April is always fun. It’s NAB time. This year our focus was on integrating “live radio production” elements, a topic we aimed at radio engineers and radio producers. While there, we announced the Backbone Production Suite, made an appearance on NAB Show Live and attended other events, including the Public Radio Engineers Conference, the RAIN Conference, BEA and other extra-curricular activities.
We also met up with Jeff Adams and the team at the NAB Show Live where they interviewed me. Jeff did a great job asking questions about how Backbone’s broadcast tools operate, a bit about our history, and where we see the industry going. Here is the full NAB Show LIVE interview, which also includes Kurt Harnack from the Telos Alliance, who was interviewed after me.
A few days before NAB opened, Rich participated in the Public Radio Engineers conference to get some valuable feedback on the ideal Backbone product interfaces to make production easier, particularly with our “PBX in the cloud” concept. If you haven’t heard us use that term before, our PBX in the cloud refers to managing all the communications used in producing the broadcast (phones, remotes, co-hosts, guests) digitally, through software, without expensive hardware. So far, our PBX is the centerpiece of Backbone Talk, Backbone Co-Host and perhaps a few other configurations we haven’t talked about yet (more on that when we have completed testing and packaging). Together they point the way tomorrow’s radio stations will move and control phone and high-fidelity audio — without a lot of configuration by the radio production and engineering teams.
In our booth George had put together a great “talk radio show” demonstration with all of the show elements. People that came by were blown away by how easy it was to put together a full radio station, take phone calls and integrate remote studios. All together the Backbone Production Suite reduces overall production costs and makes it much easier to get your programming put together. A big win for our customers!