Nick:
I’m Nicolas Quesne, I’m the VITEC broadcaster business unit general manager, and we are new in the openGear group. So firstly, let me introduce VITEC and how our solution good for a remote production, contribution, and distribution. So VITEC is a company, a private company that was building videos since Windows system since 1988, so more than 30 years. And today we count more than 250 employees and more than half of them are RND engineer. So VITEC has a long history in video, and we have done a lot of external growth in acquisition in the past decade. So as you can see here as the two last acquisitions that we made in 2019, 2020, acquisition on broadcast with T-21 and IPtec. And so that’s for us to move, to confirm our presence in the broadcast market. So you will see how openGear will help for that. So I just want to really highlight that the VITEC expertise is on codec.
So we start to develop codec since 30 years. And we are agnostic to the platform. We can do codec by software, by ASIC, by FPG, that’s the core technology from where we are coming. But based on the codec, we are building products and thanks to this product, we are really providing customer… Answering customer requests and offering a complete solution.
So we start from codec to build solution. So the codec, it’s really the first part of the video paths, coding and compression. But also now we manage a streaming, archiving and dissemination, and playbacks. That means VITEC can manage all the video paths. I want to insist on three main industry solution, the first one is video contribution. So that means from a camera to a studio, for example. So we are leading in this kind of market application.
I can give you an example, of course, broadcast, where it’s the first market for that, but it’s also for military. When you have drones or equipment like that, we contribute the video from camera to the headquarter, for example, for military. And also an application where VITEC is leading, it’s IPTV. So here, it’s a complete IPTV system. So we manage the compression and coding, but also all the streaming and all the VOD inside enterprise. So typically this is for an enterprise application, but it also can be used in venues. And we have a big venues in using VITEC in US. So you have many screens on the venues and we manage all the screens with a single management software, what we EZTV. We manage the sources, we manage endpoint.
Today, just to give you some numbers. Worldwide, we have more than 650,000 viewer of our IPTV solutions. So it’s quite huge, and it’s a complete solution. On the last one, it’s more kind of SDK OEM or industrial solution. So here we are setting some boards or small equipment with, I would say, just to API on our customer, integrate our solution in their product.
So typically we can mention against the drone market. So it has to have some constraint of weights. So they just integrate not the books, but just a card. And they make them own software on top of it and own equipment. And we can mention also those some application, which has a pipe inspection. So here, we are delivering just a bond and they are building their own system on top of it. So if you go to the next slide, this is just to give you some big name, example of who can be our customer.
So on the four market segments that I mentioned before, so you have the broadcast, you can find the names that you all know, CNN. For enterprise, we manage all the screen and the IPTV in Microsoft. Military, you can find of course US Air Force, also NASA. And the venue, you have different kinds of stadium of those in US.
So, as I mentioned, inside VITEC, we have different kinds of product families. Encoders and decoders, IPTV and Digital Signage, media servers and transcoders, and also SDI, converters, software, I would say more SDK based. So now I will leave the end to Richard. Richard will speak more about the encoder and decoder part, which is our quality topics of today, that’s means openGear.
Richard:
Thank you, Nicolas and everyone. I’m Richard Bernard from VITEC, product manager. So yes, as you’ve seen, VITEC delivers end-to-end video IP solutions. Leveraging H.264, MPEG2 and low bandwidth HEVC. And we very much focus on video quality, as well as latency. They live up to the market, a neutral low latency solution, allowing latency down to milliseconds.
We also work with the reliable transmission technology, and initially we developed product as portable appliance, and now we are delivering openGear card. And this is why we are here today and join the consortium.
Why did the VITEC joined the openGear? We joined the openGear, thanks to the open startup platform because it’s really helpful and it helps to make different types of cards. It’s cross market and application, it’s managed, and you have a shared network interface so that you can control all the board within the same system. And it’s video friendly. So it’s very good for our IP video cards and it’s shared, the general key is shared across accounts. So this is also used in our decode accounts.
And something very important for broadcasters is that it offers redundant power supply. And of course, reliability is very important for this specific market. So we have joined the openGear two years ago, and we have developed already two cards, which were not new. In fact, it’s a recipient from existing portable encoders that we were already shipping for several years. So we have the diamond encoder or SD coder. And also we have a T21, 9261 encoder.
So one of the main benefits for us is that in a 2RU chassis, the solution can deliver with our boards up to 40 HD IP feeds and coded for IP TV distribution. Up to 10 4k contribution, direct to a feed using a MGW diamond. And also it can close up to 10 HEVC and decode it feed, for example, for 4k contribution and direct to web using the SD coder. And Thanks to the mix and match capability then you can put an eight encoder card and to the color card and eight and quarter card for eight channel and coding decoding with the full-duplex application.
So looking at the card, we have the diamond OG bot, which is dedicated to broadcast, esports, and enterprise. For point-to-point application 4k HDI contribution and robot production, mainly and IP distribution to. It’s a 4K Multichannel HD and color card and up to 4kp60, or can do 4x 1080P60 up to 4:2:2 10-bit. And a very important to the in broadcast space, we see more and more… We support HDR.
And we are working a lot with video quality, latency portability, and these cards are low latency, down to 15 milliseconds end to end. So up to x32 audio channels can be included with the card. And we also propose encryption to protect your feed on the internet. So the inputs as a one 12G–SDI 4x 3G, a lot of capability with the audio and it’s future proof because it features a 2110 input for video capture of uncompressed video.
Transport protocol, so we support a lot of them. And something very important that you need to know is that we are providing a way to transport video over a lousy network like the internet, but we really want to be agnostic. There is a big, better… We know that between the Zixi, SRT, RIST and we basically want to offer what the customer wants to use in their work flow. And so we include all this technology in our cards. We have two gigabit internet. The one shared on the openGear platform. And the other one is on the audio card. And we are supporting OGX and OG3 chassis and 10 cards can be filled in the chassis. As decoder, so using Ace Decoder and diamond, you can build a 4k HEVC contribution link for up to 10 bids. It’s about 16 channel audio. We support different transport protocol.
And again, it’s agnostic to the transport protocol. And something very important is that in this board, we include the Zixi license. So if you want to do point to point streaming using Zixi, you don’t have any additional cost it’s included within the board and you don’t have to pay extra. We provide an interesting feature, which is stream forwarding. For example, if you stream point to point on the internet, from an encoder to a decoder or using a Zixi or Earth, Then the board will decode over a base band video, but also it forward the stream over IP. It’s for later IP distribution, for example, we are the provider decryption and something interesting for the broadcaster that always wants to know what the exact latency that they have today.
It’s that we feature inside the board the way to monitor life, the latency end to end from encode to decode. From the camera to the display. And so it’s very useful when you are doing a live event, or you are doing something with a comment or like. Thanks to that, we managed to synchronize the playback of all the boards altogether.
In terms of output. We have a large pot of video and audio output with 12G-SDI, downscale 3G-SDI, SGMA 2.0 and a lot of audio to adapt with different metrics. It’s sometimes very useful when you have, for example, in the house of worship, you would connect to a metrics with a lot of audio capabilities and this is appreciated. In terms of stream capture, it can be from DVB-ASI input or from IP over the gigabit internet. Again, we have two, one is shared on the openGear chassis, and the one is on the radio of the card. The body is using the Genlock shared across the openGear chassis. So this is very nice. You will put just one Genlock and it would feed all the 10 cards you’ve put in. So we are leveraging this capability and we support OGX and OG3 chassis.
The another encoder, the 9261-EB from T21, this one is ready, dedicated to direct web OTT streaming. It’s h.264 MPEG2 encoder, and it’s very flexible. And this is what really interested VITEC with this board and the design that was done by Kevin, answering that we’ll talk after it support a lot of protocols to target direct to web application and the new, standard data use on CDNs to address YouTube, Facebook live or those popular CDN now. So the board also feature 2 gigabit internet and ad signaling with SCT104. The card can be… You can populate up to 20 cards. So 20 channel HD on the 2RU rack.
So we have designed all those boards and they are all coming from our portable appliance, but I just want to go back and explain why we do that. So we very much… In the application that they are used to, we do very much of transport of video of all the IP of your scene, two different markets. So broadcast, enterprise, e-sports for remote production, live delivery, feed collection, point to point, point to multi point other any network. And really what we do is that we provide optimized solution for transports of video and audio reliably over the internet.
So here’s an example, first IP distribution that could be used with our openGear cards. So you will capture feeds on your private land and then distribute them over the network so that customer or your employee could look at it. For example, in broadcast space, they could look at the older TV channels and see what’s going on.
And at the same time, you have the capability with the sandbox to address remote sites with the openGear encoders. And they can be decoded by openGear decoders. And also now it’s of course coming more and more… You have people at home that want to access those feeds. And so you will be able to access those feeds thanks to the stream protection that we provide in our cards.
Contributions. So VITEC address for several years, the traditional satellite contribution with high quality video products, thanks to the codec that we developed here internally. And so basically it’s an encoder talking to a decoder for contributing feeds from the field back to the broadcast station.
But what we are good at and where we are really focused on is to deliver optimized solution for transporting the video over the internet. So this is the edge that we provide, and this is what we want to push. We believe that this is the modern way to go. We have so much bandwidth available and so much network available between all our sites thanks to the low bandwidth, HEVC that will provide the low latency. We are able to go down to 300 millisecond glass to glass over the internet, which is quite exceptional. And thanks to the fact that it’s resilience to lousy networks, such as the internet, and also because you can, you need, and you have to protect, and we’re allowed to do that, to protect you or your content. Then you can share content from one side to the other over the internet.
One Of the application that we target here is the remote production over the internet. And opening here is a merged, as it provides the versatility of… Or we can mix the cards. We can use them in combination with our portable encoders. And it gives us a dense solution for encoding and decoding. And here, what we provide is a SD-focused solution, HEVC, a really average front transport, as we said, and it’s very scalable solution. This is what we really like here. So here, the goal is to transmit live feeds from the remote event and stream it back for broadcast station for production and distribution.
So I like to go over our last application that we provide is direct web OTT monitoring and here, the goal is to directly capture transmit live feeds to CDNs. So CDNs like Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, you name it. And here you have the capacity to directly address your audience without too much equipment. And this is made visible here, thanks to the cards. At the same time, you do… Broadcaster wants to make sure that the fields are correctly received. And so here we can use also these kinds of decoder to monitor and make sure that the fields are correctly addressed to the people. Okay. Thank you for your time everyone. I will give the talk to Kevin Ancelin, which is our VP of broadcast sales. And I’m sure you all know it very well.
Kevin:
Can everybody hear me? Wave your hands, jump up and down, everybody’s stretch, touch your toes, touch your nose. Well, thank you, Richard and Nicholas for doing such a nice job, Nicholas for introducing VITEC. You can leave the slide up, Richard. That’s fine, please. And for Richard, who’s our esteemed product manager for all of our portable and openGear platform.
As Richard said, I came to VITEC, honestly, through 30, some years in the industry, a couple of companies and a lot of grinding. They invited me over to join Philippe Wetzel did, and I thank him for that. It’s given me an opportunity to work with some fantastic engineers, great product management, and I’m very happy here. I’m happy also that they’ve maintained the product line that I created, the T21 specifically the 9261 encoder on the openGear. I also will take responsibility for dragging VITEC into the openGear business prior to that, they had portables and some frame based cards that worked on the legacy platform that Optibase had created.
So we’re pleased to be part of this openGear infrastructure and family. It’s a great family and something that I’m so happy to be with. So Richard is a very clever individual, and he is always coming up with clever names and creative things. At the end of the day, the common denominator, what I’m going to talk about today, is over the top contribution. And of course on the back end of that, there is a need to monitor over the top content. And so the 9261, which is still a very active product within the portfolio is a ABC and coder. Yes, it supports MPEG2 too. It’s not relevant in the OTT world. MPEG2 that is ABC is very relevant, as we know. It’s the most widely deployed codec globally. It’s still gaining market share. And my prediction is that ABC is here for decades to come based on the simplicity of the decoding stamp, decoding on arm processors, very basic devices, such as cherry pies, raspberry pies, et cetera, 30, 40, $50 devices make sense.
Old iPhone support it, Android support it, you name it. So it’s progressive video over the top, the 9261 can ingest a single SDI feed and it can route, well, first off it can ingest one SDI. It can do UDX up, down, cross. And then encode that in two different formats. And then route each of those discrete formats to up to 10 sites that is from the card itself. We have solutions with our channeling server, which will soon be available on the cloud as well too, to provide routing in a much larger grander ecosystem.
Everybody’s aware of the cloud, VITEC is beginning to play with the cloud. I find it exhilarating to be part of this transition from legacy broadcast to OTT and now into the cloud. So the 9261 supports the baseline RTMP, it’s client. It also has a server mode, which is very interesting mode. It’s kind of upside down. We support legacy, RTSP, HLS, dash. And then of course, all of the wonderful ARQ methods that are associated in the industry. We see now from SRT from Zixi to RIST. And I’d like to thank my good friend Ciro for all his work on RIST and what he’s done.
Cindy:
Hey, we do have a couple of questions. And so let me just go to those. Bob’s asking what bandwidth SFPs you’re using, you’re going to support on the encoder decoder with a C2110?
Richard:
So we support a 25 gig 2110. So it will be able to do 4KP60.
Cindy:
I was wondering about how you, you started talking about accessing feeds at home, and I’d love to hear more about how your openGear solutions can help people with that right now, because it’s of course so important these days.
Richard:
And so what we provide here is that we provide the dense solution on the encoding side. Okay. And so you will be able to encode those feeds directly from your broadcast station or airs with density. And then after you can either connect, since you don’t need that to measure density at home, right? You don’t need the 20 feeds at the given time. I don’t know, maybe some people need, but as our user, our portable appliance or software solution, we’ll be able to decode those feeds at home.
Cindy:
Here’s another question. Can we do a mix and match of ODX VITEC line in the HQ with a standalone remote station?
Kevin:
All of the VITEC openGear cards and T21 cards that still are available are standard openGear cards. And as far as using those, they can be mixed and matched in the same frame as with any partner in the openGear group, right? I mean, we can have cards from a Pan tech and Asha and VITEC and T21 are all the same frame. And our portable devices, whether they be the ACE encoder, ACE decoder, or the diamond portable, or the portable 9261s, there they’re all devices that are IP devices that would stream the given protocol that the customer wants to use, whether that be some sort of ARQ such as RIST and Zixi and SRT or OTT technologies and RTMP, RTSP, HLS, and Dash.
Cindy:
How are you using HLS in your system right now? How does that manifest and sort of day to day operations?
Kevin:
Well, that’s a great question, Cindy. I mean, HLS, I mean ATSC and DVB and the ISDVT consortium, these large groups of super brilliant engineers that created these standards 20 years ago, in my opinion, it’s gen generally speaking, non-relevant for today’s world of distribution, right?
Distribution is over the top. Consumption of media from content owners, whether that content owner is ESPN, whether that content owner is Fox, whether it’s NFL, whether it’s NBA, Major League Baseball, they don’t give a crap about Arial ATSE or satellite DVB. None of that matters to them anymore. It’s all about the mobile device. And Apple was quick to the punch. I mean, they replaced the Macromedia flash, which suffers from massive security issues. It’s been deprecated. A lot of people in the industry feel that RTMP is dead. It’s not entirely dead. It has a pulse, but it’s not going to grow.
And that’s where HLS came in and HLS has two fundamental technologies beneath it. It’s transport stream based or based media, file format based there is the dash group, the consortium, it’s a small part of the industry. So distribution to Android, iOS, laptops, tablets, it’s data… It’s HLS, generally speaking. So we’re a big part of that. We can contribute HLS directly from the encoder. We have a packager and a publisher. We can go right to S3 buckets. We can publish to web servers. We can do DAB authentication. It’s pretty robust.
Cindy:
Richard, you talked a little bit about e-sports and I got to thinking about that with you. You talked about stadiums and that kind of thing, and IPTV distribution, how it relates to e-sports. I wondered if there’s been a big uptick in that in the last months, or how is that working for you guys at VITEC?
Richard:
So we are in remote production. Definitely. Yes you can see a lot of increase of demand. And especially in broadcast space, we have a larger installation links to remote commentator at home that now they don’t want to have the people coming in and broadcast stations. So they are doing that directly at home and they send the feeds for commentating live. And so here you can see the importance of latency and the fact that it’s low bandwidth, what we propose. Definitely this is where we see a lot of increase on our side, it’s remote production of other places.
Cindy:
Can I ask you just one more question before we go to our round table? I have another question for you.
Richard:
Sure.
Cindy:
I wanted to hear a little bit more about the stream forwarding you were talking about and how that gets used. If you could give us a little bit more detail and maybe an application on the stream forwarding.
Richard:
Sure. So typically in a IP distribution, the company will have several sites. So they will have a main site where they include the feeds and they are distributed under network for sharing across all the people on the company that wants to access the stream and have the right to access the stream. But at the same time, you may have another branch for the company, which is located somewhere else, really, really far. And so you need to transmit that point to point about the internet or earth. And then you need to… It’s unicast, it’s a stream that goes from one point to the other, then you have to remit it, multicast it somehow. And so in some application, our decoder is used to do that because we have the baseband video, which can be used for production, but also need the need to have this in this system for IP distribution and in viewing.
So if you want something even more density, we have some gateway that will allow to do that too, but it’s very nice to have this feature directly included in the decoder.
