Twenty-Year-Old Broadcast International Gets Boost from Big Blue Partnership

Broadcast International is a small company that has been a small company for nearly 24 years. It provides broadcast solutions to enterprise companies like Caterpillar, Morgan Stanley, and Staples. According to president and CEO Rod Tiede, the company has grown to about 65 people and about $5 million in sales. Just about all of its revenue today comes from providing its clients with managed services. This is all likely to change though with the company's announcement at NAB last week of its HD live encoding solution made possible by IBM’s Cell Processor and the company's new video operating system, which it’s dubbed CodecSys.

Tiede notes that today the company has no licensing revenue at all but he adds, "We see the licensing model [for us] now far outpacing the services model by a substantial amount. Right now we have opportunities with IBM and several other companies who are licensing the technology from us to … embodying that technology into their own application as well as creating their own services."

Tiede describes the CodecSys solution thus: "Imagine a technology using always using the best codec for video compression, switching on the fly between multiple offline codecs and always compressing the video content down always farther than a single codec can do. We can do that in a live and real-time compression environment; that's what our secret sauce is. What makes this happen is our video operating system. This is a software package that does transcoding. It determines in advance the video input and video output you would like it to be—frame size and frame rate. Those are all the things that go on inside the video operating system, which is basically a software technology that runs on a hardware package and that hardware package today is provided by IBM."

H.263 Compatible
The solution he says does not require its own player, as the stream it generates is H.264 compatible. Thus, the company claims that any H.264 player in the field today has the capacity to do the decoding and playback of the company’s streams.

"We have our own decoder that would enable us to even compress farther down [if we didn’t remain] in the H.264 standard. We are staying in an H.264 standard just because that’s what everyone is looking for today and we want to be able to provide a solution to our customers based on H.264 because that’s where set top boxes are and that’s where a lot of people are going," notes Tiede.