Q. What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2015 NAB Show?
A. The most important technology to be shown at the NAB Show will be tools to help broadcasters create and manage 4K content. I think almost everyone will need to address this in the very near future and the most successful companies will be those that make the process as easy as possible with compelling workflows.
Q. What will be your most important product news?
A. We will show a few very key tools to help broadcasters manage complex live broadcasts with limited resources. Our Viz Opus system will be shown for the first time in North America. Viz Opus combines control room automation, real-time graphics, a video server and audio board so that a broadcast can be run completely from a single system. It’s ideal for broadcasters who wish to launch secondary channels on a budget, but continue to retain a high-quality output, or nontraditional broadcasters such as websites that wish to start producing live broadcasts. Viz Opus also acts as a redundancy to traditional control rooms and control rooms using automation systems like Viz Mosart.
We will also show our 4K video management capabilities in Viz One, our media asset management (MAM) system. Viz One is fully 4K-ready so broadcasters can manage all of their 4K video content from ingest, to editing, to playout.
There is so much to talk about, but I want to point out one more item and that is the image-based tracking capabilities in Viz Arena. We’ve really removed the high cost of creating tied-to-field virtual graphics, something that could only be done by major networks in the past, and made it truly affordable for every broadcaster. Viz Arena enables broadcasters to apply tied-to-field graphics without the need of mechanical tracking heads, whether at the stadium or downstream in the studio using only a single satellite feed.
Q. How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?
A. It’s really about the end-to-end workflow. We have built these products so that they work fantastically as standalone systems, yet when you add in workflows for MOS, template-based graphics and MAM, you have a solution that does everything you could possibly need. We also build these systems so they can perform multiple functions, giving you a lot of value for the capabilities of the components. Take, for instance, Viz Engine. Here we have a tool that can function as a standalone video server for part of the day and then turn around and be a real-time graphics and video compositor for the rest of the day. It can send SDI content for on-air use and at the same time send out an IP stream on online use. Everything we do has the overall workflow in mind, as well as making sure that your content can be distributed to any output channel with highest possible quality.
Q. What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?
A. This is truly the biggest broadcast show in the world. We have the opportunity to meet with more media companies in four days than we could the rest of the year. It also allows us to really showcase what our software can do in fully realized configurations. You can’t do that with a little demo system in a flight kit. So when broadcasters come to see us at the NAB Show, they get the full view of what we can offer them.
