Reflection On IBC2016... From A Ross Video Perspective

Shows like IBC2016 are fantastic platforms for major announcements, and connecting with customers and business partners from all over the world, writes David Ross. For Ross, it was a record show in many ways.

We started the exhibition with our first IBC Keynote Address around the theme of Smart Production. A video of the event is now available for viewing online. Our corporate update noted that Ross is up 20% over last year, heading towards concluding our 25th straight year of record growth. With an average 18% increase year over year with no external private equity investment, this is a run of consistent growth we believe is unmatched in the history of our industry.

In addition to our Pinewood office in the UK, we announced doubling the size of our Singapore office, and the establishment of a new office in Sydney, Australia to even better serve our global customer base.

In the US, Ross Mobile Productions continues to gain steam by creating fantastic content economically for our network customers. The group produced over 700 games this year in 40 states. This now makes Ross one of the largest producers of college sports in the United States. The deep production expertise gained is being folded back into our product lines and made available to all our customers.

In the world of IP, Ross announced the acquisition of an engineering consulting company called Coveloz. This is our 11th acquisition in 7 years. Coveloz adds 35 deeply experienced video and audio networking engineers as an "arm's length" company to bring industry standard IP technology on Intel/Altera platforms to all companies in the industry – even our competitors.

Product-wise for IP, Ross did an advanced technology demonstration of "Raptor", our ground-breaking modular, flexible, and extremely dense "top of rack" openGear solution for efficiently bridging the worlds of SDI and COTS IP routing. This card performed extremely well at all of the interops.

Recognizing that the industry isn't actually converging but rather diverging, Ross also showed leadership in 12G SDI routing. Our ultra-compact Ultrix routers that span from SD to UHD generated considerable attention. Of particular interest are the software enabled features including 12 multiviewers, a 1536-square embedded audio matrix, and new features for the show including integrated clean/quiet switching and Quad 3G Signal Medic capabilities.

At the keynote, we had fun demonstrating how a 2RU Ultrix replaces 56 RU of traditional "best in class" equipment and it reduces cabling from 4000 cables down to just 150.

As another big surprise, 20 minutes after announcing the acquisition of Coveloz, Ross announced the acquisition of Abekas – a legendary company in the industry. Our 12th acquisition brings some brilliant product designers into Ross and adds two major new product lines: Servers and Replay. To top things off, Ross simultaneously announced our first combined product, Streamline Play, which brings MOS workflows to Abekas servers and makes them newsroom ready.

Our investment in The Future Group in Norway has led to a stunning new product for Ross named Frontier. Frontier is a virtual set system based upon Epic's Unreal gaming engine. This brings true photo realism, interactivity, and physics into the world of virtual sets. To demonstrate just one aspect of what is now possible, we showed virtual rain hitting the virtual windows in our virtual set where the droplets combined together and trickled down the glass. The lighting, reflections, and detail were astounding.

At NAB 2016, Ross announced our entry into cameras with the ground-breaking Acid Cameras. These great studio cameras added a new patent-pending feature for green screen work – 4:4:4 output for high detail chroma keying when paired with our new UltraChrome HR chroma keyer.

Proving we're serious about cameras, at IBC we launched our new PivotCam cameras in a "one more thing" moment. These PTZ cameras offer up to 1080P resolution, HD-SDI outputs, 20x Olympus optics, DashBoard control and more, all for the remarkable price of $2,750 USD. While we're officially targeting the cameras at Education, Corporate, and Legislative markets, we're confident they'll find their way into broadcast applications. They're a perfect complement to the new Carbonite Black Solo production switchers – including XPression graphics – that we just launched at NAB and start at under $5,000 USD.

Over the past several years Ross has been steadily building the world's widest live production product portfolio. We're doing this because we believe customers don't just want to buy a stack of boxes, but rather look for systems that integrate effortlessly and produce solutions for their specific applications. The needs of news, sports, stadium, OB van, entertainment, concert, legislative, educational, and corporate organization are all different with their own production needs, workflows, skill levels, and budgets.

No company in the history of our industry has been able to simultaneously offer live production solutions for augmented reality and virtual sets, real-time motion graphics, cameras, robotics, production switchers, routers, multiviewers, signal processing, video servers, instant replay, newsroom systems, social-media management, media asset management, and control systems. We're continuing to rearrange these Lego block components into compelling for our customers and it really feels like IBC2016 is only just the beginning.

www.rossvideo.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 26.

(JP/LM)