Q&A With Wohler Technologies' Carl J. Dempsey
3-Gbps Capability Is Key to HDTV's Future, Says Vendor
by George Winslow -- Multichannel News, 6/10/2009 12:07:18 PM EDT
MCN: Ho
Carl Dempsey, CEO, Wohler Technology
Carl Dempsey: HD upgrades have been helping drive the industry, and certainly our business, for more than six years.
A lot of our top customers said they loved our product but that they could only continue using it if we offered an HD input. So today, everything we do is offered with an HD upgrade path.
But we are constantly looking for the next thing as well. We've added [3 Gbps] capability to a lot of our products. On larger projects, people are saying they can't spec anything into them that doesn't have a 3-Gig upgrade path, which is exactly what we are were told many years ago regarding HD.
What's happening now with the economy is that everyone, including the manufacturers, wants more for less. So on the closed-captioning side, for example, we're essentially giving the HD away. You pay one price, the low SD price and you get HD as well. And you don't even need a software or firmware upgrade. It's on the card. The minute you're HD, you can just change a couple of settings and you've got HD. That has proved very popular.
MCN: How has the market been internationally?
CD: Economically, everyone is hurting, but we had a lot of success internationally. We just finished a project in Singapore with Discovery for their HD upgrade.
We did a very big project with Canal Plus in France [a Wohler closed caption encoder/decoder.] Even though they have to play out in both SD and HD, they wanted to eliminate the need for duplication of both SD and HD storage and our solution enabled them to do that.
It has proved to be a real cost-saving solution and very helpful in managing a large number of channels.
MCN: Can you talk some more about interest in 3-Gig upgrades?
CD: I've been on the 3-Gig bandwagon for over two years, but in talking to our sales team it has been apparent that it hasn't gotten a great deal of play.
This [National Association of Broadcasters convention], however, some of the system design people were saying to us that on larger projects, they wouldn't consider putting in a product that wasn't 3-Gig compatible. So we were getting mixed signals for quite a while with people saying they don't really care and then all of sudden, there have been a number of people, primarily system designers, saying "why would I put in a unit and that isn't 3-Gig compatible."
Right now, everything we do, even if it doesn't have 3 Gig on it, is 3-Gig compatible from a design standpoint. What I mean by that is that we design chip sets we know we can replace with 3-Gig ones fairly easily.
And, like HD before, we're helping people make the transition by giving them 3-Gig compatibility for the same price. So when they do go to 1080p throughout their plant, they won't have to rip that unit out and go spend more money. I think it puts us in a much stronger position.
MCN: The Dr. Phil show has installed your RM-2435-HD video monitors as part of an upgrade to the Stage 29 facilities on the Paramount lot. How did that product come about?
CD: It is part of the new RM series of video monitors. We have been in video monitoring for a long time but in the last 15 years the in-rack video monitoring market -- and the non in-rack business as well -- has become a real commodity kind of marketplace. And that is not a space where we do real well or really I'd want to be spending a lot of time on because we are a highly focused, pretty small team compared to people like Miranda [Technologies] and Evertz [Microsystems.]
So when we looked at that business and how we could completely revamp our video monitor, we decided we had to do something different. We decided we had to do what we've always done with audio, which is to offer as many feature sets as we can and make it as convenient as possible to operate.
So essentially, we included everything in it. Besides the regular video, you have audio in it. You have Pioneer speakers and headphone output. We put bar graphs on the actual screen itself and we put waveform vector scopes in there, so the video engineers can actually check their signal.
And, we're doing this at a price point that is lower than anyone who is just regular video.
The other thing we did, which is what Dr. Phil picked up on, is that we actually offer two channels per input, which a lot of people don't. Again, it fits into our philosophy of giving more for less.
When we started this, the economy was doing well and we didn't have any idea what would happen to the markets. But now, it means we have a very cost-effective, very affordable range of video monitoring products that stand out from the crowd and offers more than everyone else does.
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