Interview: Teradek Talks Mobile Switching, VR Stitching, and HEVC Encoding at Streaming Media West 2017

Tim Siglin: With me I've got Jon Landman, the VP of Sales from Teradek. Jon, you just won not just one, not just two, but three Readers' Choice Awards.

Jon Landman: Yes. It's not the best year for us, but I'm very happy with the three that we won.

Tim Siglin: These are the three shards, and the one that I'm holding says that you won for your cellular bonding solution. And what are the other two that you have?

Jon Landman: So we also won for the best wireless transmission system, and that would be our Bolt system. That, I would say, is the number one solution for wireless, zero delay, uncompressed transmission on virtually every news, or every movie set in the country.

Tim Siglin: And then the third one?

Jon Landman: The third one is for our mobile switcher application. It is an app called Live: Air Solo, or Live:Air Action, that can be downloaded for free from the Apple Store.

Tim Siglin: Okay, very good, and we're shooting this with a Teradek VidiU Pro, so we're familiar with Teradek products.

Jon Landman: Yeah, very happy to see that not just talking about it, but you're actually using it for real live streaming.

Tim Siglin: So what other kinds of products do you have? I think you have another one in the queue, which was nominated to win, an encoder, is that correct?

Jon Landman: Yes, we just released the H.264 and H.265 Cube 755, with the live transcoding option in the cloud. Up to 30 megabits per second, boot-up time in under 20 seconds, and at a price that again is very, very aggressive.

Tim Siglin: Are you all moving any way into virtual reality video or 360 video?

Jon Landman: We actually released a product to do live stitching, for any four cameras or any eight cameras. We live stitch on an iPad, and then can stitch that into a 4K stream will then stream direct to YouTube or Facebook.

Tim Siglin: The reason I ask is I'm actually doing a panel in just a minute on VR video, and I was curious what your approach was. So essentially it does stitches to the device and then you push them out from that iPad.

Jon Landman: The workflow is this: We have a rig that you can mount four GoPros in, for example. We take the HDMI out of those cameras, we take them into a product of ours called The Sphere, which takes those four fees, and codes them into H264 at about 10 megabits per second, and then wirelessly transmits that to the iPad where we live stitch into a 4K resolution. And why do we need the wireless? It's because you can't stand next to the cameras to stream, like he is over there. In the 360 world you would see his ugly mug on the set.

Tim Siglin: He would be showing there, exactly.

Jon Landman: You wouldn't want that.

Tim Siglin: It would give more face time for Steve.

Jon Landman: That's true.

Tim Siglin: All right, so it's 10 Mbps in aggregate, or--

Jon Landman: Which is a total of 40 Mbps. So we're sending 40 megs wirelessly to the iPad.It’s called the Sphere.

Tim Siglin: What's the basic price point on that?

Jon Landman: Sphere lists at $4,000, all in. It's a very easy way to get into the world of 360 streaming.

Tim Siglin: Jon, thank you very much for your time.