Gerald Wong (Senior Vice President, Global Operations, Caton Technology) recently sat down with Darren Whitehead from the IABM to discuss Caton’s latest innovation, its multipathing feature on the CatonNet Video Platform (CVP). Gerald shares his view on how IP is an enabler for the media industry’s digital transformation and reveals what solutions will be on display at Inter BEE 2022 in Japan.
Transcript of the interview:
Darren: Caton recently launched the multipath feature on its CatonNet Video Platform, can you tell us more about this feature and why broadcasters and media companies are excited about this?
Gerald: We are pushing the bandwidth with multipathing. It is technology that pushes the resiliency, high availability, and low latency to a whole new level. Multipathing is not load balancing. We know many technologies in the industry using different forms of load balancing which is a 1 to 1 connection and does not have the intelligence to know what is happening with that connection and does not know how to respond to that.
Multipathing defines advanced technology in IP network transmissions. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are now able to establish multiple network connections. Essentially, up to 64 paths per transmission, increasing your resilience to a phenomenal degree. This is a huge breakthrough that gives broadcasters the confidence that they have been looking for that IP transmission over internet can deliver the availability that they desire. This is the case too for high bitrates like uncompressed NDI sources and JPEG XS that multipathing will bring. We have also added SD-WAN principles to multipathing with class of services so you can add on different types of networks from low-cost business broadband to very highly available but high-cost consumption based 5G networks and you can play around with networks and systems to create a resilient but lower cost system for overall delivery. Ultimately, broadcasters get to achieve that super resiliency, high availability and improved transmission performance whilst dramatically decreasing cost which is what they have been striving for.
Darren: That’s sounds like the holy trinity that broadcasters are trying to achieve. The broadcast industry is going through one of the most rapid and significant industry transformations in history. How do you see IP as an enabler for this movement?
Gerald: Coming out of COVID and the pandemic has forced a lot of these changes. IP has enabled many organizations to be more flexible with workflows and remote productions. Some organizations are nervous about moving to IP but yet, many modern broadcasters and service providers are surging ahead and realizing that potential. For example, we have been working with Eleven Sports for the last year delivering NBA from the United States into Asia Pacific for their customers and that has been very successful to the point that they have signed a 5-year contract for us to transmit Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) to their customers. We are very excited about that as it’s a vote a confidence by Eleven Sports on Caton for our capabilities and our services.
We see service providers surging ahead in this area as well. We are engaged with LightStorm, a new consumption-based service provider focused on the Indian market and developing in high growth markets like Indonesia and the Middle East. Caton is working with LightStorm to build a holistic media and transmission network that they can offer to their customers. IP is allowing them to offer differentiated services, with the scalability and flexibility they need for their business cost modeling. I am hopeful these innovative products can help the industry move forward.
Darren: I hear Caton will be at Inter BEE 2022 in November. What exciting solutions are you introducing into the Japanese market?
Gerald: We are excited about showcasing our products, solutions and entire ecosystem to our partners and customers in Japan, at Inter BEE. We are very excited about announcing new relationships in Japan. We are building a new distribution relationship there that will take Caton to new heights.
Backed by popular demand, we will showcase our new multipathing feature on our CatonNet Video Platform (CVP). Caton Prime, our new switchable HEVC 4K encoder and decoder will make its debut in Japan at this show. Caton’s applications that allow remote production and content creation to take place anywhere will be featured at Inter BEE. We expect this to be a great show for Caton and our partners. Last but not least, we are working with Grass Valley to showcase our integrated solutions in their ecosystem as part of the overall AMPP alliance.
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