Ready or not, the conference industry is returning post-Covid

After being shut down for about two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the in-person conference industry appears to be coming back.
After a two-year absence, the National Association of Broadcasters held its NAB Show in Las Vegas April 23-27. The 2022 show attracted more than 900 exhibitors and 52,468 attendees. The NAB Show is the world’s largest annual convention for broadcasters and the broader media, entertainment, and technology industries.
The biennial MODEX manufacturing and supply chain conference drew 857 exhibitors and 37,047 visitors to Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center March 28-31. It was the largest MODEX show ever, with 20% more visitors than the last pre-pandemic show – MODEX 2018.
The MODEX show is sponsored by MHI, an international trade association that represents the material handling, logistics and supply chain industry. MODEX is held every other year, alternating each year with the ProMat trade show.
Many other U.S. conferences are scheduled for physical shows soon. They include the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston on May 10-11; the Sweets & Snacks Expo in Chicago from May 23-26, L.A TV Week in Los Angeles from June 6-8; the Automate conference in Detroit from June 6-9; and Sensors Converge in San Jose, Calif., from June 27-29. Those are just a few that I’ve been pinged about.
Some tech companies I follow are hesitant to go back to in-person shows just yet.
Apple is holding its annual Worldwide Developers Conference as an online event for the third straight year.
Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, will take place online May 11 and 12. Google I/O was canceled in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic and returned as an online event in 2021.
However, other tech companies are going forward with in-person events that also will be livestreamed for people who can’t or don’t want to travel to a physical show.
Dell is holding its Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas May 2-5. Intel has scheduled its Intel Vision conference for May 10-11 at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas.

Related reading:

After two years of Covid, live events are finally happening again (Tech-media-tainment; Feb. 13, 2022)

Photo: Officials cut a ceremonial ribbon to open the NAB 2022 trade show in Las Vegas. (NAB)

Watching the slow death of DVD

A little over 25 years after its introduction, the DVD is in its end-of-life-phase. The ease of on-demand video streaming has been pounding nails in DVD’s coffin for years. But the digital video disc and its high-definition successor, Blu-ray Disc, have been holding on.
However, the signs of its demise are easy to spot. From retailers shrinking shelf space for video discs to fewer movies being released on the physical format, you can almost see the obituary for the DVD being written.
Last year, revenue from physical video media fell 20% to $2.8 billion in the U.S. Meanwhile, revenue from digital video services rose 11% to $29.5 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association.
Physical sales have been on a slow, steady decline. In 2014, for instance, disc revenue totaled $10.3 billion in the U.S., the MPA said.
Netflix continues to run a DVD-by-mail service in the U.S., but it has been shrinking along with the overall physical media business.
In the first quarter, Netflix’s DVD revenue fell 20% year over year to $39.8 million.
While Netflix still has a better movie selection than any single subscription video-on-demand service, its catalog has been diminished as older films go out of print and new ones are never put on disc to begin with.
My Netflix DVD queue now has 47 discs in it. But my “saved” queue of movies not presently available on the service is up to 65 titles. Many of those may never be released or are permanently out of print.
My “saved” list would be even longer if I didn’t occasionally remove titles that got to see via HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, and other services.
And my “saved” queue only includes movies that Netflix has indexed on its website. There are dozens more movies I’ve searched for on the service but just aren’t listed. I keep a list of those movies in my “want-to-see” movies list at tracking service Reelgood.
Elsewhere, Redbox, operator of DVD-rental kiosks, says its business has been hurt by fewer new movies being released on disc. It blamed the lingering Covid pandemic for a smaller number of theatrical releases.
Redbox said it released just 57 new DVD rental titles in 2021, compared with 68 in 2020 and 140 movies in 2019.
Are the bells tolling for DVDs?

Photos: Netflix DVDs (top) and Redbox kiosk.