Happy 10th Birthday to NBA Tech Summit!
One of the highlights of NBA All-Star Weekend for techy geeks is the Tech Summit, held on the Friday morning prior to the game. Each year the event wrangles up NBA team owners like Mark Cuban, Jimmy Dolan alongside players like Steve Nash and Magic Johnson plus representatives from NBA sponsor partners like HP, Coca-Cola, and T-Mobile to discuss how technology is impacting the league. It’s all off the record so I can’t report on the specifics of what was said but a theme this year was how the league and its partners need to continue to serve content to fans no matter where they are.
I did get to catch up with Mike Mendenhall, chief marketing officer and SVP for HP, following his panel appearance where he mentioned a future where cloud computing plays a central role in media distribution. The cloud computing concept involves content being stored in a central location and then served out to whatever device the consumer is using. “We don’t think consumers are going to become one-device centric,” he explains. “They’ll want to use multiple devices and multiple platforms.”
Of course, many are doing that today, watching ESPN clips on cellphones, iPods, online, and, of course, on TV. So how can life become easier for consumers? “The transfer of content from device to device becomes cumbersome so when you think of cloud computing think of serving content smartly to a device that you use. The server is owned by the cable company or another enterprise provider and moves the content not from the cloud to the device.”
So who will win? Content producers, as consumption will climb because it’s easier for consumers to get engaged with the content. Another winner? Technology companies, like HP and Cisco (and others), who will help build out the bandwidth, switchers, routers, and capacaity to stream content to multiple devices.
