It’s NAB Show and BEIT Conference (BEITC) time once again. This year is different, not that it makes that much difference. NAB Shows are usually scheduled to open the first weekend following Easter Sunday. Easter is late this year and the 2025 NAB Show exhibits will open two weeks before Easter. Saturday remains reserved for BEITC Sessions.

The 2025 NAB event runs for 7 days. Thursday and Friday are field workshops. BEITC begins on Saturday. This ‘Part 1’ article covers workshops and BEITC sessions before the show opens Sunday at 10am. Part 2 covers the BEITC sessions that occur during show hours, beginning Sunday.

Monday and Tuesday exhibits are open from 9am-6pm. Wednesday exhibits open at 9am and close at 2pm. Exhibits are open only 31 hours (1860 minutes) for people to visit more than 1555 exhibits. That leaves visitors that want to see it all about one minute per exhibit, not including walking, breaks, lunch, and seeing friends. How much can you learn in an exhibit in one minute?

It’s impossible for one visitor to see and absorb everything in every exhibit. Add to that more than 75 BEITC sessions stretching from Thursday 3 April thru Tuesday 8 April. The need to manage your valuable time in the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) is virtually impossible to ignore.

Secrets Of Success

The secret to a successful NAB Show visit is to avoid and ignore everything you are not there to see. The second secret is that the best days to visit exhibits are Tuesday and Wednesday, after the weekend visitors have gone home. They are the best days for personal attention and second visits to key NAB Show exhibits. The third secret is to pack plenty of business cards. It’s the world’s worst place to run out of cards.

Focus your valuable exhibit time on investigating the equipment solutions you have budgeted for this FY and the next. Everyone likes to kick tires, point cameras, twist knobs, and ooh and aah, but time during NAB Show hours is money.

Swapping Cards

NAB Show exhibits and BEITC sessions are the best opportunity in Las Vegas to make new business contacts. A good short-term goal of any NAB Show exhibit visit is to gather as many relevant business cards and meet as many contacts as possible. BEITC sessions are where some of the most valuable new technical information is revealed in ways only experienced TV engineers can understand.

The following is Part 1 of 2 of this Contributing Editor’s recommended BEITC Session list. Sessions are a valuable time investment for many TV station chief engineers and engineering managers who came to LVCC in search of the latest technical knowledge. Don’t waste time playing Las Vegas slot machines. You’ll lose.

Thursday 3 April

Two simultaneous field workshops will be held from 9am to 5pm. One is the “Virtual Reality Productions Workshop – Day 1.” Day 2 will be on Friday. The other is “Budget Powered Production for Audio.” Both are in the field and require a “Add-On Workshop Pass.” They both look great. Please plan ahead.

Friday, 4 April

Two outstanding SBE Ennes Workshops occur simultaneously on Friday from 9am to 5pm. “Media Over IP Essentials, Day 1” will be presented in room W224-225. “RF101 Bootcamp, Day 1” will be in room W219. Both require a “Add-On Workshop Pass.” If you’re at NAB to learn, one of these is where to start.

Saturday 5 April

Saturday is the only full day of BEITC sessions before NAB exhibits open. Sessions start at 10am with the BEITC Opening Session in W222-W223. Lynn Claudy SVP of Technology at NAB, Samina Husain, President IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, and Sam Matheny, EVP and CTO at NAB will present the session.

At 11:45am in W222-W223, the “BPS Project Update, Leader-Follower Deployment, and eLoran Demo” will be presented by Harvey Arnold SVP, Engineering at Sinclair Broadcast Group, Tariq Mondal, VP of Advanced Technology at NAB, and Charles Schue, CEO of UrsaNav, LLC. The session will focus on the positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solution known as Broadcast Positioning System (BPS).

At 12:15pm in the same rooms bill be a session on “Using BPS and eLORAN as PNT Survivability Solution on Loss of Space Resources.” It will be presented by Pat Diamond, principal of Diamond Consulting, William Shelton, Retired Commander, Air Force Space Command, and Scott Sotebeer, Co-Principal Investigator at the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute.

At 1:30pm in W220-W221, James Willis, NextGen Deployment Manager at One Media Technologies, and Osmar Bento, Sr. Solutions Architect in Media and Entertainment at Amazon Web Services will present the session “Beyond the Antenna: Cloud-Native Broadcasting with ATSC 3.0 – A Blueprint for the Future of Broadcast Operations.”

It will be followed in the same rooms by “Cloud Advantages and Problematics for NextGen TV,” presented by Richard LHERMITTE CTO and R&D Director at Enensys Technologies and Jor Seccia, Regional Director of RF Transmission at TelevisaUnivision. At 2:30 in the same rooms will be “Cloud-Native Architecture: Engineering the Next Generation Creative Studio,” presented by Samuel Reid, CEO at EngineLab and Marisabel Rodriguez, Global Services Manager at Google Cloud at Google.

At 3pm in W220-W221 will be a session on “Optimizing ATSC 3.0 Spectrum Utilization with Dynamic Resource Allocation and Management.” It will be presented by Nick Hottinger, Sr. Systems Engineer at ONE Media Technologies, and Joe Seccia, Regional Director of RF Transmission at TelevisaUnivision. The session will be followed in the same room by “Broadcast Using Cloud and Broadband Technologies: Deployment Challenges and Uses Cases,” presented by Richard LHERMITTE with ENENSYS Technologies and Osmar Bento with Amazon Web Services.

At 3:40pm in W220-W221 will be a “NEXTGEN Incident Response Communication System - Using ATSC 3.0” roundtable session featuring Timothy Bagnall, Principal Analyst at Mosaic ATM and Fred Engel, consultant to Device Solutions, moderated by Joe Seccia, with TelevisaUnivision.

At 4pm in W222-W223, Peter Siebert with the Broadcast Technology Society will present “Digital Broadcast to Handhelds: The Future That is Still to Come.”

Exhibits Open Sunday

Depending on the goals of your NAB Show visit, and how you manage your time in Las Vegas, you may want to spend more time in the exhibits once they open. It is possible to spend nearly all week attending BEITC sessions, at the expense of time in the exhibits. Part 2 of this BEITC 2025 story will cover TV sessions scheduled for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. 

The interactive calendar for the BEIT Conference Sessions is HERE.