TVNewser NAB blogger Simon Marks wraps up the week:

If you'd asked me before I arrived in Las Vegas where this industry of ours is heading, I would have said "not much of a clue." Like most of us toiling in the on-camera trenches, I don't usually give much thought to how my boyish good looks get from my dateline into the living rooms of our "end users" - the viewers whose eyeballs we crave. For 20 years, I've just taken it for granted that they do.

But visit Las Vegas this week and you catch a glimpse of the future....or, to be more accurate, a glimpse of several futures some of which appear to be in direct contradiction to one another...


That's partly because of the dizzying array of technical wizardry on display here. Much of it is jaw-dropping. And the breadth of choices indicates that the manufacturers themselves don't know which of the myriad technical developments will eventually come out on top.

But there are some jugements that you can safely make.

Stand for 5 minutes and watch the folks at Apple or Avid demonstrate their latest editing software, and you realize that there is no limit on the ability of a 15 year-old with a laptop to create imagery and effects in moments that once took an entire post-production team days to complete.

Play with some of the new cameras unveiled here this week, like the Canon XL H1 (or its JVC or Sony equivalents) and you experience a seamless transition from Standard Definition to High Definition, from 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9. Sony's slogan here has been "HD for All", and at $ 5000 for a fully-stocked HDV kit, they're not kidding.

Visit the Inmarsat booth, and check out the BGAN satellite modems that are hopefully weeks away from winning full FCC approval, and you come to understand that the days of racing through the unfamiliar streets of a foreign capital to make a satellite feed may not be over, but are most assuredly numbered.

Watch any of the numerous displays of IPTV here, and it becomes clearer than ever that when our kids grow up, they'll be watching video news via broadband, wireless internet connections. The monthly cable bill will be as anachronistic to them as the old radio licence is to us today.

On Monday morning, when this conference opened, the new NAB chairman David Rehr assured delegates that the country's over-the-air networks have a bright and exciting future.

"Broadcasting still has the eardrums and eyeballs. It isn't even a contest with cable" he said, going on to declare the business models of satellite radio providers XM and Sirius "bankrupt."

With respect, a wander around this convention suggests that he may not be entirely right. Will our kids really see the same distinctions between "broadcast", "cable" and "satellite" that we draw? Or will they just be choosing from thousands of different providers pumping material into the ether through a variety of platforms, interacting with viewers and competing with one another purely on the basis of their content? How will the over-the-air networks retain a position of dominance when a new generation of consumers is coming of age that knows little of Murrow or Cronkite, Jennings or Rather, or the journalistic legacies they bestowed?

As I said, I don't profess to know the answers. But people in Vegas know quite a bit about crap shoots. Which is why we'll all be rolling the dice here again next year.