Pounding the beat at IBC: How I clocked up 12km on day 1 of this huge broadcasting industry event

In case you missed the memo, The Next Web is out in force at IBC this year, thanks to a partnership with LiveU that’s seeing us live-stream a series of interviews with some of the key movers and shakers from the broadcasting fraternity. You can monitor all our coverage here.

Just to recap, the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) is an annual trade show for broadcasters, content creators/providers, and just about any body involved in the audio-visual industry.

When it first kicked off way back in 1967 – held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London – IBC had a mere 32 exhibitors and 500 conference delegates. With broadcasting becoming more of an ‘industry’ in the 45 intervening years, IBC has been getting increasingly bigger too. In 2011 – at the Amsterdam RAI, its home since 1992 – the event drew in more than 50,000 attendees from 160 countries, with in excess of 1,300 companies displaying their wares.

And what do more people mean? Bigger spaces to accommodate them, of course. With that in mind, when we were out and about yesterday, pounding the beat of this truly colossal event (there is even an IBC Pub, I kid you not) it soon became apparent how big the event actually is – it could do with a miniature railway to traverse the space. And I’m only half-joking.

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While I made no conscious effort to monitor how much walking I personally did, the consequence of wearing a Nike+ Fuelband is that I inadvertently did just that – and it was surprising, to say the least. Following day one of the main exhibition, I clocked up 7.4 miles -which is pretty much 12 kilometers:

Compare that to the normal figures notched up by a sedentary work-at-home blogger, well, this helps to demonstrate how big the event is – here’s a random day’s numbers from last week:

This isn’t designed as a navel-gazing exercise – the miles clocked genuinely surprised us, and really hits home how big this industry is now.

To walk through all 14 halls at the conference (without actually traversing every single aisle) took 40 minutes – and we’ve pulled this little video together to give you an idea of the scale. I decided to make my way to the TNW/LiveU studio via every other hall so I could scope out interesting companies to speak with later in the event. Here’s those 40 minutes, condensed into just 120 seconds….