NAB 2009: Omneon Sharpens Production Focus
Forms partnership with Pixel Power, sells Castify unit to Aspera
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/19/2009 3:14:39 PM
Click here for complete coverage of the 2009 NAB Show
VIDEO: Q&A With Aspera's Michelle Munson
Las Vegas -- At the NAB Show here Saturday, video server and storage vendor Omneon touted its steady revenue growth in the face of the economic downturn, and said it will continue its quest to gain share in the production arena.
Suresh Vasudevan, a NetApp veteran who joined Omneon as CEO in January, spoke about Omneon's strong position in broadcast playout servers and said that the company posted 43% revenue growth in 2008 over 2007, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 59%.
He attributed Omneon's sales growth to its diversified customer base--60% of revenues come from Europe and Asia, and no single customer accounts for over 5% of revenue; its channel sales partnerships; and its continued investment in R&D to maintain its technology edge in storage and managing large media files.
But Vasudevan said that despite Omneon's strong track record in the transmission space, the company will continue to seek market share in production and content repurposing, a market that he estimates to be four times as large as the transmission segment and worth perhaps $1 billion in total counting both server and storage applications.
Gaining more production customers means teaming with editing, graphics and camera suppliers that already play in that space, and in that vein, Omneon announced a partnership with graphics provider Pixel Power to create complete systems for their customers.
"The platform is only as good as the solutions we can deploy for our customers' workflow needs," said Vasudevan, who predicted that providing storage for broadcasters using a mix of nonlinear editing systems will be Omneon's eventual sweet spot.
The first result of the Pixel Power relationship is Omneon's new MediaDeck GX, a channel playout server with integrated branding capability that should make Omneon more competitive with similar solutions from Harris, Miranda and others. It includes two channels of digital video effects (DVE); a downstream keyer; the ability to playout data-driven graphics as well as stored stills and graphics; and software templates for graphics creation.
Omneon has also introduced several new MediaPort input/output products, including the MediaPort 5500 Series for back-to-back playout of any combination of SD or HD, MPEG-2, or DV content; and the 6200/6300 Series, which supports all of the DVCPRO formats including DVCPRO HD and can be used in studio setting to record multiple camera feeds. Omneon has also integrated support for Panasonic's AVC-Intra compression scheme, which is used in its newest P2 HD camcorders, into its Omneon Spectrum server through the new MediaPort 5600 Series to allow file-based production and playout.
"These MediaPorts give us a better platform and more relevance for production workflows," said Geoff Stedman, Omneon SVP for products and markets.
Omneon also introduced MediaBridge, a software application that will allow customers with content stored on Avid Pinnacle MediaStream servers to rewrap those files and port them over to a Spectrum or MediaDeck system. Avid has discontinued support for MediaStream and several vendors, including SeaChange and Amberfin, have already developed similar workarounds to provide a migration path for content stored on MediaStream servers.
As it seeks to provide more uses for its server products, Omneon has changed course on how it provides content delivery network (CDN) technology to customers looking to share content between Omneon servers over a wide-area network. Omneon had bought the French firm Castify in 2007 and created its ProCast CDN product, officially launched at NAB last year, based on its technology, and NBC Universal used ProCast CDN to transfer video between Beijing and New York for its NBCOlympics.com Web coverage last summer.
But Omneon thinks it has found a better CDN technology in Aspera, a small Berkeley, Calif.-based firm that specializes in high-speed file transfers and counts Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, BT, DirecTV, Crawford Communications, Ascent and ESPN as customers. So Ommeon has sold its Castify business, which consisted of 10 engineers, to Aspera, which was founded in 2004 and has 50 employees, for an undisclosed amount.
Omneon will continue to market ProCast CDN, but Aspera will provide operational support for the product and is assuming all ongoing development engineering for it, with the eventual goal of integrating its "fasp" transport technology with ProCast and all the Omneon products.
"It's a mutual gain," said Aspera CEO and co-founder Michelle Munson, who added that Castify also has some unique technology that Aspera liked and plans to further develop. Moreover, she said getting access to Omneon's established sales channel will be a big boost to Aspera, which is a "much earlier, younger company."
"It gives us opportunity for significant expansion," she said.
Watch a video Q&A with Aspera's Michelle Munson:
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