Extron Acquires Electrosonic IP Products

While still planning its own line of streaming graphics and video products, Extron Electronics recently announced that the company had acquired Electrosonic IP products. This announcement could have significant impact on the live event streaming market, especially for those who are asked to stream both audio/video and graphics.

“I have been extremely impressed with the products technology at Electrosonic,” said Andrew Edwards, President of Extron Electronics. “At Extron we have been in development of a complete line of A/V streaming products for over three years and will be announcing additional streaming solutions later this year. We see the Electrosonic products as a great complement to our continually evolving product line.”

Extron clarified that it is buying only the product line, not the other aspects of Electrosonic Group.

“The Electrosonic Group systems integration and service business is not part of the acquisition and will continue forward as a wholly independent organization,” an Extron press release noted.

What’s interesting about the Electrosonic products is that they’ve been doing for almost two years what Extron has been attempting to build in house with a team at the company’s Raleigh, N.C. location.

Carl Johnson, General Manager of the Products group at Electrosonic, spoke to me at Infocomm in mid-2008, where the company rolled out its ES7000 HD and SD video streaming appliances, as well as its and ES7500 series graphics encoders and decoders.

“There are products on the market to do HD videoconferencing,” Johnson said in the interview podcast, “but one of the gaps out there is the streaming of high-resolution graphics.”

Electronsonic waded into an industry that was already crowded, primarily with solutions that encoded on a PC-based system and streamed graphics, and provided clarity and ease of use for customers used to the audio-visual black-box approach.

“There are a lot of visualization applications in defense, oil and gas and medical,” Johnson said, “where people are not able to view images with details on existing products. We provide streams of up to 1600×1200 (UXGA).”

The products aren’t your typical streaming encoders, nor do they use typical streaming codecs: Electrosonic in 2009 introduced its ES7100 encoder/decoder with a PURE3 compression codec that is somewhat more akin to a digital cinema solution than to a browser-based viewing of video. With this type of high-resolution, low-latency compression comes a need for bandwidths of 6 to 150 megabits per second.

The company also claims to have a “secret sauce” that hardens the products against network errors without the need for the Forward Error Correction (FEC) that is used in satellite and wireless distribution to guarantee delivery of enough bits to recreate the whole image.

So what’s the big deal in this acquisition for EventDVLive readers? In a nutshell, it helps advance the discussion of range extenders—covered in a previous blog post—by leaps and bounds.

No longer will your live event image magnification (IMAG) or audio/video full-resolution HD transmissions be limited to a 300-foot distance. Within an enterprise or even a college campus, where fiber rings top out around 622Mbps, you would use less than 1% of the total bandwidth to send out a single stream to any location on campus.

In addition, because this content is packetized (turned into data packets instead of just into digital formats), it can be decoded in multiple locations from a single feed, without the need for a video matrix (an inexpensive Ethernet switch acts as a matrix in and of itself for multipoint decoding).

Finally, it also brings mainstream a technology that’s been brewing—and sold with varying degrees of success—for more than four years. Extron has the power to educate the market, which is good for both the end user and the content creator, plus the consultant, systems integrator, and even competitors.

The mainstreaming of this technology will also drive down price points, which currently hover above the amount necessary for a digital or analog distribution system that has fewer than 4 end points (although there’s one company we’ll cover shortly that’s been doing this with DVI connections for two years at price points well below even today’s analog solutions).

Watch for announcements around this topic at the National Associations of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas in mid-April as well as additional announcements at Infocomm in Las Vegas in early June.

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.