Technology Feed, an online resource tracking the leading edge of broadcast production technology, recently published an analysis of the larger implications of IP for media production by Gerhard Lang, CTO of Vizrt:

The broadcast industry loves an acronym, and there is a new one that is rapidly gaining momentum. SDVS stands for software-defined visual storytelling, marking a key point in the industry’s timeline when the major tasks in the media pipeline, everything from production and content creation to distribution and archiving will be carried out by software rather than dedicated hardware.

Our industry is based on innovation, and given the speed with which technology moves, studios need to invest in technology that is future-proof. The flexibility, precision and speed of feature delivery required by today’s workflows can only be achieved by basing the solutions on software.

As omnipresent as media is in our lives, making the dedicated tools that have produced and distributed content in the 20th and early 21st centuries is a very small industry compared to the behemoth that the computing industry has grown into. For 2019, broadcast equipment has about a US$4 billion global market size, versus US$255 billion for the global computer manufacturing industry. Those are vastly deeper pockets for research and development of hardware.

At that scale and driven by global demand for ever greater performance and capability, not only do computing platforms advance rapidly, they spawn low-cost computing solutions in abundance in the wake. Today’s bleeding-edge high-end workstation always becomes tomorrow’s economy model. For the smaller market of broadcast production equipment to leverage that massive market’s rate of advance amounts to unhitching a horse and hitching up a rocket. Broadcast production vendors can concentrate R&D dollars on advancing software to make the full range of available hardware productive for content acquisition, creation, distribution and storage for every scale of production.

Software is the future! This is a big statement, I know, but one that I’m fully behind. Vizrt is committed to growing the functionality of our components, while the synergistic effects from our acquisition of NewTek and the use of AI inside our products will open new possibilities when defining workflows.

Read Gerhard Lang’s complete analysis at Tech Feed: Defining the future with SDVS (Software Defined Visual Storytelling)

Vizrt and NewTek, two of the components of the new Vizrt Group, have between them more than five decades of driving television production from “big iron” proprietary hardware to software production tools on general computing devices. Through vision and innovation, both have risen to lead their respective market segments in the industry, change the face of broadcast and extend visual storytelling to the masses. They have turned software-defined visual storytelling (#SDVS) from the wave of the future into the wave we are all riding today.

Learn More:

• Vizrt
• NDI^®
• Free and commercial NDI^® applications
• NewTek Hybrid IP/SDI and IP/HDMI Multi-Camera Live Production Systems

Broadcast, AV,

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