NAB was thousands of flowers blooming for digital media convergence, The South Hall of the Show floor was definitely the busiest area with MS/Apple/Adobe compared to 10 years ago, when the legacy broadcasters would horde the bulk of the show floor traffic.

HD solutions for post production have really improved, what was really impressive was seeing auto up scaling of lower-res clips, resolution and bitstream independent -- 960 x 720 5Mbps video upscale to 1080p at 125MBps. In addition, other solutions that focus on real-time downscaling to SD from HD/SDI (on one PCIe card), both have pervasive applications for live and on demand consumer benefits.

Apples Final Cut Studio deserves a close observation which is on Engadget:

Did Adobe and Microsoft duke it out?
There was a buzz on the show floor over the new Flash Media Player and VP6, although how many of us took up sidebar conversations at night regarding Silverlight, and Microsoft’s new VC-1 encoder SDK in contrast? will both coexist? who knows, although Microsoft seems to be expressing much humility for the competition, and really seems to have dug into features, and bolstered some cool scene descriptive capabilities that could be more retentive than Flash, even making a big splash with various NAB events and marketing campaigns, I was impressed how they extended the olive branch at NAB in general.

Adobe on the other hand is kind of the 6-pound guerrilla. VP6 has been the conduit to mass adoption of media from a codec perspective and everybody is riding that wave right now, the Flash market adoption, heterogeneous OS environment, and cost of ownership is something that cannot be ignored. Most pre and postproduction hardware and software encoders seemed to be boasting new support for Flash encoding and VP6.

Companies of specific interest for digital media production, live encoding, and automation efficiencies were KulaByte, Terrari, TVU, Rhozet, and ViewCast.

The Central Hall of NAB was also an energetic spot. With the convergence and focus towards the Internet for ad revenue, the hottest companies where definitely the Internet Content Delivery Networks (Akamai) and ASP's (ThePlatform, Whiteblox, Dayport, etc) Although production workflow for the broadcast operators, and social media publishers was definitely a sore spot that needs some attention, so in other words Mr. CDN and ASP, know your audience of publishers and listen to their feature request as it relates to automating the web links to the live and on demand videos, exporting TAC information into the web page from the Video Properties, adding watermark importing for video files, and supporting transparency for retention purposes. Furthermore, a sleeping technology needs to be considered for true broadband scalability:

P2P, and Grid Delivery:
In my opinion is the most disruptive technology in place to steam roll the adoption of broadband video delivery, what is the most pressing thought in my mind is not the cost, but the efficiency. P2P and Grid Delivery is the only way the pervasiveness of video can really match that of satellite delivery and is seems companies are getting used to that idea, Special plug to Grid Networks who in my opinion have the best business methodology for seeding delivery of instant broadband video, hopefully they have a Booth at NAB next year. I would like to highlight a few others as well including Verisign who could be a sleeping giant and would have a bit more momentum if we could have the service now. Additionally Akamai made a recent acquisition in this space, also look at TVU networks as an up in coming player, and get used to terms like "Walled Garden, Nested Cloud, and UPNP"

Mobile, and ME.
Verizon seems to be doing some exciting things to entice consumers with subscription audio and video, although the focus of the delivery sell more premium services with their unlimited data plan, the quality and quantity of the content needs some rounding out. Although it could be cool as more content becomes available, there is definitely room for growth. Qualcomm on the other hand reminds me of a legacy cable provider taking the "if it isn't broke don't fix it" approach to making video pervasive on the phone, the problem is they are forgetting that access to information, and providing the medium with the message is what makes IP media to mobile devices retentive.

What happened to Audio?
Mobile Video is a nice migration, but what happened to Internet Audio, not subscription audio; I mean live radio and Podcast. Aren't we missing focus within our collective industry on what has gotten us here? Further more doesn't' audio work better for narrow band delivery. One company got my attention, and did not even have a booth at on show floor, there called Liquid Air Lab, they provide a free publishing platform for the audio leveraging the Ogg/Vorbis high fidelity, low bandwidth codec I would call them the "MySpace" of live audio and audio Podcast with over 350 live radio stations, and 1000 Podcast it definitely caught my attention because their model is to impact their bottom line with ad revenue sharing, and premium services.

The Microsoft Party – was the best place to network with the industry counterparts and technology companies.

The Adobe Party – seemed to have broad focus on customers using the technology, and was the best place to meet prospects, publishers, and end users within the digital media industry.

The Akamai Party – Was a collective mix of customer prospects, content publishers, technology companies, and industry counterparts. I could have missed the Adobe and Microsoft party and probably have not lost a beat by going to the Akamai party alone, the only problem is that the band was loud, and I lost my voice (still recovering) talking to people.

There were probably more parties to attend, but these were the ones that I believe were impactful for our industry, what do you think? Streaming Media East is coming up soon, and would invite you to start a dialog here to give us all something to think about until SME 2007.