TV Tech: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trends at the 2025 NAB Show?
Sid Stanley: Media consumption is constantly shifting, and broadcasters face increasing competition for subscribers as well as reductions in advertising revenue. With on-demand and social content gaining more ground in the battle for viewers, broadcasters need ways to create more content with the same resources.
The days of fixed processing infrastructures are over, and broadcasters are building in robust connectivity and flexibility to allow them to scale up or down production resources and flex their requirements in more cost-effective ways. This allows them to not only cover more content, but more niche events and distributed production models that can quickly combine on-prem, on-edge and cloud resources with minimal or no additional investment. This will be a major theme at NAB.
Meanwhile, delivering control to all this new content is just as important, and Next Generation Audio (NGA) output configurations like personalization are already adding value for viewers. Having a range of distributed control interfaces that can be located anywhere, or tied into automation software to simplify workflows, will also be big news at the show. Distributed production has undoubtedly encouraged a spike in direct-to-consumer (DTC) and OTT content, but audio quality is still paramount and broadcasters still need to consider all the output configurations.
TVT: What will be your most important product news?
SS: Calrec is expanding the company’s product ecosystem across three new product ranges and is introducing a suite of new interconnected products and updates to help broadcasters meet a variety of challenges.
Connecting Calrec’s entire IP range to facilitate distributed production across multiple products, True Control 2.0 is a second-generation remote production technology that can control any system from anywhere. It provides access to more cores, more faders, more surfaces and more control from any location, and at NAB we’re adding Apollo+ and Artemis+ into the True Control 2.0 family. By expanding the number of products it works with, True Control 2.0 gives broadcasters unparalleled flexibility to scale as their production demands grow and shrink. It is compatible with Argo M, Calrec’s latest compact IP broadcast audio console with built-in DSP and I/O and GPIO, and users can add additional external DSP paths with ImPulse, ImPulse1 and ImPulseV.
Calrec is debuting an aux booster upgrade path to provide extra bussing on the ImPulse and ImPulse1 DSP cores, as well as on all three Argo consoles. We’re also packing in more functionality across the entire Argo platform with MIDI to support DAW control.
Calrec’s Type R mixing system is also upgraded, providing access to new features including off-air record, enhanced GPIO talkback, monitor selector follow, mix minus bus user labels and a large DSP pack with 32 aux buses.
Finally, Calrec is showing the ImPulseV cloud-based audio mixing solution, which delivers premium audio quality alongside Calrec’s full broadcast feature set.
TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?
SS: Connectivity is everything, and for the first time Calrec’s full range of IP-native products can seamlessly connect wherever they are, taking remote and distributed productions to new levels.
True Control 2.0 delivers expanded levels of control in two key areas. Firstly, it gives users far greater levels of remote control without the limitations of mirroring or parallel controlling, with control of an expanded feature set including EQ, dynamics, routing, direct outputs and delay. More fundamentally, it gives broadcasters and content providers the ability to scale their productions with workflow combinations that allow them to increase content output at the same time as reducing costs.
It also works seamlessly with Calrec’s ImpulseV cloud-based DSP software, which had its development preview at NAB Show in 2024, to provide a virtualized mixing engine in a cloud-native AWS environment. Accessed from anywhere in the world, it can be controlled through Calrec’s Assist web UI on a standard browser, or from any True Control 2.0 enabled console.
This new ecosystem and comprehensive suite of products empowers broadcasters to flex resources to meet the demands of large broadcast events with a mix of capex and economical opex models. It enables content providers to deliver a wider range of events which may not previously have been economically viable.
TVT: What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?
SS: We’ve attended the NAB show every year since the 1990s, and it has always given us an opportunity to reconnect with a wide range of partners, from end users, customers, operators, engineers, and network designers to system integrators and fellow manufacturers. For us this is fundamental; Calrec’s broad range of products aims to meet all our customers’ needs and NAB Show is the best international event to give us face-to-face access with everyone in the broadcast chain. The feedback we get from NAB is invaluable and it all feeds back directly into our extensive R&D teams. In fact, it’s why we always have product development teams on the floor at every show.
Our whole industry demographic is changing and what NAB does really well is showcase the evolving broadcast landscape. It does this by delivering a broad depth of content that we, as exhibitors, get immense value from; it enables us to keep across how to adapt our technology into these new environments.
