As the NAB Show gets closer, we continue our series of short Q&As with manufacturers about their plans and offerings, to help you get the most out of the big annual trade show. Philippe Delacroix is president and CEO of Digigram.
Radio World: How has business been for the company since last year’s NAB Show?
Philippe Delacroix: Business has been quite good — we’ve had an optimistic year overall, particularly as regards the U.S. market. We have great partners there and are continuously establishing new ones. In Asia and Europe, business is also doing well, thanks to an improving economy.
RW: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2015 NAB Show?
Delacroix: On the audio side, it is definitively Ravenna/AES67, since this standard facilitates the migration from legacy synchronous audio toward a pure AoIP studio infrastructure. On the video side we see HEVC video compression as a real market driver for remote broadcasting and OTT. These two trends lead the way for lower operating costs and also bring more capability and flexibility to new systems based on pure IT infrastructure.
RW: What new product/s will your company be showing?
Delacroix: We are in line with the main trends both in video and audio! On the audio side, Digigram has been highly involved in the development of Ravenna and AES67 since the beginning, and the 2015 NAB Show is a great place to spread the message and showcase the standard’s numerous advantages to our clients and to the market. We will have a full demo with our LX-IP Ravenna sound card, which enables the radio automation system to connect to the IP mixing consoles. Furthermore, all Digigram ACIP codecs can now connect directly to the AES67 network.
On the video side, we will present a prototype of a high-quality, low-power, real-time 4K HEVC video encoder, housed in a 1-RU compact chassis. The product is scalable and can encode and stream four full HD HEVC video signals in real time, or it can encode and stream 1 UHD (4K) video signal in real time.
RW: How does this product/s differentiate from other products available on the market?
Delacroix: Our products stand out from the others because they consistently anticipate market needs and propose technologies that lead to new, more efficient workflows. This permits our customers to be increasingly competitive.
RW: Why should attendees visit your booth?
Delacroix: At the Digigram booth, we will treat you to an array of new technologies and our top-level technical staff will offer personalized advice based on each customer’s requirements.
RW: How has IP technology affected you?
Delacroix: We would not say that IP “affects” our business — IP is instead the essence of our business and we use IP as a strategy to expand it even further! Much of Digigram’s success is built on our development of emerging technologies to revolutionize the industry. For example: sound cards enabled radio automation; Ethersound led to the digitization of sound reinforcement; and AoIP codecs enabled program contribution and distribution over IP.
But we won’t stop there — we will soon unveil even more leading-edge technologies, which are at present in the works in our R&D department!
RW: The Internet has changed the way people do business. Some would say that it has rendered shows such as the NAB obsolete. Is this true?
Delacroix: The Internet allows us to increasingly organize e-meetings and webinars. We see that, for example, fewer Europeans today attend NAB and instead opt to only attend IBC, because they are able to get real time information on new products and technologies via the Internet. At the same time however, the meetings we do have at NAB (and all shows) always provide quality time with our existing partners and an occasion to develop new partnerships and networking opportunities in all domains. So we think that it is much like e-commerce, which co-exists with brick and mortar, and that a dual approach will remain.
