In the 21 years since the inaugural NAB Show, the event has heralded many advances and an incredible transformation in digital broadcast technology. But according to Alan Hoff (pictured, left)), vice president of market solutions at Avid Technology Inc., it’s only very recently with the shift to cloud-based technology that one can truly say the entire process of media digitization and delivery is fully digital.

Hoff has been attending the show every year since 1996, and over that time he has witnessed the 21-year progression of the technology from start to finish.

“I’ve been watching it as that digital production value chain has evolved, and I’m cross-knocking-down one category after another. … It’s really culminating now with the journey to the cloud,” he said.

Hoff sat down with Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, to talk about the state of modern digital content creation and broadcast, as well as an overview of how Avid Technology fits into the marketplace. (Disclosure below.)

Although we may be seeing the digital completion of broadcast technology from beginning to end, the industry is still facing a number of challenges, Hoff stated. As bandwidth availability increases for the average consumer, there is a need to deliver a higher caliber content, faster, over a growing array of devices. Traditional business models are no longer able to keep up with the demand, and that is facilitating a new approach to the issues the industry is facing, he added.

“The challenges that the industry is facing at all levels is that they need to create more content at higher quality that is more standout in nature, and that is engaging in attention grabbing then than ever before,” said Hoff. “There’s so much more of it being created, and there’s so many more outlets in which it can be consumed. And it’s no longer on anybody’s schedule but the consumer’s schedule.”

The media central platform

Another big issue in digital content creation and delivery is the fact that there are different technologies and standards within the industry. This can cause various problems at basically any point in the process, so Avid Technology decided to create what it calls the “media central platform,” which is intended to standardize all of those issues and bring them all into one ecosystem.

“Avid saw this a few years ago, and we developed something that we call the media central platform,” Hoff explained. “The goal of that platform was to standardize all the disparate different technologies and bits and standards that were out there into one unified whole to make it easier for individual artists or creative teams, like at post houses or even the largest media enterprises out there, to get more efficient in the way they create their content and distribute their content.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the NAB Show. (*Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBE’s coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE