Exploring Innovations and Trends at IBC 2024: Insights from Blackbox (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to IBC 2024. Discover game-changing innovations, explore new business models, and network with over 170 countries right here in Amsterdam. John, day two of IBC, how's the show going so far?

Speaker 2: Very good, very much enjoying it here. It's great to be back in Amsterdam and talking to customers about our new technologies.

Speaker 1: Fantastic, I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. So firstly, tell me, where is Blackbox positioned in the media and broadcast industry?

Speaker 2: So Blackbox is very much focused on our core technology, our product set is around KVM over IP, our high-performance KVM over IP, and AV over IP. That's what we kind of focus on. And a lot of what we do is focus on control rooms, production control rooms, could be an outside broadcast truck, or it could be post-production, where we're basically enabling a operator to have the workflow to contact up to thousands of machines to do whatever they're doing, whether they're monitoring, editing, or just managing different aspects of the broadcast, transmission, or content development.

Speaker 1: What trends are you seeing unfolding in the industry, and what are you doing to meet the demands of those trends?

Speaker 2: So there's a couple of trends. I think there's an obvious trend that has been there for a couple of years of moving to the cloud, be it a private cloud or the public cloud. We see that, again, very strongly. So all our products are designed to seemingly support physical machines, virtual machines, and including H.264 streams. And we see that kind of as a common tread. And then the other is around resilience, because a lot of our customers operate 24-7, 365 days a year. So we basically have our technology designed so there's no single point of failure. It's highly reliable, redundant in systems, and being able to work around failures quite easily. And then another real trend that is kind of there, and it's been there a while, it's growing in the last 12 months, around cybersecurity. People are asking way more questions about how secure is your product, how do you test it, how can we know it's going to be cybersecure, because everything's over IP, they're putting it into their networks, they want to know that it's secure in there. And you see a lot more companies now having established standards themselves of what they want to see when they're trying to bring products in. Their IT policies, they're applying that to KVM in terms of security and penetration testing.

Speaker 1: And what are you showcasing here this year at IBC?

Speaker 2: Our core product that we're showing is our Next Generation DeskView product, which is a product that allows an operator to basically have three or four monitors in front of them, UHD monitors or 5K monitors, and access multiple sources of content, up to 16 different unique sources on the screen, and having easy ways to manipulate that content so that the operator or the admin can decide, I always want these things to be on the screen here, they can lock them there, they can then have a free format of way of doing it. So it's basically a very flexible product that an admin or a deployment can be locked down or as flexible as the operator wants. And obviously the key thing there is around the quality of the experience, enabling people to do the workflow they want. And we find it's really kind of designed, like what we're introducing here is what we call our P version of DeskView PE, which is the professional edition, which basically has got more power into it so that basically people can kind of have a lot more interactive content simultaneously while having it still in a small form factor. So key is that it's a small form factor so you can deploy it in your production control rooms, we see a lot of interest in OB trucks because we can consolidate a KVM receiver, a multi-viewer, and a thin client all in one box. So instead of having all that hardware, you can have one unit that kind of delivers that side of functionality.

Speaker 1: And can you just tell us a little bit more about who this is for and what the future use perspective cases are?

Speaker 2: So what it's for is people in production control rooms so that they basically have, you know what we often hear the word is, our operators have a greater span of control, which means that they need to do more stuff in less time. So it's really about making their job easier by automating the workflow for them and consolidating a lot of the information in a single box. It's for outside broadcast trucks, again, to do a similar job but in a very compact format. And then basically for anybody who's monitoring things like that. So our overall Emerald KVM family is kind of designed to be the, I suppose the workhorse of, you know, broadcasters and media and post production houses who basically need a high performance KVM system from whether it's a production control room in the OB truck or in post production.

Speaker 1: And my final question for you is what does the future look like for Blackbox?

Speaker 2: Well, we're evolving just the way the media entertainment business is evolving. So we're following the trends like as I said, cybersecurity, greater resolution is coming in. There's other protocols coming in like NDI that we're working to integrate into our product set. So we see a lot of that evolution to everything is moving over IP, moving away from proprietary protocols to IP, and we're kind of following that trend.

Speaker 1: Very exciting times for you here. Thank you so much and we're wishing you a fantastic rest of your show.

Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Pleasure to speak to you.