Q. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Digital Rapids provides innovative solutions, technology and expertise that enable broadcasters and other media organizations to bring their content to wider audiences more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably. Transforming tens of thousands of files daily and powering hundreds of live channels for the world’s leading media enterprises, our solutions help our customers maximize the value of their media content when pursuing new revenue opportunities or new ways to reach their audiences.
Empowering applications from revenue-expanding multiscreen distribution to post production and archive, our award-winning hardware and software solutions span the critical points in today’s sophisticated media operations, including ingest, encoding, transcoding, streaming, broadcast and workflow automation. Our solutions scale from standalone appliances to enterprise and global workflows, and we’ve designed them to maximize quality, productivity, flexibility and efficiency while enabling our customers to adapt quickly and easily in the rapidly evolving and fiercely competitive media landscape.
Our product lines for broadcasters and premium media organizations include StreamZ and StreamZHD studio ingest and encoding systems; the Digital Rapids Transcode Manager high-volume, automated transcoding software; the StreamZ Live family of live streaming and broadcast encoders; and the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager multi-encoder management software.
Q. What’s new that you will you exhibit at the NAB Show and that TV broadcasters should look for there?
Visitors to our booth will experience significant advances across all of our product lines, along with practical implementations of technologies we previewed late last year.
Digital Rapids Transcode Manager 2.0, the next generation of our automated, high-volume media file transcoding software, combines superior quality, intelligent automation, rich format support and outstanding performance for transcoding applications from production and archive to revenue-expanding multiscreen distribution. Built on our groundbreaking new Kayak technology platform, new features in version 2.0 include adaptive, logic-driven process automation with rich metadata support to reduce effort, errors and processing time; intuitive, visual workflow design tools; and dynamic scalability.
We’ll also be featuring our new, carrier-grade StreamZ Live Broadcast hybrid live encoder. StreamZ Live Broadcast combines the renowned multiscreen output versatility and quality of our StreamZ Live streaming encoders with robust features for the unique demands of broadcast, cable, telco and satellite television operations. StreamZ Live Broadcast features simultaneous H.264 or MPEG-2 encoding for “traditional” television applications and multiformat encoding — including adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming — for “any-screen” delivery to devices including mobile phones, tablets, PCs, IPTV, over-the-top (OTT) services and more — all in a single encoder.
We’ll also have some exciting new announcements at the show, but attendees will have to visit our booth to find out.
Q. How is your new product offering different from what’s available on the market?
We’re taking the rich experience and insight we’ve gained in more than a decade of helping our customers embrace the multiscreen opportunity — long before “multiscreen” was a buzzword — and leveraging that into our new solutions to solve their new challenges: scaling their operations while managing costs, improving the efficiency of their automated workflows, and more efficiently integrating their traditional television operations with their multiscreen initiatives. And of course, we’re building on the hallmarks that our customers trust us for — superior quality, productivity, versatility, cost-effectiveness, and the output flexibility afforded by our software-centric compression and packaging architecture.
Q. What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2012 NAB Show?
One of the most important trends stems from the intersection of business and technology, the need for media organizations to increase their operational efficiency in order to thrive in a multiscreen world. New viewing devices, cheaper network access and broader availability are driving consumer adoption of expanding media options at a staggering rate, leaving content and rights owners faced with the challenge of how to efficiently match the scale of this opportunity while controlling or reducing costs. Our new workflow technology platform and solutions are designed with exactly these factors in mind. Meanwhile, we’ll see tremendous interest in efforts to unify some of the disparate technologies and specifications underlying earlier multiscreen deployments — efforts such as the MPEG-DASH initiative.
Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
Our headquarters are in Markham, Ontario, just a few minutes North of Toronto, with additional offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Argentina and Australia. We’re continuing to grow, closing in on 100 employees. We celebrated our 10th anniversary last year, but our pedigree goes well beyond that, with key management and R&D personnel each having more than 20 years of experience in the broadcast, post-production or digital media domains — experience that we leverage into innovative yet practical solutions developed specifically for the demands of today’s diverse media environments.
