Photo: NextWaveDV

This week SiliconANGLE is attending and covering the developments from NAB this week, one of the largest professional gatherings in the production media industry. The event’s sheer scale means it encompasses a very broad spectrum of areas, and like every good tech-related conference, NAB also has its share of forecasts and long-term speculation.

It’s not like there is a shortage in topics to look into.  Traditional content streaming models have been completely blown away (both expressively and literally) by a shift driven by the web, in tandem with mobile trends, since 2007. And a good part of the industry insiders attending NAB are adapting to the market changes.

The Future of Broadcast Television panel addressed this by creating a broadcasting standard that will hopefully one day dictate the quality of video on end user devices. There are already talks of the next decade’s so-called Ultra HDTVs, featuring 16 times more pixels than today’s versions.

In 2012, the question that’s being pondered is how broadcasters will implement this new standard over time.

“To maintain any kind of relevance in a dynamic television market, terrestrial broadcast TV must have a migration path forward,” said Ben Keen, Screen Digest’s chief analyst and senior director, as he spoke at Tuesday morning’s “The Future of Broadcast Television” session.

NHK Japan is one company already working on a solution: a mix of broadcasting and broadband nicknamed Hybridcast.

In the shorter term, one very notable milestone we can already observe regarding the future of the media industry comes from none other than NAB’s organizers. This year an area dedicated to online video was added to the showroom, and all the spots were promptly sold out to the 20 companies that got hold of the space before everyone else.