In a story first broken by TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope, Andrew Cross, who joined Grass Valley earlier this year as CEO, has stepped down from the role, but will remain working with the company as an advisor. 

Cross took the decision to step down following a restructure of the company due to market conditions, CMO Neil Maycock tells TVBEurope.

“When we worked on strategy with Andrew as a management team, and when we looked at the requirements for the immediate term, Andrew didn’t really feel he was the right person to lead the company through that phase of transformation,” says Maycock. “If you know Andrew, he’s very much a technologist and visionary. He felt he was the right guy to set a forward agenda around technology exploitation, but right now we’ve got some pressing operational issues that we need to look at, and Andrew felt that wasn’t him.”

Louis Hernandez Jr, CEO of parent company Black Dragon Capital, has taken over as interim CEO, leading the company for the second time in 12 months following Tim Shoulders’ departure last November. 

The search for a new CEO is likely to begin in early 2023, says Maycock. “Louis has done a transformation like this with Avid, and they came through that with a very healthy business,” he states. “So he’s got some experience of doing what we’re doing right now. Once we get through this phase, then he will be looking to fulfil that CEO position.”

Grass Valley has been “hit particularly hard” by issues around the supply chain, explains Maycock. “We’ve done exceptionally well this year with orders, we’re hitting our orders aspirations for the first time in a long time,” he adds.

“The frustrating thing is that the supply chain is hitting us really hard and we are behind on revenue because we can’t source the components we need to make products and ship the orders that we’ve got, which is a really bizarre situation to be in. That puts an undue strain on the business. Obviously, if you’ve got less revenue than you expected, it impacts cash. In the past where we would give a supplier a forecast of what we needed over the next 12 months, now if components are available, you have to buy 12 months upfront. There are other components you can’t even get for 12 months. So it’s a completely changed landscape.

“Our inventory has gone up, and yet we still don’t have all the parts that we need to supply the demand we have for orders in a timely manner. We will fulfil those orders, but it’s taking time,” he adds.

Maycock continues that these issues have put pressure on the business which has led to an acceleration in its strategy around its media processing platform, AMPP. “That strategy involves a level of restructuring of our cost base, which will help with the supply chain issues, and that’s what we’re executing against,” he explains.

Prior to Cross’s decision to step down, CTO Sydney Lovely also left the company. He has been replaced by Marek Kielczewski, who comes from a “very strong software background”. “As we do more with AMPP we wanted to improve our software disciplines and productivity and quality. So Marek came in with that agenda”, states Maycock.

That wind of change is blowing through the media industry, and also through Grass Valley. All of the company’s playout, asset management and live production workflow components now operate through AMPP. But Maycock stresses that Grass Valley will continue to produce hardware where it is needed. “What has become clear from engaging with the market is that people aren’t looking for an either/or situation,” he says. “We think hybrid is going to be the case for a long time. So really, our strategy is about having this hybrid portfolio that allows you to use AMPP where it makes sense and then use hardware where that makes sense.”

 MONTREAL—Grass Valley today announced that former Vizrt executive Dr. Andrew Cross has been named Chief Executive Officer of the company effective immediately. Cross was most recently President of Global R&D for Vizrt Group where he oversaw product development across all three brands (Vizrt, NewTek, and NDI). Previously, he was CEO of NewTek until it was acquired by Vizrt Group in 2019.

As CEO of Grass Valley, Cross "will lead the company through the next phase to power the digital transformation of its customers and support them as they transition to the future of media and entertainment through IP, software, and cloud-based technologies," the company said.

Cross's appointment comes amid some recent turbulence at Grass Valley as it went through several executive shakeups and a major rebrand after its acquisition by Black Dragon Capital in 2020. 

Last fall, CEO and president Tim Shoulders and Marco Lopez, GM of live production left, and Black Dragon Capital CEO Louis Hernandez Jr. (former CEO of Avid) was tapped to lead Grass Valley as executive chairman. A month prior to that, former Avid executive Jan Lange was appointed CFO and earlier in the year, the company announced a round of layoffs as it transitioned its global headquarters to Canada. 

In October, Grass Valley rebranded itself, launching a new corporate identity and marketing campaign, with a new motto, “We Love Live.”  

Last month Grass announced  24% growth in 2021 compared to 2020, spurred on, in part, by the media industry's rapid transition to the cloud in light of the increased demand for remote production brought on by the global pandemic.

Cross has had a distinguished career in the M&E tech industry, having revived the NewTek brand during the past two decades by developing the industry's first real-time integrated live production systems. He also led the development of its NDI video over IP and tansport-based codec, which has become the largest IP video standard for live video production, in use by thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of users, according to Grass Valley. 

“Andrew is an experienced senior leader with deep industry knowledge and a track record of successfully taking media technology businesses into the new era of software-centric, cloud-based video technology,” Hernandez said. “I’m excited to have Andrew join at this transformative time for the company and industry. I look forward to his direction and leadership of Grass Valley alongside the excellent executive leadership team already in place.”

Cross will lead the Grass Valley team as it emphasizes it GV Media Universe (GVMU), which the company describes as "a digitally connected community that enables media companies to combine on-premise, hybrid and public cloud technologies to build live production environments while adapting to future demands."

“I am honored to be joining Grass Valley at such an exciting time. Our mission is to be the leader in the transition towards software-based technologies—both on-prem and as media companies move into the cloud.” says Andrew Cross, CEO, Grass Valley. “My personal drive has always been to use technology to innovate within the video industry, allowing more people to produce more video; there is no better time for me than this next step to join the most influential and respected company in the industry.”

BERGEN, NORWAY & SAN ANTONIO—Prior to NAB we saw press notices concerning endless numbers of synergetic ‘partnerships’ between connectable vendors, then came a shock wave as Vizrt announced it had acquired NewTek in a deal minus any traces of weakness.

Both vendors were in rude R&D, technical and marketing health, with strong user bases across multiple industries, and they cited a common vision, complementary technologies and very little product duplication as three of the deal lockers.

To get behind what happened, Michael Hallén, the current president and CEO of Vizrt, who leads the new enlarged business, and Dr. Andrew Cross, president & CTO of NewTek, who assumes the role as president of R&D in the new company, talked to TV Technology sister publication, TVBEurope.

Thinking about all those Las Vegas wedding chapels and getting hitched, when did Vizrt and NewTek start dating?

“We knew each other well long before my time, and I have been heading Vizrt for nearly three years. The early dating started ahead of that,” laughs Hallén.

“I’ve lost track of how long we have been close partners and friends, but it has got to be more like four of five years. It goes back longer than most people realize,” adds Cross.

“What I have been attracted to, and we talked a lot about it when we briefed our internal people, is that our views of where the industry is going are very similar, and have always been so. We both believe in the IP transition and that software takes over the world, but we come from complementary angles. We are on the same path to the future,” continues Hallén.

Cross takes the shared view of IP and IT, computers, networks and pushing a new future for video creation further: “You can look at any market, even outside the video sector, and you can identify the long-term trends in technology. In our space there are a lot of traditional vendors that have grown up where the market was 50 years ago, and it is clearly changing in a significant way now.”

BRILLIANT MINDS

Building a significant presence in the market is what both companies bring to the party. And planet broadcast’s emergence from the strangulation of hundreds of unique standards and years of proprietary strife to become just another industry using the same technologies represents something of a goldmine to Hallén and Cross.

“When IP took off we both jumped in, so our position is that we are already there. Where a lot of the market sees this as change, these are principles to which we have dedicated our entire strategy individually for 10 years at this point,” says Cross.

Hallén concedes that in some respects the market is catching up. He explains: “At the inception of Vizrt 20 years ago, we focused on developing our software as hardware agnostic, which was not the norm then. As a software company with software architecture you are basically IP by definition.

“What we have been doing all these years is to back port our IP infrastructure to SDI to comply with the appropriate protocols. Now the market is catching up with us we can let that go,” he adds. “When we compile the brilliant minds of both sides, we are creating something that can make significant change. That is what the aim is for this combination.”

Does it pay to have a sophisticated Opex mindset for customers of everything Vizrt can now supply in the area of software-based content production? Subscription for software tools has grown rapidly.

“It has, but as vendors supporting users across the world in different industries and at different types of sites we have had to cater for both models. We have at Tier One level a significant number of huge companies that are not interested at all in going to Opex,” concedes Hallén.

Cross adds: “In the technology world, ‘subscription’ is a buzzword of the moment, but I still see a significant number of customers who do not want to go to Opex yet. It depends very much on business models, and it has not all gone subscription by a long shot.”

Proprietary things will be gone. At NAB Vizrt stated that it is now the biggest player in IT/IP based video production. Is this based on combined market shares, or maybe the expanse of what it now offers in terms of toolsets over wider areas?

“You answered the question,” laughs Cross. “We are probably the one single vendor that has committed to a truly IT-based set of content creation tools, from kids in a classroom doing video production right the way up to national elections or the Super Bowl. It is both breadth of market, and the number of product offerings.”

One of the key attractions of NewTek was its awesome presence in the North American market. Vizrt already had 30 offices across the world, and 500 employees. Cross suggested at NAB that the combined company is one of the “most disruptive changes for the video industry in decades” and Richter scale in its potency. Was he for real?

“I should define ‘disruption.’ Ten years from now the video industry is clearly going to be different, and I believe it is going to happen in the same way as the mobile phone market changed over 15 years to its computer-based iPhone/Android infrastructure,” he says. “People will say ‘wow’ because the days of proprietary things will be gone, and we will be looking at a world dominated by computer networks and IT technologies.

“When people look back at the big things along the way, I think our deal will be one of them, because it is the first time a big player in this market has said, ‘we need to build the next generation content creation company,” Cross added. “This will be one of the key steps along the way that were signposts for where the industry is going. And that is why I see this as disruptive.”

ADDING IP CAPABILITY

The responses from the respective user bases were a key factor during the NAB Show.

“The user reaction surprised me,” admits Hallén. “Obviously we realized this was a good piece of news, but when I spoke to the Tier One user base they were extremely supportive. A lot of them had already piloted or worked a little bit with NewTek products. A great number of them saw it in the way Andrew (just) described about 10 years time, and they said that in that context it is a clever move.

“In terms of craft thinking both our booths were extraordinary, and the user base sees that we are adding much more IP capability,” he added. “They are enthused about what is going to come out of this combination.”

Cross was also surprised: “The reaction exceeded what I could have possibly hoped for. I thought it might require more explaining than it did.”

The dream of software-based video production has been bubbling up as the industry goal for some years, with lenses and camera bodies being almost the last hardware. Many vendors have had to spend millions of dollars re-inventing themselves through software and the cloud, so is it true that Vizrt’s biggest competition comes from newer software houses and recent start-ups, and companies entering the broadcast market from other industries?

“That is a valid point,” Hallén admitted. “As we move forward into an industry that is moving over to IP, very naturally the competition will come from elsewhere. It will not come from the traditional hardware-centric broadcast companies that are trying to re-invent themselves by adding more software, because I think that they are in for quite a struggle. Potential threats will come from elsewhere.”

The holistic aspects of the full workflow that Vizrt gives its customer base are key. “That gives us a head start, and it is up to us as a combination to be more innovative and to embrace new technology as it comes around,” says Hallén. “We have been successful doing that in recent times and I do think we will co-operate with new and completely different players.”

A GOOD MERGING OF WORKFLOWS

Cross agrees with Hallén, adding: “The broadcast market, which now includes lots of things, is a weird thing because there are workflows that matter. People do expect to work in a set way to produce a show, and the way that shows and the formats of shows exist is something that has evolved over 50 or 60 years from film.

“So whilst a lot of the technologies that have been created have been changed, a lot of the basic formats of shows have not,” he adds. “While the way you need to work in production has not changed, we want to give people better tools to make more people able to give that message. To some degree, what this industry needs is both a good merging of workflows that people need, but with the modern technologies that are now available. To the sense that this is true, it does give us a head start and strong position regardless of innovations that are happening elsewhere.”

Both Vizrt and NewTek had many technology partnerships prior to the acquisition, so will anything change?

“We will look for the same thing we always looked for, which is innovation,” says Hallén. “We partner with companies we think bring something really good to the table. The combination of Vizrt and NewTek becomes a bit of a platform for new technology. Bringing small innovative partners onto our platform in different ways of arrangement gives us a bit of an edge.

“And with the global customer base we now have together in small, big, medium and different markets, we have become quite attractive as a kind of springboard into the broadcast industry,” he adds.

Cross continues: “It has to be said that we are two strong companies. This was not an acquisition of weakness, but of strength. Our number one goal, both internally and externally, will not see us looking to change everything around because we think we are doing a lot really well.

“What does happen here is that the combined technology and innovation pool within the new and larger company is much deeper, and it allows us to move technologies between fields where it might not have made sense before,” he adds.

Hallén had just the experience to illustrates Cross’s point: “When we presented the acquisition internally, I was in Norway where we have a large R&D site and the reaction from one of the engineers was, ‘This is cool, can I actually take a piece of NewTek software I know about and bring it into my product? That would be awesome.’

“That reaction illustrates what we are up to together,” he adds. Will NAB and IBC remain strong and relevant through the big changes coming? “Users are clearly feeling different market forces impacting around them, and it is exciting for those shows. In many ways it is going to continue making going to those shows even more exciting,” says Cross. “It is not just the same things we saw 10 years ago; we are not seeing version 15 any more thankfully. The shows are changing, and hopefully we are a part of that. It is our intent to help bring that change to these shows.”

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—It’s been quite a pre-NAB Show week for NewTek, and it’s only half way over.

Vizrt and NewTek jointly announced Monday, April 1, that Vizrt was acquiring the maker of products like TriCaster, IP Series and 3Play, as well as creator of the NDI IP protocol for an undisclosed price.

Despite choosing the first of this month to make the announcement, this was no April Fools prank. The very real deal brings together two formidable technology juggernauts—one focused on the higher-end video market with real-time broadcast graphics and workflow solutions, the other with a portfolio of IP-based video production technology frequently used in the middle and lower end of the market.

Originally, this interview with NewTek President and CTO Andrew Cross was scheduled for April 1 at 9 a.m. to discuss NewTek’s plans for the NAB Show. However, Cross had to postpone the Q&A due to a pressing matter. It wasn’t till late in the afternoon that that matter became clear. Cross was knee-deep in the deal.

In this Q&A, conducted April 2, Cross discusses why NewTek took the Vizrt offer, how the companies’ philosophies align and their products complement each other, what the acquisition means for the workforces of both companies and many other related issues.

He also discusses, as originally intended, NewTek’s plans for the NAB Show.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTechnology:I would imagine that over the years NewTek has probably had offers from other companies about a merger or acquisition. How did the Vizrt buyout come about, and why did NewTek take its offer?

Andrew Cross: Half of our company has been friends with Vizrt for years and years. I have been personal friends with their co-founder [Petter Ole Jakobsen]. We have a lot in common. I know people don’t look in the market and see that, but we are probably the two companies that made their bets on software-based, real-time technology on computers.

Going right back to their beginning days, they made their software on Silicon Graphics workstations. It was software. Back then that was as crazy as us making Video Toaster on an Amiga.

In many ways we share a common DNA and belief since our founding.

Both of us made the very same bets when 95% of the market didn’t see things the same way.

We have known each other for years, and we collaborate a bit, but we exist in different markets. Then about a year and a half ago my friend, who is the co-founder of Viz, came down to visit San Antonio—his first time here. We went out for pizza, and we were just sitting there thinking, “Gosh, we’ve got so little in common, yet the same philosophy. What would it look like if we put all of this together?”

Everybody looks at companies in mergers and acquisitions for an overlap, but by far it makes the most sense when companies don’t have that overlap. That way you don’t say, “We both have graphics solutions,” and work out which one has to die.

Here we have this situation where they do the high end and we do the low end and the middle. They sell direct. We have a channel. We are strong in video mixing; they are strong in graphics.

We started going through the thought process of all of the areas where we are just unbelievably complementary.

He told me they just got this new CEO. He only just started. My friend said, “How about if I go tell him that we should take a serious look at this?” I said, “What the heck? Let’s start that conversation.”

That is how it came about. They didn’t say, “We want to come and eat up NewTek and make you a part of us.” It really was like, “Wow, what would it look like if we really put this together?”

If you think about our market, there are a couple of really large players who have evolved out of businesses that are 50 years old and the way TV stations were run.

We thought, what would it look like if we made a business that was formed to serve the IT-based production, which is clearly where the future is. That is why this came about and why it happened. I find it super exciting.

TVT:Andrew, you will continue on as president of R&D of the combined company and Vizrt President Michael Hallen will lead the business. What about the rest of the employees at NewTek and Vizrt? Are layoffs planned? Or, do you even know yet?

AC: I absolutely do know, and this is really key. First off, just philosophically NewTek and Vizrt are very aligned. But this is an acquisition that is really based on the strengths of both companies, so this is absolutely not a situation where we say, “We’ve both got graphics systems so we are letting one of the graphics teams go.” We are in fact both strong companies. We are both very profitable companies, and it would be crazy to mess with that. When you think about what we have as a combined entity, it’s really quite mind-blowing.

TVT:Is there going to be a relocation to Norway or San Antonio? Or, are both operations going to stay put?

AC: Vizrt is very much an international company. So the answer is clearly no. NewTek is going to stay in San Antonio. Vizrt is going to stay in Norway. When it is really hot in the summer, it means we have a good place to visit. And, I can tell you that when it is cold and wet in Norway in the winter, they’ll want to come and visit us.

TVT:Can you tell me about the financial side of the transaction?

AC: I am afraid I can’t.

TVT:When will the deal close, or is it closed now?

AC: The deal is signed, and the deal will close on a date to be determined, but very soon. My head is spinning with the lawyers and accountants. But it is very soon.

TVT:What about Tim Jenison, founder of NewTek? Will he have a role in the combined company?

AC: Almost everybody knows he has not been directly involved in NewTek for years now. He is involved in that he created the concept. We grew up in his garage, literally. But he has not been involved in NewTek for many years. So he will be about equally involved in this, in that NewTek is very much part of what he brought to the industry, and he wants to make sure his child, NewTek, which is 30 years old, goes to a good home.

I look at this very much as "we are the kid that didn’t leave home and stayed in Tim’s garage, but now we are 30 years old and it’s time for us to leave home, but our parents still really care about us and have a vested stake in us being successful."

TVT:Will the acquisition have any effect on sales channels or service?

AC: I am hesitating. The short answer is absolutely not. We are both successful companies, and the goal is to continue to be successful and to use the things we can do together to make us more successful—not suddenly cut out part of what we are doing.

NewTek very much will continue to sell the way we sell. As a matter of fact, we are more dedicated to that now because Viz sells in a different way. In many ways, this leaves us more committed to our individual strategies. Our channel is almost like a part of NewTek. They have been for years. Some of these guys have worked with us for 20 years or more.

We believe in them. They are a part of what makes us successful. They are part of why Vizrt liked NewTek. So we have no plans on changing that. In fact, we see it as a way to allow us to focus on our strengths there.

TVT:One thing Vizrt is known for is its powerful, real-time broadcast graphics. I was wondering if there might be some synergy between that side of its business and technology and NewTek’s LightWave 3D.

AC: That is an interesting question, and I just have to be completely honest and say I don’t know. I think between us, we have incredible technologies of which LightWave is one, and it probably is one that few people in the video market even know NewTek has or know its power. How we take that and turn it into something that impacts the industry in a bigger way, I honestly don’t know. I do know we have the technology and pieces that are incredible, and we need to work out how we put those building blocks together.

TVT:What about NewTek and Vizrt’s presence at the NAB Show? Separate or integrated together in one booth?

AC: We will have separate booths, certainly, at this NAB. Who knows in the future?

TVT:Can I infer from the answer to that question that both companies will maintain separate identities?

AC: That is exactly right. I think that we both have extremely strong brands in different parts of the market, and we see that as a strength. There are very few customers who sit down and say, “Should I buy NewTek or Vizrt products?” We don’t plan on changing that.

TVT:Will you be overseeing research and development at both companies in your new role as president of R&D?

AC: Probably. The honest answer is that I am so totally invested in making this work, making it successful. I am excited about this project. Where I fit in is almost secondary in my mind to my excitement about the deal and the process. And yes, I think I will be involved in R&D at both companies.

TVT:The reason I brought that up is I was wondering if you have any R&D priorities for technology between the companies.

AC: I think both sides have very different strengths. If you look at the real-time rendering and graphics capability on the Viz side, they have some absolutely groundbreaking stuff. On the NewTek side, we have a really good understanding of how you merge usability with innovation. Bringing both sets of skills together will clearly be my key goal.

I think those are defining characteristics of both organizations, and if we can harness both of them that will redefine a lot of things in the market, and that’s very much our goal.

TVT:NewTek has developed and nurtured the NDI IP protocol. Vizrt has supported the suite of SMPTE ST 2110 standards. Does the acquisition bring opportunities for a bit of cross pollination?

AC: First of all, I personally and NewTek generally are supportive of 2110. We have always thought one of the great things about IP is that the real standard is IP in the same way that on the internet there are JPEGs and PNGs. They serve different uses, and nobody says, “Gosh, JPEGs vs PNGs, who’s going to win?” It makes no sense because they both exist on a web page.

This is one of the great things about the IP world, which is the real standard was never 2110 or NDI. It was IP itself. And these things serve entirely different uses.

I think NDI has and will increasingly become an important standard, and I also think 2110 has a very valuable place in broadcast. There is really no change in our view of that, and I think if you talked to Viz, even the day before the acquisition or a year before, they would have given you the same answer, which is there are different uses for these things, and both of them are important.

TVT:Shifting gears a bit, what highlights can the industry expect from NewTek at NAB?

AC: There are probably two distinct buckets of things that we are doing at NAB. One is obviously NDI. We are announcing NDI Version 4, which improves pretty much everything. It’s certainly the biggest release we have made with NDI since its launch.

It runs faster, so you can get more channels of video. It has better quality at that same bit rate. It supports 16 bits per pixel, so it offers higher color accuracy. So, it goes beyond what SDI did.

It moves to a really new, clever way of transferring data over a wire itself, which we are calling Multi TCP. That means it can share bandwidth along a lot of different paths through the network. It is very cleverly written so it can ensure the network cards on machines can hardware accelerate it all so that it causes a low CPU load. Remember, our goal is to make this work on any computer system out there.

That’s the easy stuff—kind of the bigger, faster, better kind of thing. But the things that we are doing that I believe are also very disruptive are, you know NDI has always been a compressed format. So if you think we have compressed data flowing around the network, and there is absolutely nothing that stops you from taking that compressed data and storing it on disk. It takes no CPU time. You are only limited by the number of streams you would be able to record if you did this. You are only limited by how much network bandwidth you’ve got into a machine or multiple machines and how fast the drives are.

We are going to give away for free the ability to record any number of NDI streams straight to disk without any kind of recompression, which means CPU usage is zero. If you want to put a machine that just records all of your videos on the network, you can.

I think that disrupts the ingest market in a way, although I wouldn’t say it disrupts the ingest manufacturers. I hope we are making their lives easier by standardizing things. Making it so they have easy ways to integrate with IP that don’t involve needing lots of capture cards in a machine and lots of compression.

But we take it one step further because in the process of recording we support the process of synchronizing all of the streams. Even across multiple machines. This is really important because if you think about the progression in the industry, cameras have gotten cheaper and cheaper.

You and I can now afford to do multi-camera shoots, particularly with PTZs where you don’t even need operators. But the entertainment content you will get out of them is remarkably difficult because they are not synchronized.

So unless you genlock everything, you end up with four big files of some event, but you have to go through this manual process of resynchronizing everything.

By us putting the synchronization side of that into our recording, we totally solve that problem. So that you can record any number of streams, drop them onto a timeline and it is all synchronized.

We even allow you—if you use NTP [network time protocol], which is easy to use and free—to synchronize across multiple computers. Now the recording is done so the computers will even synchronize with each other.

You can be recording things one place in the world, another place in the world, any number of streams and things always synchronize. This is really important, so that in many ways NDI is not just applicable to people doing live video, but it is starting to become really important for those who want to do post-production as well.

Now, if you think about an NDI converter box, and we will be announcing some really cool ones at NAB, you just hook those up. You just record those streams, drop them into an NLE, and there is nothing else to do. It’s a groundbreaking workflow.

We will also have an Unreal Engine plug-in for NDI. We are putting in place a lot of the pieces for a broadcaster who wants to run in the cloud. It doesn’t rely on multicast. It can be used on Amazon Web Services.

TVT:You mentioned another bucket, not the NDI bucket. What is in it?

AC: Obviously we have the TriCaster, too, and we are really pushing the envelope there. Honestly, the thing we are showing, I think is so cool. It’s something we have been working on for years. It’s been my dream to make this work for years.

Here is the basic concept. TriCasters are used by people who want to make a show. But if you are really truthful about this, nobody creates their show on a video switcher. Everybody creates their show in something like Word—because you plan it and write out a script.

What we have done is make a system that allows you to literally bring in a Word document. It analyzes the document and then runs the whole show for you truly automatically. You can put your whole script—who says what, the title of the show, everything—into a Word document, import that into your TriCaster, and push everything to a teleprompter output and through the teleprompter feed automatically run the whole show.

TVT:That sounds amazing.

AC: It seems so obvious when one thinks about it. It’s such a cool way of working. Think about kids in a high school. How do they create a show? The school project is they write out the script. This means kids can now create and run an amazing looking show, and it does everything for them.

It means journalists can work with Google Docs to put scripts of their show that the editor can use. They can automatically bring that into the video system, and they can just run through that show.

You know how you put comments in on Word. If you want a clip to play while you are saying something, you just add a comment where you say it, and it just says play the name of the clip and we use AI to understand what is in the comment and then automatically play that clip for you.

If you want to switch to a camera, you just put in a comment that says “Show Phil,” and it will go through all of your camera inputs and find the one that is showing Phil and automatically show that camera. It makes making shows so much easier and so much more fun.

TVT:Anything else?

AC: The other thing is our IP Series higher-end video switchers. We are making them accessible to people who want to run them on their own servers, whether they are in the cloud or their local server rack. This is for people who want to virtualize, people who want to build productions where you can scale them up and down based on what shows you are running that day.

Think about it this way. We took our 44-input, 4K switcher and we allow it to be run on an off-the-shelf server for people. They can choose to run it in the cloud. That’s pretty groundbreaking and that is definitely where the industry is ultimately headed.

Those are the highlights for NAB, but I will tell you, right after NAB we have a whole bunch of other stuff coming. We’ve been busy.

TV TECHNOLOGY: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2016 NAB Show?

Dr. Andrew Cross

CROSS: It won’t come to anyone’s surprise that the industry’s transition to IP-based workflows will dominate the conversation at NAB Show this year, as it should. We are big believers in IP as the future of video production. It represents the biggest transformational change in the industry since file-based workflows replaced tape and we may not see a bigger transition in our lifetime.

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

CROSS: We will be demonstrating NewTek’s TriCaster Advanced Edition featuring our Network Device Interface (NDI) protocol, an open standard for live production for anyone wanting to enable IP workflows over Ethernet networks in their facilities or in production systems they manufacture.

TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

CROSS: NDI allows multiple video systems to identify and communicate with one another over IP, and to encode, transmit and receive many streams of high-quality, low-latency, frame-accurate video and audio in real time. This new protocol can benefit any network-connected video device, including video mixers, graphics systems, capture cards, and many other production devices. This makes it possible to exponentially increase the number of sources available for live production switching, without directly attaching to devices, changing locations, or investing in expensive, high-bandwidth networks that simply replace SDI-based workflows. NDI is also backwards-compatible with a large number of devices from top manufacturers and developers already using NewTek’s previous technology allowing IP connectivity between devices. This will extend support for NDI to well over 100,000 compatible systems already deployed worldwide, making it by far the most prolific IP video transfer method in the production market. NDI is a royalty-free software development kit (SDK).

TVT: What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?

CROSS: The NAB Show is, without question, the biggest event in our industry year after year. It is not only a great venue to launch and demonstrate our latest technology, but it’s where we can best interact directly with the broadest number of partners, developers, past and future customers, press and more. There’s no substitute for it and that’s what brings us back every year.