Richard Bernard talked with Matt Robbins and Simon Tillyer of KitPlus TV about the openGear products VITEC has been working on during the COVID shutdown. Learn more about VITEC solutions at www.vitec.com.
Simon:
Hello, and welcome to the show supported by Mediaproxy. Now, today we’re continuing our series of openGear discussions and we are delighted to welcome Richard Bernard from VITEC. Hi, Richard. Welcome to the show.
Richard Bernard:
Hello, Simon. Thanks for having me. Hello, Matt.
Matt:
Hi.
Simon:
Now, Richard VITEC are relatively new to openGear. Tell us what led you to develop the encoders and decoders with the openGear card?
Richard Bernard:
Yeah, sure. VITEC started a few years ago, two years ago, a broadcast initiative, to penetrate this market because we are developing a lot of video codecs for IP video distribution and contribution. And so, when we looked at different platforms, we definitely saw that there was good advantage to using openGear, thanks to the fact that it’s an open standard, and the fact for example, that you can mix and match cards. So it’s very beneficial for some of our user who wants to be able to encode, decode. So this was very key for us. Just saying, it really targets a wide range of application and we discovered it over time. Initially, it was really meant for broadcast, but we can see now that even in government, federal, you can see even in enterprise, you can see this platform being used. And so, we’re very happy to have joined this openGear program and partner group.
Matt:
So, what advantages does VITEC bring to the openGear ecosystem when people are going through the process of choosing their encoder decoder cards?
Richard Bernard:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So in fact, VITEC does provide, for years now, different IP video solutions. We are specialized in the video codecs, so we have a team dedicated to that, algorithm team. And so we are able to tune and reset the codecs for the application that the customer will use. And so thanks to that, we were able to… And also we are developing, I would say, appliances for years, in the same domain. And so we managed to switch quite quickly, some products, to go to openGear. And so we are leveraging the platform, which is pretty easy to use, by taking our technology which has been used widely for NIP encoding, IP decoding. And of course, thanks to that, you can build your own application with a mix of encoder, decoder.
We’re able to provide, for example, in a 2RU, up to 50 HEVC, HEVC 265 encoding channels for IPTV distribution. The same can be done to send the stream to a CDN, YouTube, I mean, what you want to do with it. And here we’re able to do up to 10 UHG channels in the 2RU. So encode, or decode, or mix and match, ready to fit within your application. So, that’s really the flexibility and the density that we provide. And also thanks to our codecs, we provide the latency, high video quality, and reliability.
Simon:
That’s great, Richard. So we have IBC, of course, approaching in December in Amsterdam. Will we be seeing VITEC there? And if so, what will you be showing?
Richard Bernard:
Yes. So VITEC will be attending IBC. So I think as the whole industry, we are very much expecting this show, to show what we have done during this COVID, and long period. The team has been very busy developing products. We have been bringing to the market a new openGear card, that we will demonstrate. We will also demonstrate one, which is currently in development. It will be announced there. And of course, we will present the whole openGear ecosystem that we provide along with our IP gateways, ChannelLink, that allows to, I will say, connect the encoder to the decoder, together and also our IPTV distribution system called EZ-TV. So please come see us at the booth. We’ll likely get your feedback, discuss with you. So it’s very important that we all meet, fully at IBC.
Matt:
That’s brilliant. At least we know that we’re heading back to some sort of normal, when we’ve got announcements going on at IBC. It’s absolutely fantastic. Look forward to that news. Thank you very much to, Richard, and check out the VITEC Solutions at vitec.com. Don’t forget, this is one of the line up of openGear interviews. So watch out for the rest coming soon, from a number of key partners. Thanks to Mediaproxy for their support of KitPlus TV. And thanks for watching. See you next time.
Learn more about VITEC solutions at www.vitec.com.
