This is my 19th NAB. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of, or if I should have figured this thing out well enough to know better by now.

Whatever the case, April finds me back in the familiar haunts of the Las Vegas Convention Center, eager to see what the major players will bring to the table in these fast developing digital days, while hoping that I’ll come across some unique, inventive souls that are turning out technology that will rock our world, whether that innovation is coming from Australia, China, or Santa Cruz, Calif.

Actually that last stop along the way is a reference to CustomFlix, the innovative on-demand DVD publishing company that’s come up with a sharp method for film and video makers to sell their work via the Web. (CustomFlix clients keep their data files on the company’s servers; DVDs are printed out as orders come in, so there’s no need to sink cash into upfront stock.)

Last summer, Amazon bought CustomFlix. Many were wondering exactly what plans lay behind the move of the retailing giant into custom video publishing. I found out the first fruits of those plans today in a lively conversation I had in the NAB pressroom with representatives from both companies. Not to be too big a tease, but I’m sworn to secrecy until they make their scheduled announcement this Monday. So stay tuned for more on that development, which should give you some insight as to just how independent producers might benefit in today’s developing media environment.

Thomson became the first of the big manufacturers to move their press conference to Saturday; I attended their glam presentation at the tony Mandalay Bay hotel/casino this afternoon.

I say glam because until this year, the French multinational’s presentations had been rather muted affairs held in the cluttered confines of their show floor booth. Today’s press conference came across like some coming out party in comparison. Thomson is feeling confident.

That confidence comes from a number of developments, such as the recent acquisition of Canopus, which beefs up its post offerings while gaining it access to the Japanese company’s highly regarded codec developers.

The big news though was its presentation of the completed and shipping versions of the Grass Valley Infinity line of camcorders, recorders, and off-the-shelf removable media. Announced last fall, Infinity gear is being touted as “IT-immersed” for its embrace of open computer industry standards such as Gigabit Ethernet, JPEG2000, standard Flash RAM, Iomega REV hard drives, FireWire…the list goes on.

Thomson will be making a big push over the coming year to contrast this open systems approach to that of its main rivals, which it tweaked in a lively media presentation that plastered CG’d statements like “Why should I have to buy into two closed standards just to make video today?” on the large screen in the front of the darkened room as jaunty music played. Perhaps taking inspiration from Linux’s populist assault on industry leading computer companies like Microsoft, Thomson feels it has a winning issue here.

To further that push, Thomson announced a new marketing program—the Grass Valley Open Alliance Partner (OAP) initiative—which will promote partners such as HP who are supporting the Infinity series open approach. HP will certify GV’s off-the-shelf, removable REV PRO drives as an option to their workstations and reference the drives for its OEM partners.

Other OAP partnering companies announced at the event include Apple,

Avid, CineForm (realtime codecs), Telestream (encoding and delivery), MainConcept (codec development kits), and MOG Solutions (software for MXF development).

Another interesting announcement was pretty gearhead-oriented, but could prove significant in speeding the rollout of HD worldwide: the Grass Valley Advanced Compression Processor. The single chip is said to deliver realtime HD MPEG-4 encoding at high-quality levels while using bitrates that go as low as 4Mbps. The chip will turn up first in the ViBE MPEG-4 encoder, but works equally as well with SD and DV coding, decoding, and transcoding.

Getting quality HD at such low data rates means that IPTV, or Web TV as some like to call it, has a good chance of taking off quick like a bunny.

Stay tuned for Sunday’s blogs by the whole staff, as we wade into the traditional start of the show, delivering fresh a non-stop week of news and views from NAB 2006.