SMW '18: Teradek's Jon Landman Introduces the HEVC-Ready VidiU GO

Learn more about bonding and HEVC streaming at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this interview:

Tim Siglin: Welcome back to Streaming Media West 2018. I'm Tim Siglin, Contributing Editor with Streaming Media Magazine, and the Founding Executive Director of the not-for-profit HelpMe! Stream. Today I have with me Jon Landman from Teradek. Jon, we've got a product that you had on the show floor and as I understand, this is actually just coming out.

Jon Landman: Yes, we are starting to ship the VidiU Go.

Tim Siglin: And what exactly is the benefit of the VidiU Go?

Jon Landman: Well, let's first talk about, how does this feel to you?

Tim Siglin: It feels nice and solid. It's got a whole bunch of antennas on it obviously.

Jon Landman: Right.

Tim Siglin: So I'm guessing those antennas are for bonded cellular.

Jon Landman: Yes. This is giving us the ability to bond integrated SIMs. So I have two cellular SIMs integrated. I have wireless integrated and ethernet integrated. And from a back standpoint, as you say, the WiFi antennas.

Tim Siglin: And then your bonded cellular and the ethernet. Ethernet is one gig?

Jon Landman: Yes, and we have the ability to bond both the ethernet with the WiFi and the cellular. And we can take in any video format, whether that be an SDI or HDMI.

Tim Siglin: And is it 802.11ac?

Jon Landman: Yes, it is.

Tim Siglin: Very good. So if you're bonding together those, you actually get a pretty nice throughput.

Jon Landman: Absolutely. This is with our latest chipset that actually does HEVC. If you go to our website, you'll see some samples of HEVC encoding. I put up some half-a-meg and they look absolutely phenomenal. We've spent a lot of time and a lot of effort in designing something that we feel is ready for the years ahead.

It’s ergonomically designed, and it's very, very solid. We've spent a huge amount of time taking a look at how this whole thing is put together. It flows, it feels good. It's actually something that we're very, very proud of from an engineering and design point of view.

Tim Siglin: So is this both a heat sink on the bottom as well as a connection plate to connect to the back of a camera?

Jon Landman: Absolutely. Or a stand to put it next to a switcher, for example.

Tim Siglin: And obviously with the standoff that you have on here with the heat sink to be able to dissipate heat, and then on the front you've got a multi-line display. I'm assuming it does Facebook, YouTube, and others?

Jon Landman: We can go virtually to any and every CDN that you can imagine, whether it be Facebook or Periscope. Now we're going to be rolling this out to send a feed to our core platform, which is our cloud management-based platform. Something that we've just released in the management platform is the ability to take two feeds from two encoders, create one as a primary, one as a backup, and either manually switch between the two, or set one as a true backup that if there is a hiccup in the connection, the fail over will fail over.

We also have the ability to load up a file. For example, in this stream we were going live to Facebook, but we weren't going live with any pre roll. So now I can load up a file with a pre roll.

Tim Siglin: Press the button and have it play that.

Jon Landman: And then the live switch over to our live feed. We've also integrated with some graphics companies, Singular and some others. And we'll be rolling out full graphics packages with the core platform.

Tim Siglin: And I would assume if you're working with graphics packages, that means you've got alpha channel and some of that ability to overlay.

Jon Landman: Overlays and greenscreens, slo-mos, rewinds, and all those kinds of things.

Tim Siglin: So what's the basic price point on this?

Jon Landman: This is starting at around $1,600. And then you can add your SIMs, your modems. But our aim is that your out of the box experience is great. You want to just get this unit, turn it on, and it just works.

Tim Siglin: When you run and gun.

Jon Landman: We don't have to use cellular, but I think that if anyone has done any streaming, we all know and have experienced how there are problems with ethernet connections, when the report is closed or someone cuts the cable, right? So you'll always have to think about what is your backup. What are you using as a backup here? Probably nothing.

Tim Siglin: Right, and ultimately that is the issue. And what's interesting is there's a fairly robust cellular signal into this building, which is surprising, because most venues like this, it gets cut off, but that would be absolutely, it would be a nice fallback to be able to get to.

Jon Landman: Right.

Tim Siglin: Awesome. Well Jon, thank you as always for your time. And VidiU Go, when is it shipping?

Jon Landman: By the end of the month.

Tim Siglin: Nice. All right. So you can get yours for your Christmas stocking stuffer if you like. I'm Tim Siglin, and we'll be right back with the next interview.