The 2009 NAB Show was held between April 18th and 23rd with registration down 20% to just over 80,000 attendees. The exhibitors included established names such as Adobe, Canon, JVC, Microsoft, SAT-GE, Tektronix, 3M, Altera, Cisco, Verizon and Xilinx and promising names like Qualstar, Bogen Imaging, Dayport, LEN, Trilithic and YellowBrix. Cheers and Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer received the inaugural Television Chairman’s Award.
Bannister Lake had made a decision to find another platform for developing broadcast graphics applications and used NAB 2009 as our place for discovery. Up until then, we had settled on Inscriber and the RTX api but we had concerns about using only one platform. Our focus was to find the next dev platform for our broadcast applications. There were several candidates and we did our homework prior to the show. Francis, D’Arcy and I met with all the potential partners. Some looked promising, others not so much. On the Wednesday of the show, Francis and D’Arcy stumbled on a product that wasn’t on our radar prior to the show. It was a recent acquisition by Ross Video. The company was Media Refinery and the product was XPression.
With the show nearing its close on Thursday, Francis and D’Arcy dragged me into the Ross booth and an acquaintance from our Inscriber days, Hans Bijlsma, gave us a demo of XPression. The first thing that impressed me was how quickly it installed. No reboot! I didn’t get a full appreciation of the api yet but XPression looked like it could do everything we needed graphically. I remember closing the 2009 NAB show sipping champagne in the Ross booth. Francis and I had found our new platform.
Over the coming years, we developed ticker, branding, scorebug, elections and other custom solutions using XPression. We even developed a ticker and branding solution which Ross Video started OEMing in 2013 and is still having success today. A lot has changed over the years in how we use XPression but it continues to be a successful development platform for Bannister Lake.