sports Digital leaned on cloud production to power 153 live streams at the Men’s 2022 FIFA World Cup and captured a couple Emmy nominations along the way. Catch that entire session here, and a quick clip below to hear how the production team was split between two continents, and operating 60 hours of live content with a fraction of the resources you’d see on a linear broadcast.

That’s a wrap on NAB 2023

What an unbelievable year for Tagboard and all of our partners. If we missed out on catching up this year, let’s find some time. This new package we released is already creating unreal efficiencies for our partners, so reach out to me, to your account manager, or fill out the form below and let’s stop having today’s content demands held back by yesterday’s processes.

Til next year 🍻😉🎥