RedShark's NAB Awards are free to enter — no pay-to-play, no catch. Now in their 12th year, we want to hear about your best products.
This year will be the 11th time we’ve run our annual RedShark NAB Awards (2020 was cancelled due to Covid). A lot has changed since we started in 2015 but one thing has stayed the same, we do not charge manufacturers to submit an entry or to be considered for an award. The reason behind this is the same as it was when Dave Shapton and I first thought of doing the awards, we just want the best products to win.
We know that “pay to play” has existed forever and we totally get why publications do that. But we have always wanted to try and be a little different here at RedShark and part of that is our position on awards. If you have a great product, tell us about it. We will do our best to come and see it and if we love it, we will award it one of our “Best in Show” awards.
So, if you are a founder, product manager, or PR professional, get in touch at editor@redsharknews.com with your pitch and we will get back to you. All NDAs respected.
Going back to why most publications charge, attending NAB costs money. A lot of money if you are travelling from Europe like we are and have a film crew to feed! The awards part is actually a pretty big undertaking; NAB is a *massive* show and seeing everything, even as a team, is obviously impossible.
So, we need some direction so help us out by telling us what you think is cool and we will do our best to see it. We are funded by advertising so if you *really* want to help us out, watch our NAB videos, like and share them. Thanks in advance!
I’ve just looked at the article announcing our winners back in 2015. We started it in Amsterdam at IBC, and we made life hard for ourselves! Rather than generic “Best in Show” award titles we tried to be clever and have specific award titles ranging from “Best Action Camera” to “Best Editing Product” with a bunch of niche stuff like “Best Documentary Camera” severely restricting the products we could provide awards to!
Some of the products are a throwback too, remember Forscene? Probably not, but boy were they innovating back then! Also great to see G-Technology as award winners, they had a genuine love and commitment to the industry and their team were super passionate about media and entertainment. Then they got swallowed up by WD and have slowly disappeared from the front row of the industry.
Some heavyweights won though, ARRI Alexa for best cinema camera and Adobe Premiere Pro for best editing product. This was around the time they started going after professionals and students, and a decade later and their market share has massively increased. Also there was Blackmagic with DaVinci Resolve 12 — not long after BMD acquired it you were already starting to see how much faster that product would develop.
That’s enough reminiscing… We expect to see a ton of AI products, so hit us up with your favourites. So far there's been a severe lack of camera releases this year (well documented by Andy here), but hopefully that changes at NAB. If it does we will be there!
As mentioned above make sure you give our YouTube, Facebook and Instagram a follow for regular updates from the show as it really does help. Here’s to another great NAB, see you there hopefully!