It’s been several years since I last attended IBC. Registering late, I found a hotel in Zandvoort, a town on the North Sea about 30 km west of Amsterdam and the RAI Convention Center, where I spent a few days with colleagues at the online publication Videonet.

A busy event for some 55,000 video pros, IBC is not nearly as crazed as CES, which draws more than three times as many people. But it’s still intense, especially for the trade journalists who cover it. John Moulding, editor of Videonet, does it well, including useful pre-event reporting, which has already begun appearing in my inbox.

The pre-IBC newsletters include links to summaries of show-related vendor news, Videonet industry reports (I wrote several of those back in the day), and a promising multi-networks solutions breakfast briefing sponsored by Verimatrix. I left my contributing editor role at Videonet in late 2012, but continue to rely on Moulding et al. for ongoing news and analysis.

Moulding recently interviewed the co-founders of V-Nova, creators of the Perseus video codec. In the second in this series of posted videos, he asks Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Eric Achtmann why V-Nova remained in stealth mode so long. Achtmann’s first answer – why make noise when you’ve already got paying customers? – had me nodding yes, yes. (That’s pretty much why I waited so long to launch my own web site.) His second answer made me think.

“As people know from product development, about half of the effort gets you 95 percent of the way to a final, industry-grade product,” Achtmann said. “The last 5 percent takes the other half of the effort. And a big mistake that people often make is to go out in the euphoria of the 95 percent, put something out into the market and then realize that they’re only half of the way there.”

Those stats may be dramatized, but they’re a useful reminder all the same: Don’t underestimate the large amount of time it takes to close the final delta in a highly demanding work order.

If I were headed to IBC, I’d try to visit with V-Nova and learn more about their massively parallel (“animal-like”) processing technology, and catch up with many other companies and acquaintances. I’ll miss Amsterdam, but thanks to Videonet, at least I won’t be missing everything.